Books: Now It Can Be Told

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In Russia they did so, but the Germans did not go home, too. As an
army and a nation they went on to the Peace of Brest-Litovsk and their
doom. But many German soldiers were converted to that gospel of "We're
all fools!" and would not fight again with any spirit, as we found at
times, after August 8th, in the last year of war.

III

The men remained in the trenches, and suffered horribly. I have told
about lice and rats and mine-shafts there. Another misery came to
torture soldiers in the line, and it was called "trench-foot." Many
men standing in slime for days and nights in field boots or puttees
lost all sense of feeling in their feet. These feet of theirs, so cold
and wet, began to swell, and then to go "dead," and then suddenly to
burn as though touched by red-hot pokers. When the "reliefs" went up
scores of men could not walk back from the trenches, but had to crawl,
or be carried pick-a-back by their comrades, to the field dressing
stations. So I saw hundreds of them, and, as the winter dragged on,
thousands. The medical officers cut off their boots and their puttees,
and the socks that had become part of their skins, exposing blackened
and rotting feet. They put oil on them, and wrapped them round with
cotton-wool, and tied labels to their tunics with the name of that new
disease--"trench-foot." Those medical officers looked serious as the
number of cases increased.

"This is getting beyond a joke," they said. "It is pulling down the
battalion strength worse than wounds."

Brigadiers and divisional generals were gloomy, and cursed the new
affliction of their men. Some of them said it was due to damned
carelessness, others were inclined to think it due to deliberate
malingering at a time when there were many cases of self-inflicted
wounds by men who shot their fingers away, or their toes, to get out
of the trenches.

There was no look of malingering on the faces of those boys who were
being carried pick-a-back to the ambulance-trains at Remy siding, near
Poperinghe, with both feet crippled and tied up in bundles of cotton-
wool. The pain was martyrizing, like that of men tied to burning
fagots for conscience' sake. In one battalion of the 49th (West
Riding) Division there were over four hundred cases in that winter of
'15. Other battalions in the Ypres salient suffered as much.

It was not until the end of the winter, when oil was taken up to the
trenches and rubbing drill was ordered, two or three times a day, that
the malady of trench-foot was reduced, and at last almost eliminated.

The spirit of the men fought against all that misery, resisted it, and
would not be beaten by it.

A sergeant of the West Riding Division was badly wounded as he stood
thigh-high in water. A bomb or a trench-mortar smashed one of his legs
into a pulp of bloody flesh and splintered bone. Word was passed down
to the field ambulance, and a surgeon came up, splashed to the neck in
mud, with his instruments held high. The operation was done in the
water, red with the blood of the wounded man, who was then brought
down, less a leg, to the field hospital. He was put on one side as a
man about to die. . . But that evening he chattered cheerfully, joked
with the priest who came to anoint him, and wrote a letter to his
wife.

"I hope this will find you in the pink, as it leaves me," he began. He
mentioned that he had had an "accident" which had taken one of his
legs away. "But the youngsters will like to play with my wooden peg,"
he wrote, and discussed the joke of it. The people round his bed
marveled at him, though day after day they saw great courage; such
courage as that of another man who was brought in mortally wounded and
lay next to a comrade on the operating table.

"Stick it, lad!" he said, "stick it!" and turned his head a little to
look at his friend.

Many of our camps were hardly better than the trenches. Only by duck-
boards could one walk about the morass in which huts were built and
tents were pitched. In the wagon lines gunners tried in vain to groom
their horses, and floundered about in their gum boots, cursing the mud
which clogged bits and chains and bridles, and could find no comfort
anywhere between Dickebusch and Locre.

IV

The Hohenzollern redoubt, near Fosse 8, captured by the 9th Scottish
Division in the battle of Loos, could not be held then under
concentrated gun-fire from German batteries, and the Scots, and the
Guards who followed them, after heavy losses, could only cling on to
part of a communication trench (on the southeast side of the
earthworks) nicknamed "Big Willie," near another trench called "Little
Willie." Our enemies forced their way back into some of their old
trenches in this outpost beyond their main lines, and in spite of the
chaos produced by our shell-fire built up new parapets and sand-bag
barricades, flung out barbed wire, and dug themselves into this
graveyard where their dead and ours were strewn.

