Books: Now It Can Be Told

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XIV

Meanwhile, at 6 P.M. on the evening of the first day of battle, the
Guards arrived at Noeux-les-Mines. As I saw them march up, splendid in
their height and strength and glory of youth, I looked out for the
officers I knew, yet hoped I should not see them--that man who had
given a farewell touch to the flowers in the garden of our billet,
that other one who knew he would be wounded, those two young brothers
who had played cricket on a sunny afternoon. I did not see them, but
saw only columns of men, staring grimly ahead of them, with strange,
unspeakable thoughts behind their masklike faces.

It was not until the morning of the 26th that the Commander-in-Chief
"placed them at the disposal of the General Officer commanding First
Army," and it was on the afternoon of Monday, the 27th, that they were
ordered to attack.

By that time we had lost Fosse 8, one brigade of the 9th Scottish
Division having been flung back to its own trenches after desperate
fighting, at frightful cost, after the capture of the Hohenzollern
redoubt by the 26th Brigade of that division. To the north of them the
7th Division was also suffering horrible losses after the capture of
the quarries, near Hulluch, and the village of Haisnes, which
afterward was lost. The commanding officers of both divisions, General
Capper of the 7th, and General Thesiger of the 9th, were killed as
they reconnoitered the ground, and wounded men were pouring down to
the casualty clearing stations if they had the luck to get so far.
Some of them had not that luck, but lay for nearly two days before
they were rescued by the stretcher-bearers from Quality Street and
Philosophe.

It was bad all along the line. The whole plan had gone astray from the
beginning. With an optimism which was splendid in fighting-men and
costly in the High Command, our men had attacked positions of enormous
strength--held by an enemy in the full height of his power--without
sufficient troops in reserve to follow up and support the initial
attack, to consolidate the ground, and resist inevitable counter-
attacks. What reserves the Commander-in-Chief had he held "in his own
hand" too long and too far back.

The Guards went in when the enemy was reorganized to meet them. The
28th Division, afterward in support, was too late to be a decisive
factor.

I do not blame Lord French. I have no right to blame him, as I am not
a soldier nor a military expert. He did his best, with the highest
motives. The blunders he made were due to ignorance of modern battles.
Many other generals made many other blunders, and our men paid with
their lives. Our High Command had to learn by mistakes, by ghastly
mistakes, repeated often, until they became visible to the military
mind and were paid for again by the slaughter of British youth. One
does not blame. A writing-man, who was an observer and recorder, like
myself, does not sit in judgment. He has no right to judge. He merely
cries out, "O God! . . . O God!" in remembrance of all that agony and
that waste of splendid boys who loved life, and died.

On Sunday, as I have told, the situation was full of danger. The Scots
of the 15th Division, weakened by many losses and exhausted by their
long fatigue, had been forced to abandon the important position of
Puits 14--a mine-shaft half a mile north of Hill 70, linked up in
defense with the enemy's redoubt on the northeast side of Hill 70. The
Germans had been given time to bring up their reserves, to reorganize
their broken lines, and to get their batteries into action again.

There was a consultation of anxious brigadiers in Loos when no man
could find safe shelter owing to the heavy shelling which now ravaged
among the houses. Rations were running short, and rain fell through
the roofless ruins, and officers and men shivered in wet clothes. Dead
bodies blown into bits, headless trunks, pools of blood, made a
ghastly mess in the roadways and the houses. Badly wounded men were
dragged down into the cellars, and lay there in the filth of Friday's
fighting. The headquarters of one of the London brigades had put up in
a roofless barn, but were shelled out, and settled down on some heaps
of brick in the open. It was as cold as death in the night, and no
fire could be lighted, and iron rations were the only food, until two
chaplains, "R. C." and Church of England (no difference of dogma
then), came up as volunteers in a perilous adventure, with bottles of
hot soup in mackintoshes. They brought a touch of human warmth to the
brigade staff, made those hours of the night more endurable, but the
men farther forward had no such luck. They were famishing and soaked,
in a cold hell where shells tossed up the earth about them and
spattered them with the blood and flesh of their comrades.

