Books: Now It Can Be Told

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The German gunners were now at work in answer to those beacons of
distress, and with every caliber of gun from howitzers to minenwerfers
they sheiled our front-lines for two hours and killed for vengeance.
They were too late to stop the advance of the assaulting troops, who
were fighting in the craters against groups of German bombers who
tried to force their way up to the rescue of a position already lost.
One of our officers leading the assault on one of the craters on the
right was killed very quickly, but his men were not checked, and with
individual resolution and initiative, and the grit of the Lancashire
man in a tight place, fought on grimly, and won their purpose.

A young lieutenant fell dead from a bullet wound after he had directed
his men to their posts from the lip of a new mine-crater, as coolly as
though he were a master of ceremonies in a Lancashire ballroom.
Another, a champion bomb-thrower, with a range of forty yards, flung
his hand-grenades at the enemy with untiring skill and with a fierce
contempt of death, until he was killed by an answering shot. The
N.C.O.'s took up the command and the men "carried on" until they held
all the chain of craters, crouching and panting above mangled men.

They were hours of anguish for many Germans, who lay wounded and half
buried, or quite buried, in the chaos, of earth made by those mine-
craters now doubly upheaved. Their screams and moans sounding above
the guns, the frantic cries of men maddened under tons of earth, which
kept them prisoners in deep pits below the crater lips, and awful
inarticulate noises of human pain coming out of that lower darkness
beyond the light of the rockets, made up a chorus of agony more than
our men could endure, even in the heat of battle. They shouted across
to the German grenadiers:

"We will cease fire if you will, and let you get in your wounded. . .
Cease fire for the wounded!"

The shout was repeated, and our bombers held their hands, still
waiting for an answer. But the answer was a new storm of bombs, and
the fighting went on, and the moaning of the men who were helpless and
unhelped.

Working-parties followed up the assault to "consolidate" the position.
They did amazing things, toiling in the darkness under abominable
shell-fire, and by daylight had built communication trenches with
head-cover from the crater lips to our front-line trenches.

But now it was the enemy's turn--the turn of his guns, which poured
explosive fire into those pits, churning up the earth again, mixing it
with new flesh and blood, and carving up his own dead; and it was the
turn of his bombers, who followed this fire in strong assaults upon
the Lancashire lads, who, lying among their killed and wounded, had to
repel those fierce attacks.

On May 17th I went to see General Doran of the 25th Division, an
optimistic old gentleman who took a bright view of things, and Colonel
Crosby, who was acting--brigadier of the 74th Brigade, which had made
the attack. He, too, was enthusiastic about the situation, though his
brigade had suffered eight hundred casualties in a month of routine
warfare.

In my simple way I asked him a direct question:

"Do you think your men can hold on to the craters, sir?"

Colonel Crosby stared at me sternly.

"Certainly. The position cannot be retaken overground. We hold it
strongly."

As he spoke an orderly came into his billet (a small farmhouse),
saluted, and handed him a pink slip, which was a telephone message. I
watched him read it, and saw the sudden pallor of his face, and
noticed how the room shook with the constant reverberation of distant
gun-fire. A big bombardment was in progress over Vimy way.

"Excuse me," said the colonel; "things seem to be happening. I must go
at once."

He went through the window, leaping the sill, and a look of bad
tidings went with him.

His men had been blown out of the craters.

A staff officer sat in the brigade office, and when the acting-
brigadier had gone raised his head and looked across to me.

"I am a critic of these affairs," he said. "They seem to me too
expensive. But I'm here to do what I am told."

We did not regain the Vimy craters until a year afterward, when the
Canadians and Scottish captured all the Vimy Ridge in a great assault.

XX

The winter of discontent had passed. Summer had come with a wealth of
beauty in the fields of France this side the belt of blasted earth.
The grass was a tapestry of flowers, and tits and warblers and the
golden oriole were making music in the woods. At dusk the nightingale
sang as though no war were near its love, and at broad noonday a
million larks rose above the tall wheat with a great high chorus of
glad notes.