Perhaps there was some reason why our generals should covet possession
of the Hohenzollern redoubt, some good military reason beyond the
spell of a high-sounding name. I went up there one day when it was
partly ours and stared at its rigid waves of mine-craters and trench
parapets and upheaved chalk, dazzling white under a blue sky, and
failed to see any beauty in the spot, or any value in it--so close to
the German lines that one could not cough for fear of losing one's
head. It seemed to me a place not to gain and not to hold. If I had
been a general (appalling thought!) I should have said: "Let the enemy
have that little hell of his. Let men live there among half-buried
bodies and crawling lice, and the stench of rotting flesh. There is no
good in it for us, and for him will be an abomination, dreaded by his
men."

But our generals desired it. They hated to think that the enemy should
have crawled back to it after our men had been there. They decided to
"bite it off," that blunt nose which was thrust forward to our line.
It was an operation that would be good to report in the official
communique. Its capture would, no doubt, increase the morale of our
men after their dead had been buried and their wounded patched up and
their losses forgotten.

It was to the 46th Midland Division that the order of assault was
given on October 13th, and into the trenches went the lace-makers of
Nottingham, and the potters of the Five Towns, and the boot-makers of
Leicester, North Staffordshires, and Robin Hoods and Sherwood
Foresters, on the night of the 12th.

On the following morning our artillery concentrated a tremendous fire
upon the redoubt, followed at 1 P.M. by volumes of smoke and gas. The
chief features on this part of the German line were, on the right, a
group of colliers' houses known as the Corons de Pekin, and a slag
heap known as the Dump, to the northeast of that bigger dump called
Fosse 8, and on the left another group of cottages, and another black
hillock farther to the right of the Fosse. These positions were in
advance of the Hohenzollern redoubt which our troops were to attack.

It was not an easy task. It was hellish. Intense as our artillery fire
had been, it failed to destroy the enemy's barbed wire and front
trenches sufficiently to clear the way, and the Germans were still
working their machine-guns when the fuses were lengthened, the fire
lifted, and the gas-clouds rolled away.

I saw that bombardment on the morning of Wednesday, October 13th, and
the beginning of the attack from a slag heap close to some of our
heavy guns. It was a fine, clear day, and some of the French miners
living round the pit-heads on our side of the battle line climbed up
iron ladders and coal heaps, roused to a new interest in the spectacle
of war which had become a monotonous and familiar thing in their
lives, because the intensity of our gun-fire and the volumes of smoke-
clouds, and a certain strange, whitish vapor which was wafted from our
lines toward the enemy stirred their imagination, dulled by the daily
din of guns, to a sense of something beyond the usual flight of shells
in their part of the war zone.

"The English are attacking again!" was the message which brought out
these men still living among ruined cottages on the edge of the
slaughter-fields. They stared into the mist, where, beyond the
brightness of the autumn sun, men were about to fight and die. It was
the same scene that I had watched when I went up to the Loos redoubt
in the September battle--a flat, bare, black plain, crisscrossed with
the whitish earth of the trenches rising a little toward Loos and then
falling again so that in the village there only the Tower Bridge was
visible, with its steel girders glinting, high over the horizon line.
To the left the ruins of Hulluch fretted the low-lying clouds of
smoke, and beyond a huddle of broken houses far away was the town of
Haisnes. Fosse 8 and the Hohenzollern redoubt were hummocks of earth
faintly visible through drifting clouds of thick, sluggish vapor.

On the edge of this battleground the fields were tawny under the
golden light of the autumn sun, and the broken towers of village
churches, red roofs shattered by shell-fire, trees stripped bare of
all leaves before the wind of autumn touched them, were painted in
clear outlines against the gray-blue of the sky.

Our guns had been invisible. Not one of all those batteries which were
massed over a wide stretch of country could be located before the
battle by a searching glass. But when the bombardment began it seemed
as though our shells came from every field and village for miles back,
behind the lines.

The glitter of those bursting shells stabbed through the smoke of
their explosion with little, twinkling flashes, like the sparkle of
innumerable mirrors heliographing messages of death. There was one
incessant roar rising and falling in waves of prodigious sound. The
whole line of battle was in a grayish murk, which obscured all
landmarks, so that even the Tower Bridge was but faintly visible.