On Monday morning the situation was still more critical, all along the
line, and the Guards were ordered up to attack Hill 70, to which only
a few Scots were clinging on the near slopes. The 6th Cavalry Brigade
dismounted--no more dreams of exploiting success and galloping round
Lens--were sent into Loos with orders to hold the village at all cost,
with the men of the 15th Division, who had been left there.

The Londoners were still holding on to the chalk-pit south of Loos,
under murderous fire.

It was a bad position for the troops sent into action at that stage.
The result of the battle on September 25th had been to create a
salient thrust like a wedge into the German position and enfiladed by
their guns. The sides of the salient ran sharply back--from Hulluch in
the north, past the chalk-quarries to Givenchy, and in the south from
the lower slopes of Hill 70 past the Double Crassier to Grenay. The
orders given to the Guards were to straighten out this salient on the
north by capturing the whole of Hill 70, Puits 14, to the north of it,
and the chalk-pit still farther north.

It was the 2d Brigade of Guards, including Grenadiers, Welsh and Scots
Guards, which was to lead the assault, while the 1st Brigade on the
left maintained a holding position and the 3d Brigade was in support,
immediately behind.

As soon as the Guards started to attack they were met by a heavy storm
of gas-shells. This checked them for a time, as smoke-helmets--the old
fashioned things of flannel which were afterward changed for the masks
with nozzles--had to be served out, and already men were choking and
gasping in the poisonous fumes. Among them was the colonel of the
Grenadiers, whose command was taken over by the major. Soon the men
advanced again, looking like devils, as, in artillery formation (small
separate groups), they groped their way through the poisoned clouds.
Shrapnel and high explosives burst over them and among them, and many
men fell as they came within close range of the enemy's positions
running from Hill 70 northward to the chalk-pit.

The Irish Guards, supported by the Coldstreamers, advanced down the
valley beyond Loos and gained the lower edge of Bois Hugo, near the
chalk-pit, while the Scots Guards assaulted Puits 14 and the building
in its group of houses known as the Keep. Another body of Guards,
including Grenadiers and Welsh, attacked at the same time the lower
slopes of Hill 70.

Puits 14 itself was won by a party of Scots Guards, led by an officer
named Captain Cuthbert, which engaged in hand-to-hand fighting,
routing out the enemy from the houses. Some companies of the
Grenadiers came to the support of their comrades in the Scots Guards,
but suffered heavy losses themselves. A platoon under a young
lieutenant named Ayres Ritchie reached the Puits, and, storming their
way into the Keep, knocked out a machine-gun, mounted on the second
floor, by a desperate bombing attack. The officer held on in a most
dauntless way to the position, until almost every man was either
killed or wounded, unable to receive support, owing to the enfilade
fire of the German machine-guns.

Night had now come on, the sky lightened by the bursting of shells and
flares, and terrible in its tumult of battle. Some of the
Coldstreamers had gained possession of the chalk-pit, which they were
organizing into a strong defensive position, and various companies of
the Guards divisions, after heroic assaults upon Hill 70, where they
were shattered by the fire which met them on the crest from the
enemy's redoubt on the northeast side, had dug themselves into the
lower slopes.

There was a strange visitor that day at the headquarters of the Guards
division, where Lord Cavan was directing operations. A young officer
came in and said, quite calmly: "Sir, I have to report that my
battalion has been cut to pieces. We have been utterly destroyed."

Lord Cavan questioned him, and then sent for another officer. "Look
after that young man," he said, quietly. "He is mad. It is a case of
shell-shock."

Reports came through of a mysterious officer going the round of the
batteries, saying that the Germans had broken through and that they
had better retire. Two batteries did actually move away.

Another unknown officer called out, "Retire! Retire!" until he was
shot through the head. "German spies!" said some of our officers and
men, but the Intelligence branch said, "Not spies . . . madmen . . .
poor devils!"

Before the dawn came the Coldstreamers made another desperate attempt
to attack and hold Puits 14, but the position was too deadly even for
their height of valor, and although some men pushed on into this
raging fire, the survivors had to fall back to the woods, where they
strengthened their defensive works.

On the following day the position was the same, the sufferings of our
men being still further increased by heavy shelling from 8-inch
howitzers. Colonel Egerton of the Coldstream Guards and his adjutant
were killed in the chalk-pit.

