Part 10 (1/2)
”Romped up,” said an officer, though I have not seen Tanks romping.
Anyhow, they came up in their elephantine way, getting the most out of their engines and most skilfully guided by their young officers and crews, who were out on a great and perilous adventure. Climbing over rough ground, cleaving through snow-drifts and mud-banks with their steel flanks, thrusting their blunt noses above old trenches and sand-bag barricades, they made straight for the great hedges of barbed wire, and drove straight through, leaving broad lanes of broken strands.
One cruised into Wancourt, followed from a distance by the shouts and cheers of the infantry. It wandered up and down the village like a bear on the prowl for something good to eat. It found human food and trampled upon machine-gun redoubts, firing into German hiding-places. The second Tank struck a zigzag course for Hninel, and in that village swept down numbers of German soldiers, so that they fled from this black monster against which bombs and rifles were of no avail. For forty hours those two Tanks--let me be fair to the men inside and say those officers and crews--did not rest, but went about on their hunting trail, breaking down wire and searching out German strong points, so that the way would be easier for our infantry.
Even then our men had no easy fighting. The enemy defended themselves stubbornly in places. Their snipers and bombers and machine-gunners did not yield at the first sight of the bayonets. While some of our troops bombed their way down trenches towards Wancourt, others worked up from the south, and at last both parties met exultantly behind this section of the Hindenburg line, greeting each other with cheers. Nearly two hundred prisoners were taken hereabout, all Silesian mechanics, like those I met at Loos in September 1915--rather miserable men, with no heart in the war, because, as Poles, it is none of their making.
It is true to say--utterly true--that all the prisoners we have taken this week, Prussians, Bavarians, Hamburgers, have lost all spirit for this fighting, hate it, loathe it as a devilish fate from which they have luckily escaped at last with life. Not one prisoner has said now that Germany will win on land. Their best hope is that the submarine campaign will force an early settlement. Their pockets are stuffed with letters from wives, sisters, and parents telling of starvation at home.
It is not good literature for the spirit of an army. The prisoners themselves come to us starving. It is not because their rations in the trenches are insufficient. They are on short commons, but have enough for bodily strength. It is because our bombardment prevented all supplies from reaching them for three or four days. In one prisoners'
enclosure, when our escort brought food, the men fought with each other like wild beasts, ravenous, and had to be separated by force and threats. The officers in charge of these prisoners' camps are overwhelmed by the ma.s.ses of men. In one of them, where 4000 were gathered, they broke the barriers. A captain and subaltern of ours were alone to deal with this situation; but their own non-commissioned officers helped to restore order.
The position of the enemy now is full of uncertainty for him. It is possible that he will try to avoid any disaster by falling back farther to the Drocourt-Quant line, and by slipping away farther north. The Hindenburg line is pierced, but he has established a series of switch-lines which will enable him to stand until our guns are ready again to make those positions untenable. The weather so far is in his favour, except that his troops are suffering as much as ours from cold and wet.
V
THE WAY TO LENS
APRIL 14
The capture of the Vimy Ridge by heroic a.s.sault of the Canadians and Scots, and their endurance in holding it under the enemy's heavy fire, have been followed swiftly by good results. Our troops have pushed forward to-day through Livin, the long and straggling suburb of Lens, clearing street after street of German machine-gunners and rear-guard posts, and our patrols are on the outskirts of Lens itself, the great mining town, which is famous in France as the capital and centre of her northern mine-fields.
The retaking of this city of mine-shafts and pit-heads, electrical power stations, and great hive of mining activity, where a population of something like 40,000 people lived in rows of red-brick cottages, under a forest of high chimneys and mountainous slag-heaps, would cause a thrill through all France, and be one of the greatest achievements of the war--a tremendous feat of arms for the British troops. I looked into the city to-day, down its silent and deserted streets, and I saw a body of our men working forward to get closer to it. They attacked the little wooded hill called the Bois de Riaumont, just to the south of the city, and with great cunning and courage encircled its lower slopes, and made their way into the street of houses behind the line of trees which is the southern way towards Lens. From the western side, up through Livin, the other troops were advancing cautiously. The enemy was still there in machine-gun redoubts, which will be very troublesome to our men. But they are only rear-guards, for the main body of the enemy has already retreated. When the Canadians swept over the Vimy Ridge, capturing thousands of prisoners, and when yesterday our 24th Division and Canadian troops seized the Bois-en-Hache and the Pimple, two small ridges or knolls below Hill 145, at the northern end of the Vimy Ridge, the enemy saw that his last chance of successful counter-attack was foiled, and at once he was seized with fear and prepared for instant retreat in wild confusion. Lens and Livin had been stacked with his guns. Both towns had been fortified in a most formidable way, and were strongholds of ma.s.sed artillery. It is certain that the enemy had at least 150 guns in that great network of mines and pit-heads. But they were all threatened by an advance down the northern slopes of Vimy, and the Canadians were not likely to stay inactive after their great triumph. They were also threatened by the British advance from the Loos battlefields by way of that great pair of black slag-hills called the Double Cra.s.sier, famous in this war for close, long, and b.l.o.o.d.y fighting, where since September of 1915 our men have been only a few yards away from their enemy, and where I saw them last a month or two ago through a c.h.i.n.k of wall in a ruined house. German staff officers knew their peril yesterday, and before. From prisoners we know that wild scenes took place in Lens, frantic efforts being made to get away the guns and the stores, to defend the line of retreat by the blowing up of roads, to carry out the orders for complete destruction by firing charges down the mine-shafts, flooding the great mine-galleries so that French property of enormous value should not be left to France, and withdrawing large bodies of troops down the roads under the fire of our long-range guns. Up to dawn yesterday the enemy in Lens hoped that the British pursuit would be held back by the German rear-guards in Vimy and Pet.i.t-Vimy villages. But that hope was flung from them when the Canadians swept down the ridge and chased the enemy out of those places on the lower slopes towards Douai.