Presently, when our artillery lifted, there were new clouds rising
from the ground and spreading upward in a great dense curtain of a
fleecy texture. They came from our smoke-shells, which were to mask
our infantry attack. Through them and beyond them rolled another wave
of cloud, a thinner, whiter vapor, which clung to the ground and then
curled forward to the enemy's lines.

"That's our gas!" said a voice on one of the slag heaps, amid a group
of observers--English and French officers.

"And the wind is dead right for it," said another voice. "The Germans
will get a taste of it this time!"

Then there was silence, and some of those observers held their breath
as though that gas had caught their own throats and choked them a
little. They tried to pierce through that bar of cloud to see the
drama behind its curtain--men caught in those fumes, the terror-
stricken flight before its advance, the sudden cry of the enemy
trapped in their dugouts. Imagination leaped out, through
invisibility, to the realization of the things that were happening
beyond.

From our place of observation there were brief glimpses of the human
element in this scene of impersonal powers and secret forces. Across a
stretch of flat ground beyond some of those zigzag lines of trenches
little black things were scurrying forward. They were not bunched
together in close groups, but scattered. Some of them seemed to
hesitate, and then to fall and lie where they fell, others hurrying on
until they disappeared in the drifting clouds.

It was the foremost line of our infantry attack, led by the bombers.
The Germans were firing tempests of shells. Some of them were
curiously colored, of a pinkish hue, or with orange-shaped puffs of
vivid green. They were poison-shells giving out noxious gases. All the
chemistry of death was poured out on both sides--and through it went
the men of the Midland Division.

The attack on the right was delivered by a brigade of Staffordshire
men, who advanced in four lines toward the Big Willie trench which
formed the southeast side of the Hohenzollern redoubt. The leading
companies, who were first over our own parapets, made a quick rush,
half blinded by the smoke and the gaseous vapors which filled the air,
and were at once received by a deadly fire from many machine-guns. It
swept their ranks, and men fell on all sides. Others ran on in little
parties flung out in extended order.

Young officers behaved with desperate gallantry, and as they fell
cheered their men on, while others ran forward shouting, followed by
numbers which dwindled at every yard, so that only a few reached the
Big Willie trench in the first assault.

A bombing-party of North Staffordshire men cleared thirty yards of the
trench by the rapidity with which they flung their hand-grenades at
the German bombers who endeavored to keep them out, and again and
again they kept at bay a tide of field-gray men, who swarmed up the
communication trenches, by a series of explosions which blew many of
them to bits as bomb after bomb was hurled into their mass. Other
Germans followed, flinging their own stick-bombs.

The Staffordshires did not yield until nearly every man was wounded
and many were killed. Even then they retreated yard by yard, still
flinging grenades almost with the rhythm of a sower who scatters his
seed, each motion of the hand and arm letting go one of those steel
pomegranates which burst with the noise of a high-explosive shell.

The survivors fell back to the other side of a barricade made in the
Big Willie trench by some of their men behind. Behind them again was
another barrier, in case the first should be rushed.

It seemed as if they might be rushed now, for the Germans were
swarming up Big Willie with strong bombing-parties, and would soon
blast a way through unless they were thrust beyond the range of hand-
grenades. It was a young lieutenant named Hawker, with some South
Staffordshire men, who went forward to meet this attack and kept the
enemy back until four o'clock in the afternoon, when only a few living
men stood among the dead and they had to fall back to the second
barrier.

Darkness now crept over the battlefield and filled the trenches, and
in the darkness the wounded men were carried back to the rear, while
those who had escaped worked hard to strengthen their defenses by
sand-bags and earthworks, knowing that their only chance of life lay
in fierce industry.

Early next morning an attempt was made by other battalions to come to
the relief of those who held on behind those barriers in Big Willie
trench. They were Nottingham men--Robin Hoods and other Sherwood lads-
-and they came across the open ground in two directions, attacking the
west as well as the east ends of the German communication trenches
which formed the face of the Hohenzollern redoubt.

They were supported by rifle grenade-fire, but their advance was met
by intense fire from artillery and machine-guns, so that many were
blown to bits or mangled or maimed, and none could reach their
comrades in Big Willie trench.