Among the British armies there was hope again, immense faith that
believed once more in an ending to the war. Verdun had been saved. The
enemy had been slaughtered. His reserves were thin and hard to get (so
said Intelligence) and the British, stronger than they had ever been,
in men, and guns, and shells, and aircraft, and all material of war,
were going to be launched in a great offensive. No more trench
warfare. No more dying in ditches. Out into the open, with an Army of
Pursuit (Rawlinson's) and a quick break-through. It was to be "The
Great Push." The last battles were to be fought before the year died
again, though many men would die before that time.

Up in the salient something happened to make men question the weakness
of the enemy, but the news did not spread very far and there was a lot
to do elsewhere, on the Somme, where the salient seemed a long way
off. It was the Canadians to whom it happened, and it was an ugly
thing.

On June 2d a flame of fire from many batteries opened upon their lines
in Sanctuary Wood and Maple Copse, beyond the lines of Ypres, and
tragedy befell them. I went to see those who lived through it and
stood in the presence of men who had escaped from the very pits of
that hell which had been invented by human beings out of the earth's
chemistry, and yet had kept their reason.

The enemy's bombardment began suddenly, with one great crash of guns,
at half past eight on Friday morning. Generals Mercer and Williams had
gone up to inspect the trenches at six o'clock in the morning.

It had been almost silent along the lines when the enemy's batteries
opened fire with one enormous thunderstroke, which was followed by
continuous salvos. The shells came from nearly every point of the
compass--north, east, and south. The evil spell of the salient was
over our men again.

In the trenches just south of Hooge were the Princess Patricia's Light
Infantry, with some battalions of the Royal Canadian Regiment south of
them, and some of the Canadian Mounted Rifles (who had long been
dismounted), and units from another Canadian division at said
Intelligence) and the British, stronger than they had ever been, in
men, and guns, and shells, and aircraft, and all material of war, were
going to be launched in a great offensive. No more trench warfare. No
more dying in ditches. Out into the open, with an Army of Pursuit
(Rawlinson's) and a quick break-through. It was to be "The Great
Push." The last battles were to be fought before the year died again,
though many men would die before that time.

Up in the salient something happened to make men question the weakness
of the enemy, but the news did not spread very far and there was a lot
to do elsewhere, on the Somme, where the salient seemed a long way
off. It was the Canadians to whom it happened, and it was an ugly
thing.

On June 2nd a flame of fire from many batteries opened upon their
lines in Sanctuary Wood and Maple Copse, beyond the lines of Ypres,
and tragedy befell them. I went to see those who lived through it and
stood in the presence of men who had escaped from the very pits of
that hell which had been invented by human beings out of the earth's
chemistry, and yet had kept their reason.

The enemy's bombardment began suddenly, with one great crash of guns,
at half past eight on Friday morning. Generals Mercer and Williams had
gone up to inspect the trenches at six o'clock in the morning.

It had been almost silent along the lines when the enemy's batteries
opened fire with one enormous thunderstroke, which was followed by
continuous salvos. The shells came from nearly every point of the
compass--north, east, and south. The evil spell of the salient was
over our men again.

In the trenches just south of Hooge were the Princess Patricia's Light
Infantry, with some battalions of the Royal Canadian Regiment south of
them, and some of the Canadian Mounted Rifles (who had long been
dismounted), and units from another Canadian division at says one of
his comrades--as he fired his revolver and then flung it into a
German's face.

Colonel Shaw of the 1st Battalion, C.M.R., rallied eighty men out of
the Cumberland dugouts, and died fighting. The Germans were kept at
bay for some time, but they flung their bombs into the square of men,
so that very few remained alive. When only eight were still fighting
among the bodies of their comrades these tattered and blood-splashed
men, standing there fiercely contemptuous of the enemy and death, were
ordered to retire by Major Palmer, the last officer among them.

Meanwhile the battalions in support were holding firm in spite of the
shell-fire, which raged above them also, and it was against this
second line of Canadians that the German infantry came up--and broke.

In the center the German thrust was hard toward Zillebeke Lake. Here
some of the Canadian Rifles were in support, and as soon as the
infantry attack began they were ordered forward to meet and check the
enemy. An officer in command of one of their battalions afterward told
me that he led his men across country to Maple Copse under such a fire
as he had never seen. Because of the comrades in front, in dire need
of help, no notice was taken as the wounded fell, but the others
pressed on as fast as they could go.