To-day, as I went towards Lens over Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and the valley beyond, I met a number of those men coming back after their victorious fighting. Amongst them were Nova-Scotians and young lumbermen and fishermen from the Far West. They came in single file, in a long procession through a wood--the Bois de Bouvigny--where once, two years ago, young Frenchmen fought with heroic fury and died in thousands to gain this ground, so that even now all this hill is strewn with their relics.
The boys of Nova Scotia came slowly, dragging one foot after another in sheer exhaustion, stumbling over loose stones and bits of sand-bags and strands of old wire. They were caked with clay from head to foot. Even their faces had masks of clay, and they were spent and done. But through that whitish mud their eyes were steel-blue and struck fire like steel when they told me of the good victory they had shared in, and of the enemy's flight before them--all this without a touch of brag, with a fine and sweet simplicity, with a manly frankness. They have suffered tragic hards.h.i.+ps in those five days since the battle of Arras began, but there was no wail in them. When they first emerged from the tunnels on the morning of the great attack they had been swept by machine-gun fire, but by good luck escaped heavy casualties, though many fell.
”Our losses were not nearly so high as we expected,” said one lad, ”but it was pretty bad all the same. Old Heine had an ugly habit of keeping one hand on his machine-gun till we were fifty paces from him, and then holding up the other hand and shouting 'Mercy! Mercy!' I don't call that a good way of surrendering.”
The enemy surrendered in hundreds on that day, as I have already described, and the worst came afterwards for the Canadians. The enemy's barrage was heavy, but even that was not the worst. It was difficult to get food up, more difficult to get water. I met lads who had been without a drop for three days. One of them, a fine, hefty fellow, strong as a sapling, could hardly speak to me above a whisper. All of them had swollen tongues and licked their dry lips in a parched way. Some of them had been lucky enough to find French wine in the German dug-outs. Then a wild snow-storm came. ”I thought I should die,” said one man, ”when for hours I had to carry wounded through the snow over ground knee-deep in mud and all slippery. All my wounded were terribly heavy.”
But, in spite of all this, those brave, weary men went down the Vimy slopes at dawn yesterday with the same high, grim spirit to clear ”Old Heine,” as they call him, out of Vimy and Little Vimy villages.
”They didn't wait for us,” said a young Canadian officer. ”One would think that the war would be over in a month by the way they ran yesterday.”
”Old Heine was scared out of his wits,” said another lad. ”He ran screaming from us. In a dug-out I found two Germans too scared even to run. They just sat and trembled like poor, cowed beasts. But there was one fellow we took who got over his fright quick, and spoke in a big way. He had been a waiter and spoke good English.
”'When will the war end?' we asked.
”'Germany will fight five years,' he said, 'and then we will win.
”'Don't you believe it, old sport,' said we, 'you're done in now, and it's only the mopping up we have to do.'”
Down in the Bois-en-Hache one of our English soldiers of the 24th Division on the Canadians' left had a grim adventure, which he describes as ”a bit of orl rite.” His way was barred by a burly German, but not for long. After a tussle our lad took him inside, and there found the dead body of a German officer lying by the side of the table, which was all spread for breakfast. It was our English lad who ate the breakfast, keeping one eye vigilant on his living prisoner and not worrying about the dead one.
There was another soldier of ours, one of the Leinsters, also of the 24th Division, who ate his breakfast in Angres, but he was in jovial company. He came across a German at the entrance and fought with him, but in a friendly kind of way. After knocking each other about they came to an understanding, and sat down together in a dug-out to a meal of German sausage, cheese, black bread, and French wine. They found a great deal of human nature in common, and were seen coming out later arm in arm, and in this way the Irishman brought back his prisoner.
The colonel of the Leinsters told another queer tale of an Irishman in the outskirts of Lens. The colonel saw him after the battle of Bois-en-Hache, which was a terrible affair and a fine feat of arms in the mud and snow, bringing back a German horse under machine-gun fire and shrapnel. He was guiding this poor lean beast over frightful ground, round the edge of monstrous sh.e.l.l-craters, through broken strands of barbed wire, and across trenches and parapets. ”What are you doing with that poor brute?” asked the commanding officer. ”Sure, sir,” said the Irishman, ”I'm bringing the horse back for Father Malone to ride.” The horse was in the last stages of starvation, and the padre weighs nineteen stone, according to the popular estimate of the men, who adore him, and that is part of the story's humour, though the Irish soldier was very serious. It is a tribute, anyhow, to the affection of the men for this Irish padre-a laughing giant of a man--who is always out in No Man's Land when there are any of his lads out there, going as far as the German barbed wire to give the last rites to dying men. To-day, when I called on the Leinster battalion, he was away burying the poor boys who lie in the mud of the battlefield. There is no humour in that side of war, though Irish soldiers, and English soldiers too, refuse to be beaten by the foulest conditions until the last strength is out of them.
In addition to the ordeal of battle they are enduring now a weather so abominable, when it is in the fields of battle, that men fight for days wet to the skin, lie out at night frozen stiff, and struggle after the enemy up to the knees in mud. So it was in this little battle of Bois-en-Hache, an historic episode in the battle of Arras, because it broke the enemy's last hope of a counter-attack against Vimy Ridge.