Books: Now It Can Be Told

P >> Philip Gibbs >> Now It Can Be Told

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41

Thousands of those lightly wounded men swarmed about a long ambulance-
train standing in a field near the village of Choques. They crowded
the carriages, leaned out of the windows with their bandaged heads and
arms, shouting at friends they saw in the other crowds. The spirit of
victory, and of lucky escape, uplifted those lads, drugged them. And
now they were going home for a spell. Home to bonny Scotland, with a
wound that would take some time to heal.

There were other wounded men from whom no laughter came, nor any
sound. They were carried to the train on stretchers, laid down awhile
on the wooden platforms, covered with blankets up to their chins--
unless they uncovered themselves with convulsive movements. I saw one
young Londoner so smashed about the face that only his eyes were
uncovered between layers of bandages, and they were glazed with the
first film of death. Another had his jaw blown clean away, so the
doctor told me, and the upper half of his face was livid and
discolored by explosive gases. A splendid boy of the Black Watch was
but a living trunk. Both his arms and both his legs were shattered. If
he lived after butcher's work of surgery he would be one of those who
go about in boxes on wheels, from whom men turn their eyes away, sick
with a sense of horror. There were blind boys led to the train by
wounded comrades, groping, very quiet, thinking of a life of darkness
ahead of them--forever in the darkness which shut in their souls. For
days and weeks that followed there was always a procession of
ambulances on the way to the dirty little town of Lillers, and going
along the roads I used to look back at them and see the soles of muddy
boots upturned below brown blankets. It was more human wreckage coming
down from the salient of Loos, from the chalkpits of Hulluch and the
tumbled earth of the Hohenzollern redoubt, which had been partly
gained by the battle which did not succeed. Outside a square brick
building, which was the Town Hall of Lillers, and for a time a
casualty clearing-station, the "bad" cases were unloaded; men with
chunks of steel in their lungs and bowels were vomiting great gobs of
blood, men with arms and legs torn from their trunks, men without
noses, and their brains throbbing through opened scalps, men without
faces . . .

XI

To a field behind the railway station near the grimy village of
Choques, on the edge of this Black Country of France, the prisoners
were brought; and I went among them and talked with some of them, on a
Sunday morning, when now the rain had stopped and there was a blue sky
overhead and good visibility for German guns and ours.

There were fourteen hundred German prisoners awaiting entrainment, a
mass of slate-gray men lying on the wet earth in huddled heaps of
misery, while a few of our fresh-faced Tommies stood among them with
fixed bayonets. They were the men who had surrendered from deep
dugouts in the trenches between us and Loos and from the cellars of
Loos itself. They had seen many of their comrades bayoneted. Some of
them had shrieked for mercy. Others had not shrieked, having no power
of sound in their throats, but had shrunk back at the sight of
glinting bayonets, with an animal fear of death. Now, all that was a
nightmare memory, and they were out of it all until the war should
end, next year, the year after, the year after that--who could tell?

They had been soaked to the skin in the night and their gray uniforms
were still soddened. Many of them were sleeping, in huddled, grotesque
postures, like dead men, some lying on their stomachs, face downward.
Others were awake, sitting hunched up, with drooping heads and a
beaten, exhausted look. Others paced up and down, up and down, like
caged animals, as they were, famished and parched, until we could
distribute the rations. Many of them were dying, and a German
ambulanceman went among them, injecting them with morphine to ease the
agony which made them writhe and groan. Two men held their stomachs,
moaning and whimpering with a pain that gnawed their bowels, caused by
cold and damp. They cried out to me, asking for a doctor. A friend of
mine carried a water jar to some of the wounded and held it to their
lips. One of them refused. He was a tall, evil-looking fellow, with a
bloody rag round his head--a typical "Hun," I thought. But he pointed
to a comrade who lay gasping beside him and said, in German, "He needs
it first." This man had never heard of Sir Philip Sidney, who at
Zutphen, when thirsty and near death, said, "His need is greater than
mine," but he had the same chivalry in his soul.

