XXXVI THE DOOM OF THIÉPVAL

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September 27

The doom of Thiépval is fulfilled. That place upon the high ridge, with its thirty-four black tree-stumps—I counted them this morning—which has been harrowed and ploughed and cratered under incessant storms of high explosive, fell into our hands last evening—all but one corner to the north-west, which is ours to-day.

Weeks ago I said—as it may be remembered—that the German garrison there must have known that their doom was creeping nearer, and that sooner or later they must surrender or die.

It was longer reaching them than I expected when I watched the attack on the Zollern trench, and the defences running up to the Wunderwerk, and saw our men crossing a wide stretch of No Man’s Land through great shell-fire which tossed up the earth about them, and go on until those who had not fallen leapt upon the German trenches and bundled back batches of prisoners, and then went on again until they were very near to the row of apple trees which used to blossom in April on the outskirts of Thiépval town perched upon the hill.

It seemed to me then, watching the rapid progress of our men and their wonderful courage, that in a few days more from the Wunderwerk and Mouquet Farm on the east side our lines would close in and put the strangle-grip upon the place.

It has taken longer than that, more storms of shells, more splendid lives, to win the stronghold, and the wonder to me is, now that I know the full strength of the place, the resistance of its underground fortifications, and the fighting spirit of the troops holding it, that we captured it yesterday and to-day with such little loss.

For our loss was amazingly light considering the long and stubborn fighting there and the machine-gun fire which swept upon our men from many hidden places, and the desperation of the garrison who defended themselves with great gallantry. Let us give them the honour of saying that, for they were fine fighting men.

In defence the advantage was all with them. But for the power of our guns and the way in which British troops fight—meaning to win whatever the cost—they were in an impregnable position. The taking of Mouquet Farm by the Australians and afterwards by the Canadians was the worst menace to them, enclosing them on the right, but an astounding episode which happened yesterday will show most clearly the difficulties of our troops and the cunning of the enemy’s earthworks.

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It is many days since I reported the final capture of Mouquet Farm, after in and out fighting, and since I saw its ruins from the high ridge.

These bits of broken brickwork, all that was left after the Australians had made it their own, were the remnants of a place more important once than an ordinary French farmstead.

It was a series of buildings such as one finds in France attached to a big château, with barns and out-houses and stables, or to an old monastic institution, covering a large space of ground.

Our last line of trenches struck through the middle of the place, leaving two bits of ruin to the north of the trench and one to the south, behind the line. The enemy seemed to be well away northwards in the shell-craters beyond our parapet, and nobody suspected “Brother Boche” near at hand.

It was with great surprise a few days ago that one of our English officers saw two Germans rise suddenly from a hole behind our line, near the southern ruin of bricks.

One of them beckoned to him. “Be careful, sir,” said the sentry. But the officer imagined that the two Germans had strayed into our lines and wanted to be taken prisoner, as some do from time to time.

He went forward slowly until he was quite close to them. Then he fell dead, shot by the man who had beckoned to him, who with his comrade disappeared immediately into some hole which could not be found.

A day or two later a working party digging in the neighbourhood broke through to a deep tunnel. Instead of searching it there and then they filled it up again. Our men found themselves being sniped from other holes in the ground. It came into the heads of our officers that beneath the ground, even behind our lines, were nests of Germans who might turn upon them at any moment, or blow them up by a charge of guncotton.

Orders were given to draw back a little from Mouquet Farm, and the guns were turned on it again, flinging high explosives and shrapnel over the place, as in the old days. Then some of our men were sent forward to clear the trenches, if they could find them. They came back without success. So the place remained one of our “mystery corners” until yesterday, when the attack was to begin on Thiépval, from the trenches south, and swinging left from Mouquet. It was dangerous, but it was decided to carry out the attack without worrying about the underground inhabitants.

The attack on Thiépval began, and instantly our men on the right had advanced beyond the farm to the Zollern trench parties of grey-coats came out of the tunnels of Mouquet and began firing machine-guns into the backs of the British soldiers.

By good luck there was a young British officer not far away who kept his head on his shoulders, and had a quick way of dealing with a situation of this kind. He was in charge of a working party, but he saw his chance of a “scrap.” “Come on, boys!” he shouted. “Never mind your shovels.” His men threw down their tools and followed him.

I don’t know how many there were of them, but only thirteen came back. They did not come back ingloriously. They brought with them one German officer and fifty-five men as prisoners, and there were no living men left at six o’clock last night in the tunnels of Mouquet.

It was only a small episode in the rear of the assault on Thiépval, but extraordinary, and not without importance, on the right wing of our advance, for men do not like to go forward with machine-gun fire from behind. It shows the way in which the ground all about here has been used for subterranean fighting.

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So it was in Thiépval. Above ground there was nothing to see to-day, and for a long time, but the black and broken tree-trunks with their lopped branches high above Thiépval Wood, which is just as utterly destroyed—those bare poles, and to the left a mass of reddish brickwork which was once Thiépval chateau, and, standing solitary, a queer-shaped monster, looking like a sleeping megatherium, which I recognised as an old Tank on the war-path.

