XXXVIII THE WAY TO BAPAUME

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October 7

Our troops have taken advantage of fine weather after heavy rains to make a new attack this afternoon upon a German front of 12,000 yards, and have captured a number of important positions, including the fortified village of Le Sars, to the north-west of Eaucourt l’Abbaye. For several days past the pressure of our attack had to be slackened on account of the bad state of the ground and the rain-storms, which prevented artillery and aerial observation.

It was bad luck upon our men, as it increased the difficulties for getting up the supplies essential to the success of a new move forward, and made the battlefields one vast bog, in which guns and men and wagons and mules were clogged with slime and mud.

Yesterday the sky cleared, and the men who had taken Eaucourt l’Abbaye by such a gallant struggle pushed out and seized the millhouse to the west of those ruins from which the enemy had been maintaining heavy machine-gun fire.

It is to those who know what mud and rain mean to an army in the field an astonishing and audacious thing to attack in such numbers to-day, abruptly and without waiting for more favourable conditions of ground.

At this hour, when heavy fighting continues along the whole line from Le Sars eastwards towards Le Transloy, it is impossible to write more than a few details of the progress that has been made already.

The taking of Le Sars itself is the gain of another fortress defending the way to Bapaume, the main road to that town running through the village, which was in a natural position of defence protected by a deep cutting on the right, by a double line of trenches to the south and by machine-gun emplacements with a wide field of fire.

It was from that position that our troops were heavily enfiladed in their first assaults upon the Abbey ruins, and the enemy had determined to defend it desperately, as it holds a position of great strategic importance to our future drive against them.

Well, they have lost it. Before the red dusk this evening our airmen, who were hovering over the place high above the shell-fire, signalled back that our infantry were well into the town and sending back batches of prisoners.

It was a rapid assault. Within an hour our men had fought their way across the tangle of trenches and shell-craters just below the village, and had gained their chief objectives, which included the deep cutting striking into the village from the right.

The only way of escape for the Germans was westwards through a belt of scarred and blackened tree-stumps. I do not know yet whether they had been dislodged from that primeval burial-place called the Butte de Warlencourt, which rises about fifty feet to the north of Le Sars on the right of the Bapaume Road.

The ground beyond has the village of Le Barque on the right of the road and four sunken cross-roads called the Cut-Throat on the west of a deep ravine, just above the village of Warlencourt-Eaucourt. It is here that the enemy will be under our barrage and the enemy’s troops must rally there if they can for any counter-attack.

East of Le Sars and north of Flers and Lesbœufs British battalions have made solid progress, driving back the enemy out of trenches hurriedly scraped up during recent weeks, but not so richly provided with dug-outs as his earlier lines, so that when our guns concentrated their fire on them the only escape from great slaughter was to hold them thinly with the main reliance on machine-guns for defence.

Our right wing has advanced about a kilometre from Lesbœufs towards Le Transloy, where it has linked up with the French battalions pressing forward to Sailly-Saillisel, with their usual dashing spirit of attack.

It seems that the day has been in our favour all along the line of this sweeping movement. We shall know more and may tell more in a few hours.

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October 8

The men who took Le Sars are still holding it, and only the short facts of their case come back from them through the mist and across the waterpools. Last night and this morning it has been raining again, in a drizzling way, and all the shell-craters are ponds.

It would be possible to swim in some of them, those scooped out by the biggest shells and linked up with others. It is not easy to get runners back across country like that, and the Germans find it harder and are drowned in many of those pits, because of our artillery fire pouring “stuff” over them.

Yet, curiously, it is from the Germans that one learns most of the frightful drama which went on yesterday afternoon in Le Sars village. They are prisoners, 300 of them, with five officers who were sent back to safety, while our men stayed on and fought on.

Those from the village—it’s just the name that stands—belong to the 321st and 322nd “Ersatz,” or Reserve Regiment. They had been reinforced, strengthening the garrison and expecting an attack, by some uncanny means, at the exact minute.

They were stout fellows—our officers pay them this tribute—and they had been ordered to fight to the last man rather than surrender this fortress, which is one of the gates barring the long road to Bapaume.

They trained their machine-guns and trench mortars on our front trenches, kept their rifles dry by wrapping them in rags, and sent out volunteers and victims to lie in the shell-pits waist-high in water to snipe our men as they came over.

They knew that they had a poor chance really to keep Le Sars, and their best hope of life or death was to put up a hard fight. Our guns had already smashed the houses and barns to rubbish heaps like those of Martinpuich and Courcelette—even a little more, judging from what our airmen saw—and our nine-point-twos, eight inches, and other monster guns were making a worse hell of the place.

The men of the German 361st and 362nd regiment of reserves lay low in their dug-outs and tucked their heads down in new trenches, finely built in a hurry.

What happened first was that our barrage lifted and long waves of brown soldiers sprang over their parapets facing up from ground close south of Le Sars and on the German left from the edge of Eaucourt l’Abbaye and the millhouse beyond.

Their first goal on our right was one of those beastly quadrilateral redoubts called the Tangle (there is another behind our new line at Eaucourt), and after that the road from Martinpuich, north-eastwards, and then forward to the Butte de Warlencourt—that old high tumulus in which the bones of some prehistoric man lay until we flung them up to the surface of our modern civilisation.

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The Tangle was the first check and a bad one. Machine-guns swept the field with bullets so that men lay on their faces in the mud, not bothering, you may guess, about appearances. They were just scarecrows and mud-larks, wallowing in slime but finding an inch or two of luck in it. Another muddy thing came on the way to the Tangle, more like a primeval river hog than in the early days of its debut, because of the mountains of slush churned up by its flanks.

The Tank turned its snout towards the Tangle and struggled over the choppy ground—wave upon wave of craters with high rims, until it reached a bit of the deep cutting which makes a hole in the side of Le Sars.

This sunken road, or old quarry track, was filled with German soldiers alive and dead. The living ones flung bombs at the Tank, fired rifle volleys and tried to stab it from beneath as it straggled across the ditch and stayed across it firing venomously from each flank. After that, something having happened to its internal organs, it committed hari-kari. But it seems to have been useful before going up in a blaze of glory.

The German prisoners who faced our men in the outskirts of Le Sars, and then further back in the sunken road, and in the hiding places below ground, say there was grim and bitter fighting there, and pay a soldier’s tribute to the men who captured them. “They fought us fiercely, and beat us. We could not stand up against them.” Our men saw red, even in the mist, and in the hand-to-hand fighting they had the Germans by the throat.