The officer in charge of their escort could not speak German and had
no means of explaining to the prisoners that they were to take their
turn to get rations and water at a dump nearby. It was a war
correspondent, young Valentine Williams, afterward a very gallant
officer in the Irish Guards who gave the orders in fluent and incisive
German. He began with a hoarse shout of "Achtung!" and that old word
of command had an electrical effect on many of the men. Even those who
had seemed asleep staggered to their feet and stood at attention. The
habit of discipline was part of their very life, and men almost dead
strove to obey.

The non-commissioned officers formed parties to draw and distribute
the rations, and then those prisoners clutched at hunks of bread and
ate in a famished way, like starved beasts. Some of them had been four
days hungry, cut off from their supplies by our barrage fire, and
intense hunger gave them a kind of vitality when food appeared. The
sight of that mass of men reduced to such depths of human misery was
horrible. One had no hate in one's heart for them then.

"Poor devils!" said an officer with me. "Poor beasts! Here we see the
`glory' of war! the `romance' of war!"

I spoke to some of them in bad German, and understood their answer.

"It is better here than on the battlefield," said one of them. "We are
glad to be prisoners."

One of them waved his hand toward the tumult of guns which were firing
ceaselessly.

"I pity our poor people there," he said.

One of them, who spoke English, described all he had seen of the
battle, which was not much, because no man at such a time sees more
than what happens within a yard or two.

"The English caught us by surprise when the attack came at last," he
said. "The bombardment had been going on for days, and we could not
guess when the attack would begin. I was in a deep dugout, wondering
how long it would be before a shell came through the roof and blow us
to pieces. The earth shook above our heads. Wounded men crawled into
the dugout, and some of them died down there. We sat looking at their
bodies in the doorway and up the steps. I climbed over them when a
lull came. A friend of mine was there, dead, and I stepped on his
stomach to get upstairs. The first thing I saw was a crowd of your
soldiers streaming past our trenches. We were surrounded on three
sides, and our position was hopeless. Some of our men started firing,
but it was only asking for death. Your men killed them with bayonets.
I went back into my dugout and waited. Presently there was an
explosion in the doorway and part of the dugout fell in. One of the
men with me had his head blown off, and his blood spurted on me. I was
dazed, but through the fumes I saw an English soldier in a petticoat
standing at the doorway, making ready to throw another bomb.

"I shouted to him in English:

"'Don't kill us! We surrender!'

"He was silent for a second or two, and I thought he would throw his
bomb. Then he said:

"'Come out, you swine.'

"So we went out, and saw many soldiers in petticoats, your
Highlanders, with bayonets. They wanted to kill us, but one man argued
with them in words I could not understand-a dialect-and we were told
to go along a trench. Even then we expected death, but came to another
group of prisoners, and joined them on their way back. Gott sei dank!"

He spoke gravely and simply, this dirty, bearded man, who had been a
clerk in a London office. He had the truthfulness of a man who had
just come from great horrors.

Many of the men around him were Silesians-more Polish than German.
Some of them could not speak more than a few words of German, and were
true Slavs in physical type, with flat cheek-bones.

A group of German artillery officers had been captured and they were
behaving with studied arrogance and insolence as they smoked
cigarettes apart from the men, and looked in a jeering way at our
officers.

"Did you get any of our gas this morning?" I asked them, and one of
them laughed and shrugged his shoulders.

"I smelled it a little. It was rather nice . . . The English always
imitate the German war-methods, but without much success."

They grinned and imitated my way of saying "Guten Tag" when I left
them. It took a year or more to tame the arrogance of the German
officer. At the end of the Somme battles he changed his manner when
captured, and was very polite.