No men could have remained alive above ground yesterday when our guns hurled upon it a stream of heavy shells which burst all over the site of the village with violent upheavals of earth and vast clouds of curly black smoke filled with death.

The German garrison kept below, in a long series of vaults and tunnels which they had strengthened and linked up, and dug deeper, in a way that would have surprised the old French farmers who used to keep their wine and stores down there centuries ago. They had made many exits, so that they could pop up with rifles and machine-guns at many spots between the four corners of the village, and they were ready for another British attack.

I know these things because I have been talking with the German survivors of the garrison. They were nearly all men of the 180th Regiment, and they have held Thiépval for two years.

“In the old days,” said one of them this morning—he talked very frankly to me in excellent French—“the place was quiet and happy. We had no great comfort below ground, no fancy furniture or fine decorations (our beds were just wooden planks raised above the ground); but we worked hard to fortify the vaults. We pierced many new tunnels. We made this underground world perfectly safe, and we were proud of it.”

It belonged so much to the 180th Regiment that instead of being relieved in the ordinary way like other troops, and sent off to different parts of the front, they were given the honour of defending Thiépval since the beginning of the Battle of the Somme. The regiment arranged its own reliefs company by company, Bapaume being their rest camp. The men I met to-day had been actually in Thiépval only seven days, without relief, and had guessed that it would be their turn to defend the place against a great English assault. They had pledged themselves to defend it to the death.

Before telling the narrative of our attack and the adventures of our own men I think it is interesting to give this glimpse of the defenders, of their life underground. When I talked with them this morning they had just been captured. I was struck by the superior bearing and intelligence of them all.

They were certainly the best type of Germans I have seen on this front—Württembergers all, and handsome fellows, who had kept their spirit—one of the last groups of men who fought against us in the early days, and survivors of the first-line troops of the German army who have fallen like autumn leaves upon the battlefields of Europe, in the endless massacre of this war.

They are weary of the war, like all their troops. They laughed when I asked “Will England win?” and would not pretend that Germany is still victorious. They had heard of the downfall of the two Zeppelins in England, “Kaput,” as they called it, and had all the news that is given to German people by the newspapers which they had every day—even yesterday!—in their underground dwelling-place at Thiépval. But they were not dupes of false news.

“Do you believe the British Fleet is destroyed?” I asked, testing them. “The English Fleet is too great to be destroyed,” they said. “We did not believe all those stories. But we gave you a good fight at sea.”

They gave us a good fight on land, and underground, this garrison of Thiépval, and with a few exceptions they fought honourably, so that our men have no grudge against them now that they are prisoners of war.

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Our attack began yesterday at half-past twelve after a great bombardment that had been continuous for twenty-four hours, rising to infernal heights of shell-fire. Our men leapt out of their trenches to the south of the trees, just north of the “Wunderwerk,” and advanced in waves up to the trench by the row of apple trees, the right wing swinging round, as I have said, from Mouquet.

It was on the left that the men had the hardest time. One battalion leading the assault had to advance directly upon the château, that heap of red rubbish, and from cellars beneath it came waves of savage machine-gun fire. They were also raked by an enfilade fire of machine-guns from the left top corner of the ground where the village once stood.

Our men were astounded.

“I didn’t believe it possible,” said one of them, “that any living soul could be there after all that shell-fire. But blessed as soon as it switched off if the Germans didn’t come up like rabbits out of bunnyholes and fire most hellishly.”

For a long time it was impossible to get near the château or take a trench dug in front of it. It was a château once belonging to a German. French gossip said that he had tunnelled it for such a defence as that of yesterday, which is a fantastic tale, but its cellars stood now, and were a strong place from which one party of the garrison poured out a stream of lead.

“Where are the old Tanks?” shouted our men, and stared back to catch a glimpse of them.

It is splendid to see the smiles spreading over our men’s faces every time they talk of the Tank. Whatever their sufferings have been they cheer up and laugh in a comical way at this thought, for the Tank is a wonderfully fine tonic to the spirits of our men and an outrageous comedy thrusting a blunt nose into the grim business of this fighting.

A Tank had been coming along slowly in a lumbering way, crawling over the interminable succession of shell-craters, lurching over and down into and out of old German trenches, nosing heavily into soft earth, and grunting up again, and sitting poised on broken parapets as though quite winded by this exercise, and then waddling forward in the wake of the infantry. Then it faced the ruins of the château, and stared at them very steadily for quite a long time, as though wondering whether it should eat them or crush them. Our men were hiding behind ridges of shell-craters, keeping low from the swish of machine-gun bullets, and imploring the Tank to “get on with it.”

Then it moved forward, in a monstrous way, not swerving much to the left or right, but heaving itself on jerkily, like a dragon with indigestion, but very fierce. Fire leapt from its nostrils. The German machine-guns splashed its sides with bullets, which ricocheted off. Not all those bullets kept it back. It got on top of the enemy’s trench, trudged down the length of it, laying its sandbags flat and sweeping it with fire.

