XXXVII NORTHWARD FROM THIÉPVAL

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September 28

The weather is still in our favour—and soldiers watch the weather like seamen in frail craft, knowing that two days of heavy rain, or less than that, may make a month’s difference in the progress of attack, and that when mist gathers over the hills airmen cannot see to report to the guns, and guns cannot shoot on certain targets, and enemy troops may come creeping up to a counter-attack.

One of his battalions was spotted by our airmen to-day, and our artillery found the range quickly and scattered them. It puts them into the same villainous plight as our men have had to endure under the brow of the Messines and Wyghtschaete ridges and other high ground from which the enemy could see the slightest movement of our troops and would snipe even a solitary wagon with shell-fire.

The tables are turned down here by the Somme and the Ancre. The German soldiers will know now the devilish torture of living always under hostile observation, and under great guns. They are already beginning to find it intolerable, not “sticking” it as our men “stuck” it in the salient, when we had hardly any guns to answer back.

A further gain of ground was made yesterday on the high ridge where Thiépval stood when our men captured a strong line of trenches known as the Stuff Redoubt, and again to-day when they advanced northwards from the black trees of Thiépval to the Schwaben Redoubt, which is on the edge of the plateau.

This attack at mid-day to-day was similar to other operations which I have described on this part of the front before. A large number of batteries concentrated intense, violent fire upon the position beyond the last blighted trees on the ridge and on the upheaved lines of soil, of white chalk and brown earth, which marked the enemy’s next defensive system.

Our heavy shells tore up the ground, opening great chasms and raising hell fires, until all the blue of the sky was hidden behind heavy spreading smoke, gushing up in round, dense masses which mingled and thickened the overhanging pall.

Then our guns lengthened their range, and our infantry trudged across through this fog and under the wild scream of shells flung beyond them, and fought their way down into the enemy’s ditches. Later, after signals of distress, the German gunners barraged the line of the Schwaben Redoubt, which seemed to prove the successful advance of our men, and ranged their heavies on to Thiépval itself as we did until the day before yesterday, when it changed hands.

The industry of the men who lived there first—that 180th regiment which has held Thiépval for two years—is now of use to our own soldiers, who can find ample and shell-proof cover in those underground rooms, one of them, at least, large enough to hold three companies of men.

I am not certain at this hour whether we hold the whole of the Schwaben Redoubt, but if not all, the rest will be taken quickly, and the whole of the high plateau will be ours from Thiépval to Ginchy old telegraph.

Meanwhile on the right we hold a firm straight line, down from Gueudecourt to Combles, and it forms a solid flank.

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September 30

It is here beyond Thiépval that the slaughter of men is greatest just now—the scene of the shambles changes quickly these days—and here that the enemy is sacrificing many more lives in the vain hope of driving our men back from the underground fortress and its surrounding redoubts.

Desperate German counter-attacks were made last night and this morning on the Schwaben Redoubt, just north of Thiépval, and on the Hessian Redoubt, further east, where the German troops hold out in a wedge made by a sunken road from Grandcourt.

I have not often heard such a menace in the sound of gun-fire as when I went to an artillery O.P. in this direction this morning. There was something in the atmosphere as well as in the intensity of the bombardment which made the shell-bursts—they were German crumps—thunder out in a queer, hollow, reverberating way.

The enemy had concentrated a heavy weight of metal on to our lines here (so recently his own), and I watched these high explosives vomiting up from the Thiépval ridge, just below the Schwaben Redoubt, with a great hope that our men holding out there might have found good cover in old German dug-outs.

That is one advantage gained in capturing these strongholds. The enemy’s industry through two years of trench warfare may be turned to our own good and safety. In Thiépval itself many of the elaborate underground chambers have now been found, though when our men first won the place, after all their hard hand-to-hand fighting with the garrison they could not get to cover at once.

A major belonging to one of the battalions who came up first behind the assaulting troops—New Army men who fought like the old Regulars, though many of them were quite new to this fortress fighting—tells me that the entry into Thiépval was the most devilish experience he has had, though he has been through other frightful “shows.”

A dug-out next to a hole in which he had made his temporary headquarters was blown up with sixteen men, and when he moved on beyond the château—a fine name for the only rubbish heap which marked the site of a town—he found the headquarters of the leading battalion “sitting on red bricks” in the midst of dead men.

By that time his colonel and adjutant had been badly wounded, and the major arrived with only three runners, surprised to see the C.O. of the other battalion standing up on the brick heap waving his stick and rallying his men.