In another place--a prison in St.-Omer--I had a conversation with two
other officers of the German army who were more courteous than the
gunners. They had been taken at Hooge and were both Prussians--one a
stout captain, smiling behind horn spectacles, with a false, jovial
manner, hiding the effect of the ordeal from which he had just
escaped, and his hatred of us; the other a young, slim fellow, with
clear-cut features, who was very nervous, but bowed repeatedly, with
his heels together, as though in a cafe at Ehrenbreitstein, when high
officers came in. A few hours before he had been buried alive. One of
our mines had exploded under him, flinging a heap of earth over him.
The fat man by his side--his captain--had been buried, too, in the
dugout. They had scraped themselves out by clawing at the earth.

They were cautious about answering questions on the war, but the
younger man said they were prepared down to the last gaiter for
another winter campaign and--that seemed to me at the time a fine
touch of audacity--for two more winter campaigns if need be. The
winter of '16, after this autumn and winter of '15, and then after
that the winter of '17! The words of that young Prussian seemed to me,
the more I thought of them, idiotic and almost insane. Why, the world
itself could not suffer two more years of war. It would end before
then in general anarchy, the wild revolutions of armies on all fronts.
Humanity of every nation would revolt against such prolonged
slaughter. . . It was I who was mad, in the foolish faith that the war
would end before another year had passed, because I thought that would
be the limit of endurance of such mutual massacre.

In a room next to those two officers--a week before this battle, the
captain had been rowing with his wife on the lake at Potsdam--was
another prisoner, who wept and wept. He had escaped to our lines
before the battle to save his skin, and now was conscience-stricken
and thought he had lost his soul. What stabbed his conscience most was
the thought that his wife and children would lose their allowances
because of his treachery. He stared at us with wild, red eyes.

"Ach, mein armes Weib! Meine Kinder!. . . Ach, Gott in Himmel!"

He had no pride, no dignity, no courage.

This tall, bearded man, father of a family, put his hands against the
wall and laid his head on his arm and wept.

XII

During the battle, for several days I went with other men to various
points of view, trying to see something of the human conflict from
slag heaps and rising ground, but could only see the swirl and flurry
of gun-fire and the smoke of shells mixing with wet mist, and the
backwash of wounded and prisoners, and the traffic of guns, and
wagons, and supporting troops. Like an ant on the edge of a volcano I
sat among the slag heaps with gunner observers, who were listening at
telephones dumped down in the fields and connected with artillery
brigades and field batteries.

"The Guards are fighting round Fosse 8," said one of these observers.

Through the mist I could see Fosse 8, a flat-topped hill of coal-dust.
Little glinting lights were playing about it, like confetti shining in
the sun. That was German shrapnel. Eruptions of red flame and black
earth vomited out of the hill. That was German high explosive. For a
time on Monday, September 27th, it was the storm-center of battle.

"What's that?" asked an artillery staff-officer, with his ear to the
field telephone. "What's that?. . . Hullo!. . . Are you there?. . .
The Guards have been kicked off Fosse 8. . . Oh, hell!"

From all parts of the field of battle such whispers came to listening
men and were passed on to headquarters, where other men listened. This
brigade was doing pretty well. That was hard pressed. The Germans were
counter-attacking heavily. Their barrage was strong and our casualties
heavy. "Oh, hell!" said other men. From behind the mist came the news
of life and death, revealing things which no onlooker could see.

I went closer to see--into the center of the arc of battle, up by the
Loos redoubt, where the German dead and ours still lay in heaps. John
Buchan was my companion on that walk, and together we stood staring
over the edge of a trench to where, grim and gaunt against the gray
sky, loomed the high, steel columns of the "Tower Bridge," the mining-
works which I had seen before the battle as an inaccessible landmark
in the German lines. Now they were within our lines in the center of
Loos, and no longer "leering" at us, as an officer once told me they
used to do when he led his men into communication trenches under their
observation.

Behind us now was the turmoil of war--thousands and scores of
thousands of men moving in steady columns forward and backward in the
queer, tangled way which during a great battle seems to have no
purpose or meaning, except to the directing brains on the Headquarters
Staff, and, sometimes in history, none to them.

