XXXV THE ABANDONMENT OF COMBLES

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September 26

The enemy cannot stand against us on his present line. That has been proved to-day and yesterday by sweeping British successes, which include the capture of Gueudecourt, Lesbœufs, Morval and Combles, with nearly 2,000 prisoners (according to my own reckoning) and a great mass of material. The German infantry was ordered to hold on to these places at all costs, to the very death.

The enemy may pretend later that they have made a voluntary withdrawal to “take up a new and stronger line of defence”—that is the usual convention—but I have talked with their officers and men and know what their orders were. They were to fight for every inch of soil against us, and they did not lack courage.

But our men and our guns have been too strong for them. As soon as we held the high ridge from the Pozières windmill through the old German switch line below Martinpuich, and above High Wood and Ginchy, their position down the slopes became untenable because of the new observation we had for our artillery.

One by one their strongholds have fallen, Courcelette and Martinpuich and Flers; now those other places, Gueudecourt, Lesbœufs and Morval. In spite of all their massed machine-guns in strong emplacements, and all their tunnelled dug-outs, and all their stubborn resistance, they could not hold on to a line here under the hurricane of fire our guns have flung upon them, and the tide of men who swept forward and overwhelmed them.

Their defence began to show signs of cracking when they were unable to force home their repeated counter-attacks by any big general scheme of offence.

It was clear that our constant hammer strokes, with those delivered by the French on our right, had demoralised and disorganised them, and that they were unable to gather reserves from other parts of the line quick enough or big enough to strike back heavily so as to thwart our progress. They had to rely mainly on their gun-power, and formidable as that is it has been mastered by ours for the time being, and could not do more than make our advance costly to our wonderful infantry, who went through its curtain fire.

Even that has weakened a little during the past forty-eight hours—our men who come back broken by it will not think so, poor fellows—and the last attacks have succeeded with far fewer casualties on our side than ever before on such a day of success in this Battle of the Somme. The casualties, indeed, were very light considering the striking successes gained. The enemy is in retreat—not for a great distance, perhaps, but certainly retreating.

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For the first time in the history of this war on the western front since the Battle of the Marne and the beginning of trench warfare the enemy has been compelled to abandon a town without a fight in it. He has withdrawn from Combles, which is a place of some importance, and more than a mere village, and our troops have entered it from the north, while the French hold the southern half.

As soon as Morval was taken yesterday, after that wonderful assault upon the double line of trenches defending it, his gunners near Sailly Saillisel, to the east, packed up and bolted away. In the night troops holding the ground between Morval and that place have melted away, and our patrols are out there trying to find out his rearguard.

Between Gueudecourt and Lesbœufs a body of German infantry tried to rally up to a counter-attack and came forward a little way with a show of strength and resolution.

Our gunners were quick to get their target. Clouds of shrapnel burst over those massed men, and their attack turned into a panic-stricken rout. They flung down rifles and packs and fled back towards Le Transloy, leaving many dead and wounded in their wake.

The worst thing that has happened to the enemy is the breaking-up of the moral of his troops. These men have been ordered to hold out in death-traps, and although there can be no slur on their courage, for they have fought well and are brave men, they have seen with dismal eyes that if they hold on longer they must die or be taken.

As soon as our men had swept across the trenches and the sunken roads where the Germans defended themselves stubbornly and entered the villages—Morval being taken from the north—the garrisons came up out of their underground places and surrendered in heaps. They could have fought longer and harder here, perhaps, but only with their backs to the walls asking for death. They had not the spirit to do that and no man would expect it of them.

They were done and dazed by the appalling intensity of the shell-fire which we had smashed over their tunnels. They were disheartened by the unfailing regularity with which the British had captured one stronghold after another since July 1, and at last after two years of utter confidence in the supreme strength of the German war-machine, their faith had been destroyed.

They have seen it crack and break, leaving them as the victims of its failure. Men who have lost faith in the one idol to which they had pledged their souls are not so strong as before. It is this loss of faith among her soldiers which is the worst thing that has happened to Germany.

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In opposition to the faith which we have now broken is the fear they have of British troops whom, once upon a time, they were taught to despise; they are stupefied by the grim way in which our men attack, reckless of loss, so that no barrage stops them, and they are amazed that men who were not soldiers a year ago should now be equal to their own best troops in fighting skill as gunners and as infantry.

