Part 46 (1/2)
And I thought of the laughter and gallant spirit of the young men, after five months of the greatest battles in the history of the world. It seemed to me wonderful.
XX
I have described what happened on our side of the lines, our fearful losses, the stream of wounded that came back day by day, the ”Butchers' Shops,” the agony in men's souls, the sh.e.l.l-shock cases, the welter and bewilderment of battle, the sh.e.l.ling of our own troops, the lack of communication between fighting units and the command, the filth and stench of the hideous shambles which were our battlefields. But to complete the picture of that human conflict in the Somme I must now tell what happened on the German side of the lines, as I was able to piece the tale together from German prisoners with whom I talked, German letters which I found in their abandoned dugouts, and doc.u.ments which fell into the hands of our staff-officers.
Our men were at least inspirited by the knowledge that they were beating their enemy back, in spite of their own b.l.o.o.d.y losses. The Germans had not even that source of comfort, for whatever it might be worth under barrage fire. The mistakes of our generals.h.i.+p, the inefficiency of our staff-work, were not greater than the blunderings of the German High Command, and their problem was more difficult than ours because of the weakness of their reserves, owing to enormous preoccupation on the Russian front. The agony of their men was greater than ours.
To understand the German situation it must be remembered that from January to May, 1916, the German command on the western front was concentrating all its energy and available strength in man-power and gun-power upon the attack of Verdun. The Crown Prince had staked his reputation upon that adventure, which he believed would end in the capture of the strongest French fortress and the destruction of the French armies. He demanded men and more men, until every unit that could be spared from other fronts of the line had been thrown into that furnace. Divisions were called in from other theaters of war, and increased the strength on the western front to a total of about one hundred and thirty divisions.
But the months pa.s.sed and Verdun still held out above piles of German corpses on its slopes, and in June Germany looked east and saw a great menace. The Russian offensive was becoming violent. German generals on the Russian fronts sent desperate messages for help. ”Send us more men,” they said, and from the western front four divisions containing thirty-nine battalions were sent to them.
They must have been sent grudgingly, for now another menace threatened the enemy, and it was ours. The British armies were getting ready to strike. In spite of Verdun, France still had men enough--withdrawn from that part of the line in which they had been relieved by the British--to co-operate in a new attack.
It was our offensive that the German command feared most, for they had no exact knowledge of our strength or of the quality of our new troops. They knew that our army had grown prodigiously since the a.s.sault on Loos, nearly a year before.
They had heard of the Canadian reinforcements, and the coming of the Australians, and the steady increase of recruiting in England, and month by month they had heard the louder roar of our guns along the line, and had seen their destructive effect spreading and becoming more terrible. They knew of the steady, quiet concentration of batteries and divisions on the west and south of the Ancre.
The German command expected a heavy blow and, prepared for it, but as yet had no knowledge of the driving force behind it. What confidence they had of being able to resist the British attack was based upon the wonderful strength of the lines which they had been digging and fortifying since the autumn of the first year of war-”impregnable positions,” they had called them-the inexperience of our troops, their own immense quant.i.ty of machine-guns, the courage and skill of their gunners, and their profound belief in the superiority of German generals.h.i.+p.
In order to prevent espionage during the coming struggle, and to conceal the movement of troops and guns, they ordered the civil populations to be removed from villages close behind their positions, drew cordons of military police across the country, picketed crossroads, and established a network of counter espionage to prevent any leakage of information.
To inspire the German troops with a spirit of martial fervor (not easily aroused to fever pitch after the b.l.o.o.d.y losses before Verdun) Orders of the Day were issued to the battalions counseling them to hold fast against the hated English, who stood foremost in the way of peace (that was the gist of a manifes...o...b.. Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, which I found in a dugout at Montauban), and promising them a speedy ending to the war.
Great stores of material and munitions were concentrated at rail-heads and dumps ready to be sent up to the firing-lines, and the perfection of German organization may well have seemed flawless-before the attack began.
When they began they found that in ”heavies” and in expenditure of high explosives they were outcla.s.sed.