Vast convoys of transports choked the roads, with teams of mules
harnessed to wagons and gun-limbers, with trains of motor ambulances
packed with wounded men, with infantry brigades plodding through the
slush and slime, with divisional cavalry halted in the villages, and
great bivouacs in the boggy fields.

The men, Londoners, and Scots, and Guards, and Yorkshires, and
Leinsters, passed and repassed in dense masses, in small battalions,
in scattered groups. One could tell them from those who were filling
their places by the white chalk which covered them from head to foot,
and sometimes by the blood which had splashed them.

Regiments which had lost many of their comrades and had fought in
attack and counter-attack through those days and nights went very
silently, and no man cheered them. Legions of tall lads, who a few
months before marched smart and trim down English lanes, trudged
toward the fighting-lines under the burden of their heavy packs, with
all their smartness befouled by the business of war, but wonderful and
pitiful to see because of the look of courage and the gravity in their
eyes as they went up to dreadful places. Farther away within the zone
of the enemy's fire the traffic ceased, and I came into the desolate
lands of death, where there is but little movement, and the only noise
is that of guns. I passed by ruined villages and towns.

To the left was Vermelles (two months before death nearly caught me
there), and I stared at those broken houses and roofless farms and
fallen churches which used to make one's soul shiver even when they
stood clear in the daylight.

To the right, a few hundred yards away, was Masingarbe, from which
many of our troops marched out to begin the great attack. Farther back
were the great slag heaps of Noeux-les-Mines, and all around other
black hills of this mining country which rise out of the flat plain.
It was a long walk through narrow trenches toward that Loos redoubt
where at last I stood. There was the smell of death in those narrow,
winding ways. One boy, whom death had taken almost at the entrance-
way, knelt on the fire-step, with his head bent and his forehead
against the wet clay, as though in prayer. Farther on other bodies of
London boys and Scots lay huddled up.

We were in the center of a wide field of fire, with the enemy's
batteries on one side and ours on the other in sweeping semicircles.
The shells of all these batteries went crying through the air with
high, whining sighs, which ended in the cough of death. The roar of
the guns was incessant and very close. The enemy was sweeping a road
to my right, and his shells went overhead with a continual rush,
passing our shells, which answered back. The whole sky was filled with
these thunderbolts. Many of them were "Jack Johnsons," which raised a
volume of black smoke where they fell. I wondered how it would feel to
be caught by one of them, whether one would have any consciousness
before being scattered. Fear, which had walked with me part of the
way, left me for a time. I had a strange sense of exhilaration, an
intoxicated interest in this foul scene and the activity of that
shell-fire.

Peering over the parapet, we saw the whole panorama of the
battleground. It was but an ugly, naked plain, rising up to Hulluch
and Haisnes on the north, falling down to Loos on the east, from where
we stood, and rising again to Hill 70 (now in German hands again),
still farther east and a little south.

The villages of Haisnes and Hulluch fretted the skyline, and Fosse 8
was a black wart between them. The "Tower Bridge," close by in the
town of Loos, was the one high landmark which broke the monotony of
this desolation.

No men moved about this ground. Yet thousands of men were hidden about
us in the ditches, waiting for another counter-attack behind storms of
fire. The only moving things were the shells which vomited up earth
and smoke and steel as they burst in all directions over the whole
zone. We were shelling Hulluch and Haisnes and Fosse 8 with an
intense, concentrated fire, and the enemy was retaliating by
scattering shells over the town of Loos and our new line between Hill
70 and the chalk-pit, and the whole length of our line from north to
south.

Only two men moved about above the trenches. They were two London boys
carrying a gas-cylinder, and whistling as though it were a health
resort under the autumn sun. . . It was not a health resort. It stank
of death, from piles of corpses, all mangled and in a mush of flesh
and bones lying around the Loos redoubt and all the ground in this
neighborhood, and for a long distance north.