It is not really surprising. I met that officer to-day, and I saw the ice-cold fervour of the man, the quiet determination of his character, utterly scornful of any kind of danger. Men would follow such a man into furnace fires—and did.

The enemy was six hours before he began to get his barrage fixed (before then he was not quite sure of his own soldiers’ whereabouts) and it was colossal when it came. Many of our men lay about wounded. It was difficult to get them into safety.

The medical officer of one of the battalions lost his stretcher-bearers and went up alone to do what he could, dodging great shells, binding up the wounds of men.

For a time a Tank gave valuable cover. It had heaved itself across a trench, enfilading it each side with deadly fire. Underneath its body there was good shelter, and the M.O. worked here for a while with a heap of wounded.

The fighting on the north-east of Thiépval is in a land of shell-craters. Most of the trenches are just linked shell-craters, into which men burrow as soon as they have rushed the ground, getting a little cover in their depths from the barrage which searches them out.

The Hessian trench has changed hands several times within the last forty-eight hours, after savage bomb-fights and bayonet work. Forty Germans have been brought in from one bit of ground, but it is not country in which prisoners are gathered in great numbers. It is difficult to know one’s own whereabouts.

There are single combats over the rim of a shell-hole. Men knock up against each other in the dark, and peer into each other’s faces to know if it is friend or foe. If friend they drop into a shell-hole together; if foe, fight till one is dead.

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Queer things happen in shell-crater land, as when a Canadian officer brought up the rum ration for his men, and found himself in a ditch with a number of German wounded. They were lying in a row, in a tragic state.

What was the officer to do? He was puzzled, but decided to give the rum to these poor suffering devils, who were grateful for it.

In the Hessian trench or in a twist of the crater-land about it, two German officers and twenty-two men came down across the holes. They were met by a private soldier, who was surprised to see them. He emptied his revolver at them, shooting one of them.

Then he picked up a German rifle and fired that and killed another. A second time he stopped and grasped a German rifle at his feet, and killed a third man. The others ran. Our man ran after them.

It was a chase along a dirty ditch which had once been a trench, and the hunter was a dead shot, with abandoned rifles, all along the way. At the end of the hunt there was only one German unwounded, and he was brought back as a prisoner.

It sounds like a lie—preposterous in the numbers given. But the German prisoner tells the same tale, and other men watched the hunt at different stages—this fearful man-hunt down a bloody ditch.

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Things happen like that in this present fighting. Worse than that in human anguish, and better than that in courage. Out in crater-land were found three Australians in a hole.

One of them was unwounded, the other two rotting with wounds. They had been there for nine days. The unwounded man had stayed with his “pals” all that time, day after day, night after night, hoping for rescue. This part of crater-land was swept with machine-gun fire—ours or the enemy’s, how could these men tell who had lost all sense of direction?—but at night the unwounded Australian crawled out of his hole and rummaged among dead bodies for rations and water-bottles, which he took back to his friends and shared with them.

It is only one incident of the kind. In crater-land there are many like it, though not so long-drawn. But it is the enemy who suffers most out there.

Many times men left to hold a line against us do not get their reliefs, for the reliefs cannot get up through our curtain-fire or will not come.

So the others, starving and wounded, crawl back, leaving a trail of dead on the way, and for a time, here and there, the enemy has disappeared before us, so that when our patrols push out they can find no living man.

Then, after a while, the reliefs come up, dodging our shell-fire, leaving another trail of dead and wounded, and then dropping into shell-holes inhabited by corpses.

It is the way of the war, about which the orators have much to say, not knowing quite the meaning of it. Herr Bethmann-Hollweg has not seen his men in crater-land.

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October 4

A little romance clings to old buildings, even the remnant of a wall or two, so that a place like Eaucourt l’Abbaye—the ruin of a French monastery—seems of greater importance than a heap of earth and a network of ditches like the Schwaben or Hessian redoubts. It is of no more importance (I suppose less, except as another stepping-stone on the way to Bapaume), but it is the scene of fighting which has a special interest because of those old bricks built up centuries ago by French monks to enclose a place of prayer and peaceful work.

On Monday last, when the fighting began, two monsters came crawling up to the ditches which had been dug by the fighting men outside the monastery walls. They breathed out smoke and fire. Their sides opened with stabs of flame, and they killed the men in the ditches by rolling on them and crushing them, and hurling invisible bolts at them.

