Part 50 (2/2)
Heninel was not a choice spot. There were other places of extreme unhealthfulness where our men had fought their way up to the Hindenburg line, or, as the Germans called it, the Siegfried line. Croisille and Cherisy were targets of German guns, and I saw them ravaging among the ruins, and dodged them. But our men, who lived close to these places, stayed there too long to dodge them always. They were inhabitants, not visitors. The Australians settled down in front of Bullecourt, captured it after many desperate fights, which left them with a bitter grudge against tanks which had failed them and some English troops who were held up on the left while they went forward and were slaughtered. The 4th Australian Division lost three thousand men in an experimental attack directed by the Fifth Army. They made their gun emplacements in the Noreuil Valley, the valley of death as they called it, and Australian gunners made little slit trenches and scuttled into them when the Germans ranged on their batteries, blowing gun spokes and wheels and breech-blocks into the air. Queant, the bastion of the Hindenburg line, stared straight down the valley, and it was evil ground, as I knew when I went walking there with another war correspondent and an Australian officer who at a great pace led us round about, amid 5.9's, and debouched a little to see one of our ammunition-dumps exploding like a Brock's Benefit, and chattered brightly under ”woolly bears” which made a rending tumult above our heads. I think he enjoyed his afternoon out from staff-work in the headquarters huts. Afterward I was told that he was mad, but I think he was only brave. I hated those hours, but put on the mask that royalty wears when it takes an intelligent interest in factory-work.
The streams of wounded poured down into the casualty clearing stations day by day, week by week, and I saw the crowded Butchers' Shops of war, where busy surgeons lopped at limbs and plugged men's wounds.
Yet in those days, as before and afterward, as at the beginning and as at the end, the spirits of British soldiers kept high unless their bodies were laid low. Between battles they enjoyed their spells of rest behind the lines. In that early summer of '17 there was laughter in Arras, lots of fun in spite of high velocities, the music of ma.s.sed pipers and bra.s.s bands, jolly comrades.h.i.+p in billets with paneled walls upon which perhaps Robespierre's shadow had fallen in the candle-light before the Revolution, when he was the good young man of Arras.
As a guest of the Gordons, of the 15th Division, I listened to the pipers who marched round the table and stood behind the colonel's chair and mine, and played the martial music of Scotland, until something seemed to break in my soul and my ear-drums. I introduced a French friend to the mess, and as a guest of honor he sat next to the colonel, and the eight pipers played behind his chair. He went pale, deadly white, and presently swooned off his chair... and the Gordons thought it the finest tribute to their pipes!
The officers danced reels in stocking feet with challenging cries, Gaelic exhortations, with fine grace and pa.s.sion, though they were tangled sometimes in the maze... many of them fell in the fields outside or in the bogs of Flanders.
On the western side of Arras there were field sports by London men, and Surreys, Buffs, Suss.e.x, Norfolks, Suffolks, and Devons. They played cricket between their turns in the line, lived in the suns.h.i.+ne of the day, and did not look forward to the morrow. At such times one found no trace of war's agony in their faces or their eyes nor in the quality of their laughter.
My dwelling-place at that time, with other war correspondents, was in an old white chateau between St.-Pol and Hesdin, from which we motored out to the line, Arras way or Vimy way, for those walks in Queer Street. The contrast of our retreat with that Armageddon beyond was profound and bewildering. Behind the old white house were winding walks through little woods beside the stream which Henry crossed on his way to Agincourt; tapestried in early spring with bluebells and daffodils and all the flowers that Ronsard wove into his verse in the springtime of France. Birds sang their love-songs in the thickets. The t.i.ts twittered fearfully at the laugh of the jay. All that beauty was like a sharp pain at one's heart after hearing the close tumult of the guns and trudging over the blasted fields of war, in the routine of our task, week by week, month by month.
”This makes for madness,” said a friend of mine, a musician surprised to find himself a soldier. ”In the morning we see boys with their heads blown off”-that morning beyond the Point du Jour and Thelus we had pa.s.sed a group of headless boys, and another coming up stared at them with a silly smile and said, ”They've copped it all right!” and went on to the same risk; and we had crouched below mounds of earth when sh.e.l.ls had scattered dirt over us and scared us horribly, so that we felt a little sick in the stomach-”and in the afternoon we walk through this garden where the birds are singing... There is no sense in it. It's just midsummer madness!”
But only one of us went really mad and tried to cut his throat, and died. One of the best, as I knew him at his best.
IV
The battles of the Third Army beyond Arras petered out and on June 7th there was the battle of Messines and Wytschaete when the Second Army revealed its mastery of organization and detail. It was the beginning of a vastly ambitious scheme to capture the whole line of ridges through Flanders, of which this was the southern hook, and then to liberate the Belgian coast as far inland as Bruges by a combined sea-and-land attack with sh.o.r.egoing tanks, directed by the Fourth Army. This first blow at the Messines Ridge was completely and wonderfully successful, due to the explosion of seventeen enormous mines under the German positions, followed by an attack ”in depth,” divisions pa.s.sing through each other, or ”leap-frogging,” as it was called, to the final objectives against an enemy demoralized by the earthquake of the explosions.
For two years there had been fierce underground fighting at Hill 60 and elsewhere, when our tunnelers saw the Germans had listened to one another's workings, racing to strike through first to their enemies' galleries and touch off their high-explosive charges. Our miners, aided by the magnificent work of Australian and Canadian tunnelers, had beaten the enemy into sheer terror of their method of fighting and they had abandoned it, believing that we had also. But we did not, as they found to their cost.