Maple Copse was reached, and here the men halted and awaited the enemy
with another battalion who were already holding this wood of six or
seven acres. When the German troops arrived they may have expected to
meet no great resistance. They met a withering fire, which caused them
bloody losses. The Canadians had assembled at various points, which
became strongholds of defense with machine-guns and bomb stores, and
the men held their fire until the enemy was within close range, so
that they worked havoc among them. But the German guns never ceased
and many Canadians fell. Col. E. H. Baker, a member of the Canadian
Parliament, fell with a piece of shell in his lung.

Hour after hour our gunners fed their breeches and poured out shells.
The edge of the salient was swept with fire, and, though the Canadian
losses were frightful, the Germans suffered also, so that the
battlefield was one great shambles. Our own wounded, who were brought
back, owe their lives to the stretcher-bearers, who were supreme in
devotion. They worked in and out across that shell-swept ground hour
after hour through the day and night, rescuing many stricken men at a
great cost in life to themselves. Out of one party of twenty only five
remained alive. "No one can say," said one of their officers, "that
the Canadians do not know how to die."

No one would deny that.

Out of three thousand men in the Canadian 8th Brigade their casualties
were twenty-two hundred.

There were 151 survivors from the 1st Battalion Canadian Mounted
Rifles, 130 from the 4th Battalion, 350 from the 5th, 520 from the
2nd. Those are the figures of massacre.

Eleven days later the Canadians took their revenge. Their own guns
were but a small part of the huge orchestra of "heavies" and field
batteries which played the devil's tattoo upon the German positions in
our old trenches. It was annihilating, and the German soldiers had to
endure the same experience as their guns had given to Canadian troops
on the same ground. Trenches already battered were smashed again. The
earth, which was plowed with shells in their own attack, was flung up
again by our shells. It was hell again for poor human wretches.

The Canadian troops charged at two o'clock in the morning. Their
attack was directed to the part of the line from the southern end of
Sanctuary Wood to Mount Gorst, about a mile, which included Armagh
Wood, Observatory Hill, and Mount Gorst itself.

The attack went quickly and the men expected greater trouble. The
enemy's shell-fire was heavy, but the Canadians got through under
cover of their own guns, which had lengthened their fuses a little and
continued an intense bombardment behind the enemy's first line. The
men advanced in open order and worked downward and southward into
their old positions.

In one place of attack about forty Germans, who fought desperately,
were killed almost to a man, just as Colonel Shaw had died on June 2d
with his party of eighty men who had rallied round him. It was one
shambles for another, and the Germans were not less brave, it seems.

One officer and one hundred and thirteen men surrendered. The officer
was glad to escape from the death to which he had resigned himself
when our bombardment began.

"I knew how it would be," he said. "We had orders to take this ground,
and took it; but we knew you would come back again. You had to do so.
So here I am."

Parts of the line were deserted, except by the dead. In one place the
stores which had been buried by the Canadians before they left were
still there, untouched by the enemy. Our bombardment had made it
impossible for his troops to consolidate their position and to hold
the line steady.

They had just taken cover in the old bits of trench, in shell-holes
and craters, and behind scattered sand-bags, and had been pounded
there. The Canadians were back again.

PART FIVE

The Heart of a City

AMIENS IN TIME OF WAR

I

During the battles of the Somme in 1916, and afterward in periods of
progress and retreat over the abominable fields, the city of Amiens
was the capital of the British army. When the battles began in July of
that year it was only a short distance away from the fighting-lines;
near enough to hear the incessant roar of gun-fire on the French front
and ours, and near enough to get, by motor-car or lorry, in less than
thirty minutes, to places where men were being killed or maimed or
blinded in the routine of the day's work. One went out past Amiens
station and across a little stone bridge which afterward, in the
enemy's advance of 1918, became the mark for German high velocities
along the road to Querrieux, where Rawlinson had his headquarters of
the Fourth Army in an old chateau with pleasant meadows round it and a
stream meandering through fields of buttercups in summer-time. Beyond
the dusty village of Querrieux with its white cottages, from which the
plaster fell off in blotches as the war went on, we went along the
straight highroad to Albert, through the long and straggling village
of Lahoussoye, where Scottish soldiers in reserve lounged about among
frowsy peasant women and played solemn games with "the bairns"; and
so, past camps and hutments on each side of the road, to the ugly red-
brick town where the Golden Virgin hung head downward from the broken
tower of the church with her Babe outstretched above the fields of
death as though as a peace-offering to this world at war.