They were startled, too, by the skill and accuracy of the British gunners, whom they had scorned as ”amateurs,” and by the daring of our airmen, who flew over their lines with the utmost audacity, ”spotting” for the guns, and registering on batteries, communication trenches, crossroads, rail-heads, and every vital point of organization in the German war-machine working opposite the British lines north and south of the Ancre.
Even before the British infantry had left their trenches at dawn on July 1st, German officers behind the firing-lines saw with anxiety that all the organization which had worked so smoothly in times of ordinary trench-warfare was now working only in a hazardous way under a deadly storm of sh.e.l.ls.
Food and supplies of all kinds could not be sent up to front-line trenches without many casualties, and sometimes could not be sent up at all. Telephone wires were cut, and communications broken between the front and headquarters staffs. Staff-officers sent up to report were killed on the way to the lines. Troops moving forward from reserve areas came under heavy fire and lost many men before arriving in the support trenches.
Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, sitting aloof from all this in personal safety, must have known before July 1st that his resources in men and material would be strained to the uttermost by the British attack, but he could take a broader view than men closer to the scene of battle, and taking into account the courage of his troops (he had no need to doubt that), the immense strength of their positions, dug and tunneled beyond the power of high explosives, the number of his machine-guns, the concentration of his artillery, and the rawness of the British troops, he could count up the possible cost and believe that in spite of a heavy price to pay there would be no break in his lines.
At 7.30 A.M. on July 1st the British infantry, as I have told, left their trenches and attacked on the right angle down from Gommecourt, Beaumont Hamel, Thiepval, Ovillers, and La Boisselle, and eastward from Fricourt, below Mametz and Montauban. For a week the German troops-Bavarians and Prussians-had been crouching in their dugouts, listening to the ceaseless cras.h.i.+ng of the British ”drum-fire.” In places like Beaumont Hamel, the men down in the deep tunnels-some of them large enough to hold a battalion and a half-were safe as long as they stayed there. But to get in or out was death. Trenches disappeared into a sea of sh.e.l.l-craters, and the men holding them-for some men had to stay on duty there-were blown to fragments.
Many of the shallower dugouts were smashed in by heavy sh.e.l.ls, and officers and men lay dead there as I saw them lying on the first days of July, in Fricourt and Mametz and Montauban. The living men kept their courage, but below ground, under that tumult of bursting sh.e.l.ls, and wrote pitiful letters to their people at home describing the horror of those hours.
”We are quite shut off from the rest of the world,” wrote one of them. ”Nothing comes to us. No letters. The English keep such a barrage on our approaches it is terrible. To-morrow evening it will be seven days since this bombardment began. We cannot hold out much longer. Everything is shot to pieces.”
Thirst was one of their tortures. In many of the tunneled shelters there was food enough, but the water could not be sent up. The German soldiers were maddened by thirst. When rain fell many of them crawled out and drank filthy water mixed with yellow sh.e.l.l-sulphur, and then were killed by high explosives. Other men crept out, careless of death, but compelled to drink. They crouched over the bodies of the men who lay above, or in, the sh.e.l.l-holes, and lapped up the puddles and then crawled down again if they were not hit.
When our infantry attacked at Gommecourt and Beaumont Hamel and Thiepval they were received by waves of machine-gun bullets fired by men who, in spite of the ordeal of our seven days' bombardment, came out into the open now, at the moment of attack which they knew through their periscopes was coming. They brought their guns above the sh.e.l.l-craters of their destroyed trenches under our barrage and served them. They ran forward even into No Man's Land, and planted their machine-guns there, and swept down our men as they charged. Over their heads the German gunners flung a frightful barrage, plowing gaps in the ranks of our men.
On the left, by Gommecourt and Beaumont Hamel, the British attack failed, as I have told, but southward the ”impregnable” lines were smashed by a tide of British soldiers as sand castles are overwhelmed by the waves. Our men swept up to Fricourt, struck straight up to Montauban on the right, captured it, and flung a loop round Mametz village.
For the German generals, receiving their reports with great difficulty because runners were killed and telephones broken, the question was: ”How will these British troops fight in the open after their first a.s.sault? How will our men stand between the first line and the second?”