I had seen the working of the tunnelers up by Hill 70 and elsewhere. I had gone into the darkness of the tunnels, crouching low, striking my steel hat with sharp, spine-jarring knocks against the low beams overhead, coming into galleries where one could stand upright and walk at ease in electric light, hearing the vibrant hum of great engines, the murmur of men's voices in dark crypts, seeing numbers of men sleeping on bunks in the gloom of caverns close beneath the German lines, and listening through a queer little instrument called a microphone, by which I heard the scuffle of German feet in German galleries a thousand yards away, the dropping of a pick or shovel, the knocking out of German pipes against charcoal stoves. It was by that listening instrument, more perfect than the enemy's, that we had beaten him, and by the grim determination of those underground men of ours, whose skin was the color of the chalk in which they worked, who coughed in the dampness of the caves, and who packed high explosives at the shaft-heads-hundreds of tons of it-for the moment when a b.u.t.ton should be touched far away, and an electric current would pa.s.s down a wire, and the enemy and his works would be blown into dust.
That moment came at Hill 60 and sixteen other places below the Wytschaete and Messines Ridge at three-thirty on the morning of June 7th, after a quiet night of war, when a few of our batteries had fired in a desultory way and the enemy had sent over some flocks of gas-sh.e.l.ls, and before the dawn I heard the c.o.c.ks crow on Kemmel Hill. I saw the seventeen mines go up, and earth and flame gush out of them as though the fires of h.e.l.l had risen. A terrible sight, as the work of men against their fellow-creatures... It was the signal for seven hundred and fifty of our heavy guns and two thousand of our field-guns to open fire, and behind a moving wall of bursting sh.e.l.ls English, Irish, and New Zealand soldiers moved forward in dense waves. It was almost a ”walk-over.” Only here and there groups of Germans served their machine-guns to the death. Most of the living were stupefied amid their dead in the upheaved trenches, slashed woods, and deepest dugouts. I walked to the edge of the mine-craters and stared into their great gulfs, wondering how many German bodies had been engulfed there. The following day I walked through Wytschaete Wood to the ruins of the Hospice on the ridge. In 1914 some of our cavalry had pa.s.sed this way when the Hospice was a big red-brick building with wings and outhouses and a large community of nuns and children. Through my gla.s.ses I had often seen its ruins from Kemmel Hill and the Scherpenberg. Now nothing was left but a pile of broken bricks, not very high. Our losses were comparatively small, though some brave men had died, including Major Willie Redmond, whose death in Wytschaete Wood was heard with grief in Ireland.
Ludendorff admits the severity of the blow:
”The moral effect of the explosions was simply staggering... The 7th of June cost us dear, and, owing to the success of the enemy attack, the price we paid was very heavy. Here, too, it was many days before the front was again secure. The British army did not press its advantage; apparently it only intended to improve its position for the launching of the great Flanders offensive. It thereupon resumed operations between the old Arras battlefield and also between La Ba.s.see and Lens. The object of the enemy was to wear us down and distract our attention from Ypres.”
That was true. The Canadians made heavy attacks at Lens, some of which I saw from ground beyond Notre Dame de Lorette and the Vimy Ridge and the enemy country by Grenay, when those men besieged a long chain of mining villages which girdled Lens itself, where every house was a machine-gun fort above deep tunnels. I saw them after desperate struggles, covered in clay, parched with thirst, ga.s.sed, wounded, but indomitable. Lens was the Troy of the Canadian Corps and the English troops of the First Army, and it was only owing to other battles they were called upon to fight in Flanders that they had to leave it at last uncaptured, for the enemy to escape.
All this was subsidiary to the great offensive in Flanders, with its ambitious objects. But when the battles of Flanders began the year was getting past its middle age, and events on other fronts had upset the strategical plan of Sir Douglas Haig and our High Command. The failure and abandonment of the Nivelle offensive in the Champagne were disastrous to us. It liberated many German divisions who could be sent up to relieve exhausted divisions in Flanders. Instead of attacking the enemy when he was weakening under a.s.saults elsewhere, we attacked him when all was quiet on the French front. The collapse of Russia was now happening and our policy ought to have been to save men for the tremendous moment of 1918, when we should need all our strength. So it seems certain now, though it is easy to prophesy after the event.
I went along the coast as far as c.o.xyde and Nieuport and saw secret preparations for the coast offensive. We were building enormous gun emplacements at Malo-les-Bains for long-range naval guns, camouflaged in sand-dunes. Our men were being trained for fighting in the dunes. Our artillery positions were mapped out.
”Three shots to one, sir,” said Sir Henry Rawlinson to the King, ”that's the stuff to give them!”
But the Germans struck the first blow up there, not of importance to the strategical position, but ghastly to two battalions of the 1st Division, cut off on a spit of land at Lombartzyde and almost annihilated under a fury of fire.
At this time the enemy was developing his use of a new poison-gas-mustard gas-which raised blisters and burned men's bodies where the vapor was condensed into a reddish powder and blinded them for a week or more, if not forever, and turned their lungs to water. I saw hundreds of these cases in the 3rd Canadian casualty clearing station on the coast, and there were thousands all along our front. At Oast Dunkerque, near Nieuport, I had a whiff of it, and was conscious of a burning sensation about the lips and eyelids, and for a week afterward vomited at times, and was scared by queer flutterings of the heart which at night seemed to have but a feeble beat. It was enough to ”put the wind up.” Our men dreaded the new danger, so mysterious, so stealthy in its approach. It was one of the new plagues of war.
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