A German officer who surrendered to-day with a whole company when the British stormed their way into Morval paid a tribute to them when he was taken prisoner.

“Your soldiers,” he said, “surprise me by their sangfroid. They were very cool and calm in moments when most soldiers would lose their heads.”

He was touched, too, by their kindness to him, puzzled by it, not finding any kind of hatred in their hearts now that the fighting was over.

“They asked me whether I would like to go down at once or wait until the barrage eased off. That was very good-natured of them. Then they gave me ‘kuchen’—little cakes—and called me ‘old boy’ as though they had known me before.”

They are grateful for our treatment of them, and truly some of our men are chivalrous in the way they behave to them after the bloodshed is over and the fierce and frightful things of battle.

There were two fellows on the roadside to-day, an English soldier and a German, trudging side by side to a field dressing station. Both heads were bandaged, and one man could see out of one eye and one out of the other.

Said the Englishman:

“This chap tried to gouge out my eye with his fist, and I did the same to his with my elbow, and now we get on famously together.”

Two other men came in—enemies an hour before.

“This is old Bill,” said the English soldier, pointing to a wounded German. “Where I go Bill goes. I wounded him and I took him.... Come on, Bill, old son.”

I saw 1200 German prisoners to-day just out of the battle. They lay in rows, grey body close to grey body, so that when any stood and walked about they had to step carefully over all those lying men. They were men from Morval and Lesbœufs, and some from Combles, who in the retreat in the night had mistaken their way out and come into our lines.

They were mostly strong, well-built young men—better than some of those I saw yesterday—and were nearly all Prussians from the Rhinelands. In the mass there was nothing repulsive about them, though here and there was an evil-looking face. These fresh-coloured fellows, very smart and soldierly, and with very little of the dirt of war upon them, as they had been living in the dug-outs, stared about them with curious eyes—at the British troops passing and British transports, and all the traffic that goes up to the battle lines. They were startled at finding themselves in so great a company of fellow-prisoners. They confessed to one of our officers that it was “a great British victory.”

These men were all unwounded. But in a tent not far away, and in other tents, were rows of Germans on stretchers, lying very still, and looking very grey, in blood-soaked clothes. Some of them were moaning their lives away, but English doctors were with them, attending to them just in the same way as they dealt with our wounded men carried into other tents.

“We make no difference,” said the medical officer.

There was a young officer there whom I had met yesterday on the roadside. He sat up when he saw me again, and said he wanted nothing that could be given to him, and was grateful for the treatment. He had just been writing down the address of one of his wounded comrades, who was going to die, so that he might send a letter to the man’s wife. He had been asked to do this by one of the English doctors, and he was glad to do it.

I sat down by the side of a young soldier from the Rhineland.

“Are you badly wounded?” I asked.

He pointed to his shoulder, and said “Here.”

When I said he looked very young, he shrugged that wounded shoulder of his, and said, “All my comrades were young. We fought as well as older men. The English came behind us, or we would not have been taken.”

The pride of the boy remained with him even now, and it seemed to me fine and plucky.

But these men, as a whole, have none of the braggart confidence of the prisoners we used to take a year ago. The truth, I think, is beginning to dawn upon them. The guns that protected them have been matched by British guns, and the new army that has grown up against them has broken their strongest lines.

It is only the beginning. People at home must not think that the German army has lost its power of defence and that the great rout is at hand. They are drawing back their guns, but saving most of them. They are retreating, but will stand again, and dig new trenches and defend other villages.

There will be greater and fiercer and more desperate fighting before the end comes, and God alone knows when that will be. But so far as the fighting goes it is a real stroke of victory for us. Within the last forty-eight hours we have put out of action eight German battalions between Lesbœufs and Morval, and the enemy can ill afford such loss after all that has happened since the first day of July.

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The story of the meeting of the French and British in the stronghold of Combles is an historic incident, which may form one day the subject of a great painting, though perhaps no artist’s eye was there to see it. Some brigades of English troops were holding on Monday morning, the ground of the Quadrilateral (where our men had been badly held up on September 15), to the west of Bouleaux Wood.

The French were hammering forward with their soixante-quinze and masses of splendid infantry to the east of Combles in the direction of Frégicourt. The plan of attack was to box in Combles by the French advance on one side, and on ours by forming a strong line to the north-west of Combles.