Through the streets of Bethune streamed a tide of war: the transport
of divisions, gun-teams with their limber ambulance convoys,
ammunition wagons, infantry moving up to the front, despatch riders,
staff-officers, signalers, and a great host of men and mules and
motor-cars. The rain lashed down upon the crowds; waterproofs and
burberries and the tarpaulin covers of forage-carts streamed with
water, and the bronzed faces of the soldiers were dripping wet. Mud
splashed them to the thighs. Fountains of mud spurted up from the
wheels of gun-carriages. The chill of winter made Highlanders as well
as Indians--those poor, brave, wretched Indians who had been flung
into the holding attack on the canal at La Bassee, and mown down in
the inevitable way by shrapnel and machine-gun bullets--shiver in the
wind.

Yet, in spite of rain and great death, there was a spirit of
exultation among many fighting-men. At last there was a break in the
months of stationary warfare. We were up and out of the trenches. The
first proofs of victory were visible there in a long line of German
guns captured at Loos, guarded on each side by British soldiers with
fixed bayonets. Men moving up did not know the general failure that
had swamped a partial success. They stared at the guns and said, "By
God--we've got 'em going this time!"

A group of French civilians gathered round them, excited at the sight.
Artillery officers examined their broken breech-blocks and their
inscriptions:

"Pro Gloria et Patria."

"Ultima ratio regis."

The irony of the words made some of the onlookers laugh. A French
interpreter spoke to some English officers with a thrill of joy in his
voice. Had they heard the last news from Champagne? The French had
broken through the enemy's line. The Germans were in full retreat . .
. It was utterly untrue, because after the desperate valor of heroic
youth and horrible casualties, the French attack had broken down. But
the spirit of hope came down the cold wind and went with the men whom
I saw marching to the fields of fate in the slanting rain, as the
darkness and the mist came to end another day of battle.

Outside the headquarters of a British army corps stood another line of
captured field-guns and several machine-guns, of which one had a
strange history of adventure. It was a Russian machine-gun, taken by
the Germans on the eastern front and retaken by us on the western
front.

In General Rawlinson's headquarters I saw a queer piece of booty. It
was a big bronze bell used by the Germans in their trenches to signal
a British gas-attack.

General Rawlinson was taking tea in his chateau when I called on him,
and was having an animated argument with Lord Cavan, commanding the
Guards, as to the disposal of the captured artillery and other
trophies. Lord Cavan claimed some for his own, with some violence of
speech. But General Rawlinson was bright and breezy as usual. Our
losses were not worrying him. As a great general he did not allow
losses to worry him. He ate his tea with a hearty appetite, and
chaffed his staff-officers. They were anticipating the real German
counter-attack--a big affair. Away up the line there would be more
dead piled up, more filth and stench of human slaughter, but the smell
of it would not reach back to headquarters.

XIII

In a despatch by Sir John French, dated October 15, 1915, and issued
by the War Office on November 1st of that year, the Commander-in-Chief
stated that: "In view of the great length of line along which the
British troops were operating it was necessary to keep a strong
reserve in my own hand. The 11th Corps, consisting of the Guards, the
21st and the 24th Divisions, were detailed for this purpose. This
reserve was the more necessary owing to the fact that the Tenth French
Army had to postpone its attack until one o'clock in the day; and
further, that the corps operating on the French left had to be
directed in a more or less southeasterly direction, involving, in case
of our success, a considerable gap in our line. To insure, however,
the speedy and effective support of the 1st and 4th Corps in the case
of their success, the 21st and 24th Divisions passed the night of the
24th and 25th on the line Beuvry (to the east of Bethune)-Noeux-les-
Mines. The Guards Division was in the neighborhood of Lillers on the
same night."