One could be killed any day in Albert. I saw men blown to bits there
the clay after the battles of the Somme began. It was in the road that
turned to the right, past the square to go to Meaulte and on to
Fricourt. There was a tide of gun transport swirling down the road,
bringing up new ammunition for the guns that were firing without a
pause over Fricourt and Mametz. The high scream of a shell came
through a blue sky and ended on its downward note with a sharp crash.
For a few minutes the transport column was held up while a mass of raw
flesh which a second before had been two living men and their horses
was cleared out of the way. Then the gun wagons went at a harder pace
down the road, raising a cloud of white dust out of which I heard the
curses of the drivers, swearing in a foul way to disguise their fear.

I went through Albert many scores of times to the battlefields beyond,
and watched its process of disintegration through those years, until
it was nothing but a wild scrap heap of read brick and twisted iron,
and, in the last phase, even the Golden Virgin and her Babe, which had
seemed to escape all shell-fire by miraculous powers, lay buried
beneath a mass of masonry. Beyond were the battlefields of the Somme
where every yard of ground is part of the great graveyard of our
youth.

So Amiens, as I have said, was not far away from the red heart of war,
and was clear enough to the lines to be crowded always with officers
and men who came out between one battle and another, and by "lorry-
jumping" could reach this city for a few hours of civilized life,
according to their views of civilization. To these men--boys, mostly--
who had been living in lousy ditches under hell fire, Amiens was
Paradise, with little hells for those who liked them. There were
hotels in which they could go get a bath, if they waited long enough
or had the luck to be early on the list. There were streets of shops
with plate-glass windows unbroken, shining, beautiful. There were
well-dressed women walking about, with kind eyes, and children as
dainty, some of them, as in High Street, Kensington, or Prince's
Street, Edinburgh. Young officers, who had plenty of money to spend--
because there was no chance of spending money between a row of blasted
trees and a ditch in which bits of dead men were plastered into the
parapet--invaded the shops and bought fancy soaps, razors, hair-oil,
stationery, pocketbooks, knives, flash-lamps, top-boots (at a fabulous
price), khaki shirts and collars, gramophone records, and the latest
set of Kirchner prints. It was the delight of spending, rather than
the joy of possessing, which made them go from one shop to another in
search of things they could carry hack to the line--that and the lure
of girls behind the counters, laughing, bright-eyed girls who
understood their execrable French, even English spoken with a Glasgow
accent, and were pleased to flirt for five minutes with any group of
young fighting-men--who broke into roars of laughter at the gallantry
of some Don Juan among them with the gift of audacity, and paid
outrageous prices for the privilege of stammering out some foolish
sentiment in broken French, blushing to the roots of their hair
(though captains and heroes) at their own temerity with a girl who, in
another five minutes, would play the same part in the same scene with
a different group of boys.

I used to marvel at the patience of these girls. How bored they must
have been with all this flirtation, which led to nothing except,
perhaps, the purchase of a bit of soap at twice its proper price! They
knew that these boys would leave to go back to the trenches in a few
hours and that some of them would certainly be dead in a few days.
There could be no romantic episode, save of a transient kind, between
them and these good-looking lads in whose eyes there were desire and
hunger, because to them the plainest girl was Womanhood, the sweet,
gentle, and feminine side of life, as opposed to the cruelty,
brutality, and ugliness of war and death. The shopgirls of Amiens had
no illusions. They had lived too long in war not to know the
realities. They knew the risks of transient love and they were not
taking them--unless conditions were very favorable. They attended
strictly to business and hoped to make a lot of money in the shop, and
were, I think, mostly good girls--as virtuous as life in war-time may
let girls be--wise beyond their years, and with pity behind their
laughter for these soldiers who tried to touch their hands over the
counters, knowing that many of them were doomed to die for France and
England. They had their own lovers--boys in blue somewhere between
Vaux-sur-Somme and Hartmanns--weilerkopf--and apart from occasional
intimacies with English officers quartered in Amiens for long spells,
left the traffic of passion to other women who walked the streets.