It was now seen by the headquarters staff of the Guards Division that
Puits 14 was untenable, owing to its enfilading by heavy artillery,
and the order was given for a retirement to the chalk-pit, which was a
place of sanctuary owing to the wonderful work done throughout the
night to strengthen its natural defensive features by sand--bags and
barbed wire, in spite of machine-guns which raked it from the
neighboring woods.

The retirement was done as though the men were on parade, slowly, and
in perfect order, across the field of fire, each man bearing himself,
so their officers told me, as though at the Trooping of the Colors,
until now one and then another fell in a huddled heap. It was an
astonishing tribute to the strength of tradition among troops. To
safeguard the honor of a famous name these men showed such dignity in
the presence of death that even the enemy must have been moved to
admiration.

But they had failed, after suffering heavy losses, and the Commander-
in-Chief had to call upon the French for help, realizing that without
strong assistance the salient made by that battle of Loos would be a
death-trap. The French Tenth Army had failed, too, at Vimy, thus
failing to give the British troops protection on their right flank.

"On representing this to General Joffre," wrote Sir John French, "he
was kind enough to ask the commander of the northern group of French
armies to render us assistance. General Foch met those demands in the
same friendly spirit which he has always displayed throughout the
course of the whole campaign, and expressed his readiness to give me
all the support he could. On the morning of the 28th we discussed the
situation, and the general agreed to send the 9th French Corps to take
over the ground occupied by us, extending from the French left up to
and including that portion of Hill 70 which we were holding, and also
the village of Loos. This relief was commenced on September 30th, and
completed on the two following nights."

So ended the battle of Loos, except for a violent counter--attack
delivered on October 8th all along the line from Fosse 8 on the north
to the right of the French 9th Corps on the south, with twenty-eight
battalions in the first line of assault. It was preceded by a
stupendous bombardment which inflicted heavy casualties upon our 1st
Division in the neighborhood of the chalk-pit, and upon the Guards
holding the Hohenzollern redoubt near Hulluch. Once again those
brigades, which had been sorely tried, had to crouch under a fury of
fire, until the living were surrounded by dead, half buried or carved
up into chunks of flesh in the chaos of broken trenches. The Germans
had their own shambles, more frightful, we were told, than ours, and
thousands of dead lay in front of our lines when the tide of their
attack ebbed back and waves of living men were broken by the fire of
our field-guns, rifles, and machine-guns. Sir John French's staff
estimated the number of German dead as from eight to nine thousand. It
was impossible to make any accurate sum in that arithmetic of
slaughter, and always the enemy's losses were exaggerated because of
the dreadful need of balancing accounts in new-made corpses in that
Debit and Credit of war's bookkeeping.

What had we gained by great sacrifices of life? Not Lens, nor Lille,
nor even Hill 70 (for our line had to be withdrawn from those bloody
slopes where our men left many of their dead), but another sharp-edged
salient enfiladed by German guns for two years more, and a foothold on
one slag heap of the Double Crassier, where our men lived, if they
could, a few yards from Germans on the other; and that part of the
Hohenzollern redoubt which became another Hooge where English youth
was blown up by mines, buried by trench-mortars, condemned to a living
death in lousy caves dug into the chalk. Another V-shaped salient,
narrower than that of Ypres, more dismal, and as deadly, among the
pit-heads and the black dust hills and the broken mine-shafts of that
foul country beyond Loos.

The battle which had been begun with such high hopes ended in ghastly
failure by ourselves and by the French. Men who came back from it
spoke in whispers of its generalship and staff work, and said things
which were dangerous to speak aloud, cursing their fate as fighting-
men, asking of God as well as of mortals why the courage of the
soldiers they led should be thrown away in such a muck of slaughter,
laughing with despairing mirth at the optimism of their leaders, who
had been lured on by a strange, false, terrible belief in German
weakness, and looking ahead at unending vistas of such massacre as
this which would lead only to other salients, after desperate and
futile endeavor.