While one brigade of the Midland men had been fighting like this on
the right, another brigade had been engaged on the left. It contained
Sherwood, Leicester, and Lincoln men, who, on the afternoon of October
13th, went forward to the assault with very desperate endeavor.
Advancing in four lines, the leading companies were successful in
reaching the Hohenzollern redoubt, smashed through the barbed wire,
part of which was uncut, and reached the Fosse trench which forms the
north base of the salient.

Machine-gun fire cut down the first two lines severely and the two
remaining lines were heavily shelled by German artillery. It was an
hour in which the courage of those men was agonized. They were exposed
on naked ground swept by bullets, the atmosphere was heavy with gas
and smoke; all the abomination of battle--he moaning of the wounded,
the last cries of the dying, the death-crawl of stricken beings
holding their broken limbs and their entrails--was around them, and in
front a hidden enemy with unlimited supplies of ammunition and a
better position.

The Robin Hoods and the men of Lincoln and Leicestershire were
sustained in that shambles by the spirit that had come to them through
the old yeoman stock in which their traditions were rooted, and those
who had not fallen went forward, past their wounded comrades, past
these poor, bloody, moaning men, to the German trenches behind the
redoubt.

At 2.15 P.M. some Monmouth men came up in support, and while their
bombers were at work some of the Lincolns pushed up with a machine-gun
to a point within sixty yards from the Fosse trench, where they stayed
till dark, and then were forced to fall back.

At this time parties of bombers were trying to force their way up the
Little Willie trench on the extreme left of the redoubt, and here
ghastly fighting took place. Some of the Leicesters made a dash three
hundred yards up the trench, but were beaten back by overpowering
numbers of German bombers and bayonet-men, and again and again other
Midland lads went up that alleyway of death, flinging their grenades
until they fell or until few comrades were left to support them as
they stood among their dead and dying.

Single men held on, throwing and throwing, until there was no strength
in their arms to hurl another bomb, or until death came to them. Yet
the business went on through the darkness of the afternoon, and into
the deeper darkness of the night, lit luridly at moments by the white
illumination of German flares and by the flash of bursting shells.

Isolated machine-guns in uncaptured parts of the redoubt still beat a
tattoo like the ruffle of war-drums, and from behind the barriers in
the Big Willie trench came the sharp crack of English rifles, and dull
explosions of other bombs flung by other Englishmen very hard pressed
that night.

In the outer trenches, at the nose of the salient, fresh companies of
Sherwood lads were feeling their way along, mixed up confusedly with
comrades from other companies, wounded or spent with fighting, but
determined to hold the ground they had won.

Some of the Robin Hoods up Little Willie trench were holding out
desperately and almost at the last gasp, when they were relieved by
other Sherwoods, and it was here that a young officer named Vickers
was found in the way that won him his V.C.

Charles Geoffrey Vickers stood there for hours against a horde of men
eager for his death, eager to get at the men behind him. But they
could not approach. He and his fellow-bombers kept twenty yards or
more clear before them, and any man who flung himself forward was the
target of a hand-grenade.

From front and from flank German bombs came whizzing, falling short
sometimes, with a blasting roar that tore down lumps of trench, and
sometimes falling very close--close enough to kill.

Vickers saw some of his best men fall, but he kept the barrier still
intact by bombing and bombing.

When many of his comrades were dead or wounded, he wondered how long
the barrier would last, and gave orders for another to be built behind
him, so that when the rush came it would be stopped behind him--and
over him.

Men worked at that barricade, piling up sand-bags, and as it was built
that young lieutenant knew that his own retreat was being cut off and
that he was being coffined in that narrow space. Two other men were
with him--I never learned their names--and they were hardly enough to
hand up bombs as quickly as he wished to throw them.

Away there up the trench the Germans were waiting for a pounce. Though
wounded so that he felt faint and giddy, he called out for more bombs.
"More!" he said, "More!" and his hand was like a machine reaching out
and throwing.

Rescue came at last, and the wounded officer was hauled over the
barricade which he had ordered to be built behind him, closing up his
way of escape.

All through October 14th the Midland men of the 46th Division held on
to their ground, and some of the Sherwoods made a new attack, clearing
the enemy out of the east portion of the redoubt.