The German machine-guns were silent, and when our men followed the Tank, shouting and cheering, they found a few German gunners standing with their hands up as a sign of surrender to the monster who had come upon them.

“We couldn’t have faced the château without the help of the old Tank,” said several men. “It didn’t care a damn for machine-guns. It did them in properly.”

Unfortunately the great grasshopper got into trouble with some part of its mysterious anatomy, and had to rest before crawling home to its lair, so that the rest of the fighting in Thiépval was without this powerful support, and our infantry faced many other machine-guns alone.

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I suppose only Ovillers can rank with Thiépval for long and close fighting. Our men had to tackle an underground foe, who fired at them out of holes and crevices while they remained hidden.

They had to burrow for them, dive down into dark-entries, fight in tunnels, get their hands about the throats of men who suddenly sprang up to them out of the earth.

“I went down into some of those deep dug-outs,” said one boy, “but ran back again every time I saw Germans there. Some of them wanted to surrender, but how did I know if they wouldn’t have killed me? And other chaps were coming along with bombs. As likely as not I should have been done in by our own lads. It was very difficult to know how to handle ’em, and up above we were being raked by rifles and machine-guns something frightful.”

Many of the deep dug-outs were blown in at the entrances, so that the men were forced to come up the other side. Our men smoked them out, and dug holes for them to tease them out. It was like rat-hunting, but dangerous rats, life-size, and often desperate. They surrendered in hundreds when our men were all round them and right down in their tunnels.

I cannot tell the number of the German garrison. Nine hundred and ninety-eight unwounded men and forty wounded were brought down safely as prisoners, but others were killed on the way by their own barrage, and many fought until they died, so that some of the dug-outs are filled with dead and many lie above in the shell-craters. In one case a party of sixteen prisoners behaved treacherously.

They turned on the escort of two English soldiers taking them down, wounded them, and tried to go back to fight. They had no mercy from other English soldiers who came up at this moment. All through the night and early this morning the last remnant of the garrison held out in the north-west corner of Thiépval, until they were swept into the net by a separate and gallant assault of South Country troops.

Later in the morning the enemy attempted a counter-attack after a tremendous barrage which I watched falling along the ridge and below in Thiépval Wood. Very-lights rose through all this smoke, and I saw our men signalling for the help of our guns.

The help came quickly, and a new storm of white and black smoke-clouds rent by little flashes of flame burst beyond the village on to the German positions in and beyond the cemetery.

It was queer that this seemed to silence the enemy’s guns, for after this Thiépval was quiet for a time, and our men came poking about in the open as though looking for souvenirs, and dug new holes down into the tunnels.

They seemed to be teasing out more prisoners, because I saw trails of smoke rising from those holes in the earth, and one black volume gushed out of a cavern mouth made through the heap of red rubbish which was once the château.

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I have no space or time to deal with many events on other parts of the line, but everywhere the enemy is harassed, and his troops do not seem able yet to rally up to strong counter-attacks. In many parts of the line patrols find it difficult to locate the enemy, and No Man’s Land is widening out. His guns were active to-day along all the line, shelling Combles now and then, and Morval heavily, but even his gun-power seems to be weakening here and there, and it is likely that he is shifting some of his batteries.

One of the most remarkable Tank adventures was in the direction of Gueudecourt where our troops were held up yesterday in the usual way, that is to say by the raking fire of machine-guns. They made two attacks, but could not get beyond that screen of bullets.

Then a Tank strolled along, rolled over the trench, with fire flashing from its flanks, and delivered it into the hands of the infantry with nearly 400 prisoners, who waved white flags above the parapet. That was not all. The Tank, exhilarated by this success, went lolloping along the way in search of new adventures. It went quite alone, and only stopped for minor repairs when it was surrounded by a horde of German soldiers. These men closed upon it, with great pluck, for it was firing in a most deadly way, and tried to kill it.

They flung bombs at it, clambered on to its back, and tried to smash it with the butt-ends of rifles, jabbed it with bayonets, fired revolvers and rifles at it, and made a wild pandemonium about it.

Then our infantry arrived, attracted by the tumult of this scene, and drove the enemy back. But the Tank had done deadly work, and between 200 and 300 killed and wounded Germans lay about its ungainly carcass. For a little while it seemed that the Tank also was out of action, but after a little attention and a good deal of grinding and grunting, it heaved itself up and waddled away.

These things sound incredible.... They are true. And though I write them in fantastic style because that is really the nature of the thing, it must not be forgotten that these Tanks are terrible engines of war, doing most grim work, and that the men inside are taking high risks with astonishing courage.

They are of the same breed as those flying men of ours who to-day and yesterday flew in flocks over and beyond Thiépval “ridiculously low down,” as one of our officers observed, swooping down like hawks over German batteries so that they did not dare to fire. All our soldiers are fighting with a spirit beyond the normal laws of human nature. They are fighting for a quick finish—if that may be had by courage—to this most infamous and vile war.