Part Four

A WINTER OF DISCONTENT

I

The winter of 1915 was, I think, the worst of all. There was a settled
hopelessness in it which was heavy in the hearts of men--ours and the
enemy's. In 1914 there was the first battle of Ypres, when the bodies
of British soldiers lay strewn in the fields beyond this city and
their brown lines barred the way to Calais, but the war did not seem
likely to go on forever. Most men believed, even then, that it would
end quickly, and each side had faith in some miracle that might
happen. In 1916-17 the winter was foul over the fields of the Somme
after battles which had cut all our divisions to pieces and staggered
the soul of the world by the immense martyrdom of boys--British,
French, and German--on the western front. But the German retreat from
the Somme to the shelter of their Hindenburg line gave some respite to
our men, and theirs, from the long-drawn fury of attack and counter-
attack, and from the intensity of gun-fire. There was at best the
mirage of something like victory on our side, a faint flickering up of
the old faith that the Germans had weakened and were nearly spent.

But for a time in those dark days of 1915 there was no hope ahead. No
mental dope by which our fighting-men could drug themselves into
seeing a vision of the war's end.

The battle of Loos and its aftermath of minor massacres in the ground
we had gained--he new horror of that new salient--had sapped into the
confidence of those battalion officers and men who had been assured of
German weakness by cheery, optimistic, breezy-minded generals. It was
no good some of those old gentlemen saying, "We've got 'em beat!" when
from Hooge to the Hohenzollern redoubt our men sat in wet trenches
under ceaseless bombardment of heavy guns, and when any small attack
they made by the orders of a High Command which believed in small
attacks, without much plan or purpose, was only "asking for trouble"
from German counterattacks by mines, trench-mortars, bombing sorties,
poison-gas, flame-throwers, and other forms of frightfulness which
made a dirty mess of flesh and blood, without definite result on
either side beyond piling up the lists of death.

"It keeps up the fighting spirit of the men," said the generals. "We
must maintain an aggressive policy."

They searched their trench maps for good spots where another "small
operation" might be organized. There was a competition among the corps
and divisional generals as to the highest number of raids, mine
explosions, trench-grabbings undertaken by their men.

"My corps," one old general told me over a cup of tea in his
headquarters mess, "beats the record for raids." His casualties also
beat the record, and many of his officers and men called him, just
bluntly and simply, "Our old murderer." They disliked the necessity of
dying so that he might add one more raid to his heroic competition
with the corps commander of the sector on the left. When they waited
for the explosion of a mine which afterward they had to "rush" in a
race with the German bombing-parties, some of them saw no sense in the
proceeding, but only the likelihood of having legs and arms torn off
by German stick-bombs or shells. "What's the good of it?" they asked,
and could find no answer except the satisfaction of an old man
listening to the distant roar of the new tumult by which he had
"raised hell" again.

II

The autumn of 1915 was wet in Flanders and Artois, where our men
settled down--knee-deep where the trenches were worst--for the winter
campaign. On rainy days, as I remember, a high wind hurtled over the
Flemish fields, but it was moist, and swept gusts of rain into the
faces of men marching through mud to the fighting-lines and of other
men doing sentry on the fire-steps of trenches into which water came
trickling down the slimy parapets.

When the wind dropped at dusk or dawn a whitish fog crept out of the
ground, so that rifles were clammy to the touch and a blanket of
moisture settled on every stick in the dugouts, and nothing could be
seen through the veil of vapor to the enemy's lines, where he stayed
invisible.

He was not likely to attack on a big scale while the battlefields were
in that quagmire state. An advancing wave of men would have been
clogged in the mud after the first jump over the slimy sand-bags, and
to advance artillery was sheer impossibility. Nothing would be done on
either side but stick-in-the-mud warfare and those trench-raids and
minings which had no object except "to keep up the spirit of the men."
There was always work to do in the trenches--draining them,
strengthening their parapets, making their walls, tiling or boarding
their floorways, timbering the dugouts, and after it was done another
rainstorm or snowstorm undid most of it, and the parapets slid down,
the water poured in, and spaces were opened for German machine-gun
fire, and there was less head cover against shrapnel bullets which
mixed with the raindrops, and high explosives which smashed through
the mud. The working parties had a bad time and a wet one, in spite of
waders and gum boots which were served out to lucky ones. Some of them
wore a new kind of hat, seen for the first time, and greeted with
guffaws--the "tin" hat which later became the headgear of all
fighting-men. It saved many head wounds, but did not save body wounds,
and every day the casualty lists grew longer in the routine of a
warfare in which there was "Nothing to report."