The operation was of great importance to the whole of our attack on Morval and Lesbœufs on Monday morning, because, apart from cutting off Combles, the new position was needed as a solid plank to our right wing.

The men who were given the task—it is sad that I am not yet able to say who they were—had been fighting heavily in previous battles, and had suffered many losses. But for this new assault they rallied up again with a brave spirit, and did all that was asked of them and a little more.

Instead of attacking Bouleaux Wood itself, where the Germans were in great force, they were ordered to take two lines of trenches on the west side of it, and to establish the flank line there—a clever bit of strategy which a German officer has since complained of bitterly as “not playing the game.” Because at Bouleaux Wood the Germans were waiting for an attack and ready for it with massed machine-guns, which they could not put to their full use, poor lads!

The trenches were taken easily and rapidly—in five minutes from the moment of attack—but nearly at right angles to it was an embankment with a rabbit warren of dug-outs, which gave more trouble.

It was the German flank line, and enormously important to the enemy, so that he held it with a large force of men and many machine-guns and minenwerfer.

Fierce, savage fighting took place here, and it was only four hours later that the dug-outs were finally cleared. Hereabouts eighty prisoners were taken, but a great many dead bodies lay below the embankment when the fight was done.

Near by five minenwerfer were captured, and our men found some empty gun emplacements, which had been abandoned in such a hurry by the German gunners that they had left behind them a great store of four-point-two shells and all their ammunition carriers.

Our strong flank was formed and a new trench dug in great style by a pioneer battalion, and then in the darkness patrols of infantry pushed forward in the direction of Combles. It was dark, yet not an absolute and lasting darkness. The sky was very calm and strewn with bright stars, and up above the Combles road at Morval white flares went up and down, throwing every few moments a white, vivid glare over the battlefield, lighting up its desolation, with the rim of every shell-crater white as snow and with black pits in the depths of them.

The sky was not quiet except high above the strife of men. Away down the French lines it was all on fire, and shells were bursting in a great semi-circle where the British were fighting at Lesbœufs and Gueudecourt.

But Combles was dark and quiet. No star-shells came up from its ruined houses. There was no sign of life there, only a few black shadows came up from the town towards our patrols and exchanged shots with them and then tried to escape. Twenty of these stragglers were taken prisoner. Ten were killed in fights with our patrol parties.

Hour after hour there was the tremendous tattoo of the French soixante-quinze coming nearer and nearer, and a final outburst of gun and rifle fire when Frégicourt was taken.

The night was passing, but it was long before dawn—at 3.15—when a strong patrol of English soldiers with machine-guns advanced down a tramline into the town of Combles. They were tired men, worn with fighting, craving sleep, hating all this hell around them, not in that night hour inspired by any thrill of joy because they were entering Combles “in triumph.” They were not quite sure how far the beastly place had been abandoned. News had come to them that the enemy had found a way out.

But you never can tell. There might be desperate fellows in the cellars, machine-guns behind any of these broken walls. They went on slowly and cautiously until they reached the ruined streets.

Dead men lay about, with white faces turned upwards to the stars. The ground was littered with broken bricks and twisted iron and destroyed wagons. But no shot came through the gaping holes in houses which still stood as roofless shells. It was all as quiet and still as death. A halt was made at the railway line, and then our tired men saw through the gloom other tired figures trudging towards them.

Officers went forward. Words were spoken in French and English:

“Ce sont les Anglais.”

“Them’s the French all right.”

“The blooming town’s abandoned.”

“Les sacrés Boches n’existent plus!”

Combles was taken thus in the early hours of the morning of the day before yesterday without any demonstration or dramatic ceremony, without cheers or theatrical nonsense, by grim, quiet, tired men who were glad to be at the end of another day’s fighting, with a dog’s chance of rest.

It was a great place for booty. The cellars were stacked with thousands of rifles and a great store of ammunition. The enemy had left behind four thousand rounds of five-point-nine shells—the less to fire at us, thank God!—and a mass of material and kit of every kind.

This flight from Combles is the most ignominious thing that has happened to the enemy on the Western front since he was hammered back on the Marne, and it must have hurt his pride—the pride of his “High Command”—as a smarting wound.