The ghosts of the monks, if any were there, would have seen that modern warfare has brought back the mediæval dragon-myth, and made it real, and more terrible than superstition. They were the Tanks who came.

One could write all this fantastically and make a queer tale of it. The truth is fantastic, but one must write it soberly, because they were British boys who have given their lives or a little of their blood to get these bits of wall called Eaucourt l’Abbaye, with its vaults and cellars. To them it was not like an old fairy-tale, but was just one of those grim bits of fighting, damnably dangerous and ugly and cheerless, which belong to the Battle of the Somme.

The first part I have already told, two days ago, how our men, in their attack on the double line of trenches outside the monastery, were checked by barbed wire and machine-guns, and two Tanks came to the rescue. One of them, after doing useful work, came to a stop, and the skipper came out and, after doing most gallant service, was wounded.

Three of the crew put him into a shell-crater and would not leave him. A day later he was wounded again by a bomb, which—amazing as it seems—did not burst, but injured him badly in the ribs, so that he had to endure great suffering out there in the crater.

Our infantry passed over the trenches and through the monastery ruins and dug a new ditch on the north side for defence and cover. Heavy rain came and drenched them and swamped the ditch. They were cold and wet and hungry.

For a time it was impossible to get food up to them. The ground behind was a quagmire for miles. The carriers became bogged. That little body of men to the north of the abbey were dangerously isolated, and might have starved but for the help of troops on their right who discovered their needs and sent food.

That was on Monday night. To the best of their belief the enemy was in force all round them. They could see flares going up, at Warlencourt, and from a primeval burial ground, about forty feet high, called the Butte de Warlencourt, just north of them, and they could hear the snap of rifle bullets from close shell-craters and the rat-tat-tat of a machine-gun from a millhouse 300 yards away, north-west.

From what our men learnt yesterday, there was an hour or two at least when they had only a few Germans in the close neighbourhood of the Abbey.

The enemy’s troops were expecting their relief. When they found that the reliefs did not come up they cursed the war and the weather—they were as wet and hungry as our men—and decided to go back without further waiting. Only a few snipers and machine-gunners stayed.

Such things have happened before in the enemy’s lines as I have already described. It was given away this time by a body of twenty men with an officer and non-commissioned officer, who came down past the millhouse and took cover under a bank close to the abbey buildings.

They were seen by our men, who crept out towards them with a machine-gun, and then shouted “Hands up!” Twenty men held up their hands. The officer and the “unteroffizier” did not surrender, but ran hard back and made their escape, unless two of our bullets reached them.

The twenty men told their tale. They belonged to the battalion who had been sent up to relieve the troops holding the outskirts of the Abbey. They had found no one to receive them or to explain the lie of the land. They had not the slightest notion of the amount of ground held by the English here.

Other bodies of the relieving troops were just as ignorant. Some of them blundered against trenches held by our men on the right of the Abbey, and were dealt with by them.

Meanwhile a telephone message had been sent to our artillery, which flung out a barrage and caught more of the relief coming down from Warlencourt.

In spite of their horrible mess, the men who got through the barrage were bold fellows and attacked the abbey and the trenches south of it. They had a new supply of bombs and used them freely. Our men were sadly at a disadvantage. Bombs were very scarce.

A dump had exploded by accident, sending their store to blazes. They had to fight with what they carried on their bodies, and it was not enough. For a time they had to submit to the fortune of war, and while still holding the north side of the abbey and ground to the east and south-east, could not keep the enemy from bombing his way into a part of the ruins and into the southern ditch which had been captured with the help of the Tanks.

So the situation remained last evening and night. New and heavy rain-storms increased the ugly discomforts of our men.

They were clinging on to water-logged holes. They were wet to the skin, covered in slimy mud, and cold and weary. The wounded among them were in a tragic plight.

The dead seemed to have all the luck.... But the fighting spirit did not desert them. New bombs arrived, and that heartened them. Some of their comrades came fighting up from the south.

Early in the morning there were roars of explosion as the bombs crashed into the south ditch and then burst among the abbey ruins. It was then that there was hot fighting underground as well as above ground. Our men “cleaned up” Eaucourt l’Abbaye.

It is a technical phrase which has a very grim meaning. There are no Germans there now in the abbey vaults, except the bodies of their dead.

In those great arched cellars, where old spiders have spun their webs, and where old monks once came blinking down with horn lanterns to fetch the abbot’s wine, or to count their stores, English soldiers, covered with mud, but drier now, sit rubbing up their rifles and binding up their wounded and talking of the fight that is over.