It was lucky that it coincided with a counter-attack made by the enemy
at a different point, because it relieved the pressure there. Bombing
duels continued hour after hour, and human nature could hardly have
endured so long a struggle without fatigue beyond the strength of men.

So it seems; yet when a brigade of Guards came up on the night of
October 15th the enemy attacked along the whole line of redoubts, and
the Midland men, who were just about to leave the trenches, found
themselves engaged in a new action. They had to fight again before
they could go, and they fought like demons or demigods for their right
of way and home, and bombed the enemy back to his holes in the ground.

So ended the assault on the Hohenzollern by the Midland men of
England, whose division, years later, helped to break the Hindenburg
line along the great canal south of St.-Quentin.

What good came of it mortal men cannot say, unless the generals who
planned it hold the secret. It cost a heavy price in life and agony.
It demonstrated the fighting spirit of many English boys who did the
best they could, with the rage, and fear, and madness of great
courage, before they died or fell, and it left some living men, and
others who relieved them in Big Willie and Little Willie trenches, so
close to the enemy that one could hear them cough, or swear in
guttural whispers.

And through the winter of '15, and the years that followed, the
Hohenzollern redoubt became another Hooge, as horrible as Hooge, as
deadly, as damnable in its filthy perils, where men of English blood,
and Irish, and Scottish, took their turn, and hated it, and counted
themselves lucky if they escaped from its prison-house, whose walls
stank of new and ancient death.

* * *

Among those who took their turn in the hell of the Hohenzollern were
the men of the 12th Division, New Army men, and all of the old stock
and spirit of England, bred in the shires of Norfolk and Suffolk,
Gloucester and Bedford, and in Surrey, Kent, Sussex, and Middlesex
(which meant London), as the names of their battalions told. In
September they relieved the Guards and cavalry at Loos; in December
they moved on to Givenchy, and in February they began a long spell at
the Hohenzollern. It was there the English battalions learned the
worst things of war and showed the quality of English courage.

A man of Kent, named Corporal Cotter, of the Buffs, was marvelous in
spirit, stronger than the flesh.

On the night of March 6th an attack was made by his company along an
enemy trench, but his own bombing--party was cut off, owing to heavy
casualties in the center of the attack. Things looked serious and
Cotter went back under heavy fire to report and bring up more bombs.

On the return journey his right leg was blown off close below the knee
and he was wounded in both arms. By a kind of miracle--the miracle of
human courage--he did not drop down and die in the mud of the trench,
mud so deep that unwounded men found it hard to walk--but made his way
along fifty yards of trench toward the crater where his comrades were
hard pressed. He came up to Lance-corporal Newman, who was bombing
with his sector to the right of the position. Cotter called to him and
directed him to bomb six feet toward where help was most needed, and
worked his way forward to the crater where the Germans had developed a
violent counter-attack.

Men fell rapidly under the enemy's bomb-fire, but Cotter, with only
one leg, and bleeding from both arms, steadied his comrades, who were
beginning to have the wind-up, as they say, issued orders, controlled
the fire, and then altered dispositions to meet the attack. It was
repulsed after two hours' fighting, and only then did Cotter allow his
wounds to be bandaged. From the dug--out where he lay while the
bombardment still continued he called out cheery words to the men,
until he was carried down, fourteen hours later. He received the V.
C., but died of his wounds.

Officers and men vied with one another, yet not for honor or reward,
round these craters of the Hohenzollern, and in the mud, and the fumes
of shells, and rain-swept darkness, and all the black horror of such a
time and place, sometimes in groups and sometimes quite alone, did
acts of supreme valor. When all the men in one of these infernal
craters were dead or wounded Lieut. Lea Smith, of the Buffs, ran
forward with a Lewis gun, helped by Private Bradley, and served it
during a fierce attack by German bombers until it jammed.

Then he left the gun and took to bombing, and that single figure of
his, flinging grenades like an overarm bowler, kept the enemy at bay
until reinforcements reached him.

Another officer of the Buff's--by name Smeltzer--withdrew his platoon
under heavy fire, and, although he was wounded, fought his way back
slowly to prevent the enemy from following up. The men were proud of
his gallantry, but when he was asked what he had done he could think
of nothing except that "when the Boches began shelling I got into a
dugout, and when they stopped I came out again."