Our men were never dry. They were wet in their trenches and wet in
their dugouts. They slept in soaking clothes, with boots full of
water, and they drank rain with their tea, and ate mud with their
"bully," and endured it all with the philosophy of "grin and bear it!"
and laughter, as I heard them laughing in those places between
explosive curses.

On the other side of the barbed wire the Germans were more miserable,
not because their plight was worse, but because I think they lacked
the English sense of humor. In some places they had the advantage of
our men in better trenches, with better drains and dugouts--due to an
industry with which ours could never compete. Here and there, as in
the ground to the north of Hooge, they were in a worse state, with
such rivers in their trenches that they went to enormous trouble to
drain the Bellewarde Lake which used to slop over in the rainy season.
Those field-gray men had to wade through a Slough of Despond to get to
their line, and at night by Hooge where the lines were close together-
-only a few yards apart--our men could hear their boots squelching in
the mud with sucking, gurgling noises.

"They're drinking soup again!" said our humorists.

There, at Hooge, Germans and English talked to one another, out of
their common misery.

"How deep is it with you?" shouted a German soldier.

His voice came from behind a pile of sand-bags which divided the enemy
and ourselves in a communication trench between the main lines.

"Up to our blooming knees," said an English corporal, who was trying
to keep his bombs dry under a tarpaulin.

"So? . . . You are lucky fellows. We are up to our belts in it."

It was so bad in parts of the line during November storms that whole
sections of trench collapsed into a chaos of slime and ooze. It was
the frost as well as the rain which caused this ruin, making the
earthworks sink under their weight of sand-bags. German and English
soldiers were exposed to one another like ants upturned from their
nests by a minor landslide. They ignored one another. They pretended
that the other fellows were not there. They had not been properly
introduced. In another place, reckless because of their discomfort,
the Germans crawled upon their slimy parapets and sat on top to dry
their legs, and shouted: "Don't shoot! Don't shoot!"

Our men did not shoot. They, too, sat on the parapets drying their
legs, and grinning at the gray ants yonder, until these incidents were
reported back to G. H. Q.--where good fires were burning under dry
roofs--and stringent orders came against "fraternization." Every
German who showed himself was to be shot. Of course any Englishman who
showed himself--owing to a parapet falling in--would be shot, too. It
was six of one and half a dozen of the other, as always, in this
trench warfare, but the dignity of G. H. Q. would not be outraged by
the thought of such indecent spectacles as British and Germans
refusing to kill each other on sight. Some of the men obeyed orders,
and when a German sat up and said, "Don't shoot!" plugged him through
the head. Others were extremely short-sighted. . . Now and again
Germans crawled over to our trenches and asked meekly to be taken
prisoner. I met a few of these men and spoke with them.

"There is no sense in this war," said one of them. "It is misery on
both sides. There is no use in it."

That thought of war's futility inspired an episode which was narrated
throughout the army in that winter of '15, and led to curious
conversations in dugouts and billets. Above a German front-line trench
appeared a plank on which, in big letters, was scrawled these words

"The English are fools."

"Not such bloody fools as all that!" said a sergeant, and in a few
minutes the plank was smashed to splinters by rifle-fire.

Another plank appeared, with other words:

"The French are fools."

Loyalty to our allies caused the destruction of that board.

A third plank was put up:

"We're all fools. Let's all go home."

That board was also shot to pieces, but the message caused some
laughter, and men repeating it said: "There's a deal of truth in those
words. Why should this go on? What's it all about? Let the old men who
made this war come and fight it out among themselves, at Hooge. The
fighting-men have no real quarrel with one another. We all want to go
home to our wives and our work."

But neither side was prepared to "go home" first. Each side was in a
trap--a devil's trap from which there was no escape. Loyalty to their
own side, discipline, with the death penalty behind it, spell words of
old tradition, obedience to the laws of war or to the caste which
ruled them, all the moral and spiritual propaganda handed out by
pastors, newspapers, generals, staff-officers, old men at home,
exalted women, female furies, a deep and simple love for England and
Germany, pride of manhood, fear of cowardice--a thousand complexities
of thought and sentiment prevented men, on both sides, from breaking
the net of fate in which they were entangled, and revolting against
that mutual, unceasing massacre, by a rising from the trenches with a
shout of, "We're all fools! . . . Let's all go home!"