By that statement, and by the facts that happened in accordance with
it, the whole scheme of attack in the battle of Loos will stand
challenged in history. Lord French admits in that despatch that he
held his reserves "in his own hand," and later he states that it was
not until nine-thirty on the morning of battle that "I placed the 21st
and 24th Divisions at the disposal of the General Officer commanding
First Army." He still held the Guards. He makes, as a defense of the
decision to hold back the reserves, the extraordinary statement that
there "would be a considerable gap in our line in case of our
success." That is to say, he was actually envisaging a gap in the line
if the attack succeeded according to his expectations, and risking the
most frightful catastrophe that may befall any army in an assault upon
a powerful enemy, provided with enormous reserves, as the Germans were
at that time, and as our Commander-in-Chief ought to have known.

But apart from that the whole time-table of the battle was, as it now
appears, fatally wrong. To move divisions along narrow roads requires
an immense amount of time, even if the roads are clear, and those
roads toward Loos were crowded with the transport and gun-limbers of
the assaulting troops. To move them in daylight to the trenches meant
inevitable loss of life and almost certain demoralization under the
enemy's gun-fire.

"Between 11 A.M. and 12 noon the central brigade of these divisions
filed past me at Bethune and Noeux-les-Mines, respectively," wrote Sir
John French. It was not possible for them to reach our old trenches
until 4 P.M. It was Gen. Sir Frederick Maurice, the Chief of Staff,
who revealed that fact to me afterward in an official explanation, and
it was confirmed by battalion officers of the 24th Division whom I
met.

That time-table led to disaster. By eight o'clock in the morning there
were Scots on Hill 70. They had been told to go "all out," with the
promise that the ground they gained would be consolidated by following
troops. Yet no supports were due to arrive until 4 P.M. at our
original line of attack--still away back from Hill 70--by which time
the enemy had recovered from his first surprise, had reorganized his
guns, and was moving up his own supports. Tragedy befell the Scots on
Hill 70 and in the Cite St.-Auguste, as I have told. Worse tragedy
happened to the 21st and 24th Divisions. They became hopelessly
checked and tangled in the traffic of the roads, and in their heavy
kit were exhausted long before they reached the battlefield. They
drank the water out of their bottles, and then were parched. They ate
their iron rations, and then were hungry. Some of their transport
moved too far forward in daylight, was seen by German observers,
ranged on by German guns, and blown to bits on the road. The cookers
were destroyed, and with them that night's food. None of the officers
had been told that they were expected to attack on that day. All they
anticipated was the duty of holding the old support trenches. In
actual fact they arrived when the enemy was preparing a heavy counter-
attack and flinging over storms of shell-fire. The officers had no
maps and no orders. They were utterly bewildered with the situation,
and had no knowledge as to the where-abouts of the enemy or their own
objectives. Their men met heavy fire for the first time when their
physical and moral condition was weakened by the long march, the lack
of food and water, and the unexpected terror ahead of them. They
crowded into broken trenches, where shells burst over them and into
them. Young officers acting on their own initiative tried to lead
their men forward, and isolated parties went forward, but uncertainly,
not knowing the ground nor their purpose. Shrapnel lashed them, and
high-explosive shells plowed up the earth about them and with them.
Dusk came, and then darkness. Some officers were cursing, and some
wept, fearing dishonor. The men were huddled together like sheep
without shepherds when wolves are about, and saw by the bewilderment
of the officers that they were without leadership. It is that which
makes for demoralization, and these men, who afterward in the battle
of the Somme in the following year fought with magnificent valor, were
on that day at Loos demoralized in a tragic and complete way. Those
who had gone forward came back to the crowded trenches and added to
the panic and the rage and the anguish. Men smashed their rifles in a
kind of madness. Boys were cursing and weeping at the same time. They
were too hopelessly disordered and dismayed by the lack of guidance
and by the shock to their sense of discipline to be of much use in
that battle. Some bodies of them in both these unhappy divisions
arrived in front of Hill 70 at the very time when the enemy launched
his first counter-attack, and were driven back in disorder. . . Some
days later I saw the 21st Division marching back behind the lines.
Rain slashed them. They walked with bent heads. The young officers
were blanched and had a beaten look. The sight of those dejected men
was tragic and pitiful.