II

The Street of the Three Pebbles--la rue des Trois Cailloux--which goes
up from the station through the heart of Amiens, was the crowded
highway. Here were the best shops--the hairdresser, at the left-hand
side, where all day long officers down from the line came in to have
elaborate luxury in the way of close crops with friction d'eau de
quinine, shampooing, singeing, oiling, not because of vanity, but
because of the joyous sense of cleanliness and perfume after the filth
and stench of life in the desolate fields; then the booksellers'
(Madame Carpentier et fille) on the right-hand side, which was not
only the rendezvous of the miscellaneous crowd buying stationery and
La Vie Parisienne, but of the intellectuals who spoke good French and
bought good books and liked ten minutes' chat with the mother and
daughter. (Madame was an Alsatian lady with vivid memories of I870,
when, as a child, she had first learned to hate Germans.) She hated
them now with a fresh, vital hatred, and would have seen her own son
dead a hundred times--he was a soldier in Saloniki--rather than that
France should make a compromise peace with the enemy. She had been in
Amiens, as I was, on a dreadful night of August of 1914, when the
French army passed through in retreat from Bapaume, and she and the
people of her city knew for the first time that the Germans were close
upon them. She stood in the crowd as I did--in the darkness, watching
that French column pass with their transport, and their wounded lying
on the baggage wagons, men of many regiments mixed up, the light of
the street lamps shining on the casques of cuirassiers with their long
horsehair tails, leading their stumbling horses, and foot soldiers,
hunched under their packs, marching silently with dragging steps. Once
in a while one of the soldiers left the ranks and came on to the
sidewalk, whispering to a group of dark shadows. The crowds watched
silently, in a curious, dreadful silence, as though stunned. A woman
near me spoke in a low voice, and said, "Nous sommes perdus!" Those
were the only words I heard or remembered.

That night in the station of Amiens the boys of a new class were being
hurried away in truck trains, and while their army was in retreat sang
"La Marseillaise," as though victory were in their hearts. Next day
the German army under von Kluck entered Amiens, and ten days afterward
passed through it on the way to Paris. Madame Carpentier told me of
the first terror of the people when the field-gray men came down the
Street of the Three Pebbles and entered their shops. A boy selling
oranges fainted when a German stretched out his hand to buy some.
Women hid behind their counters when German boots stamped into their
shops. But Madame Carpentier was not afraid. She knew the Germans and
their language. She spoke frank words to German officers, who saluted
her respectfully enough. "You will never get to Paris. . . France and
England will be too strong for you. . . Germany will be destroyed
before this war ends." They laughed at her and said: "We shall be in
Paris in a week from now. Have you a little diary, Madame?" Madame
Carpentier was haughty with them. Some women of Amiens--poor drabs--
did not show any haughtiness, nor any pride, with the enemy who
crowded into the city on their way toward Paris. A girl told me that
she was looking through the window of a house that faced the Place de
la Gare, and saw a number of German soldiers dancing round a piano-
organ which was playing to them. They were dancing with women of the
town, who were laughing and screeching in the embrace of big, blond
Germans. The girl who was watching was only a schoolgirl then. She
knew very little of the evil of life, but enough to know that there
was something in this scene degrading to womanhood and to France. She
turned from the window and flung herself on her bed and wept
bitterly. . .

I used to call in at the bookshop for a chat now and then with Madame
and Mademoiselle Carpentier, while a crowd of officers came in and
out. Madame was always merry and bright in spite of her denunciations
of the "Sale Boches--les brigands, les bandits!" and Mademoiselle put
my knowledge of French to a severe but pleasant test. She spoke with
alarming rapidity, her words tumbling over one another in a cascade of
volubility delightful to hear but difficult to follow. She had a
strong mind--masterly in her methods of business--so that she could
serve six customers at once and make each one think that her attention
was entirely devoted to his needs--and a very shrewd and critical idea
of military strategy and organization. She had but a poor opinion of
British generals and generalship, although a wholehearted admiration
for the gallantry of British officers and men; and she had an intimate
knowledge of our preparations, plans, failures, and losses. French
liaison-officers confided to her the secrets of the British army; and
English officers trusted her with many revelations of things "in the
wind." But Mademoiselle Carpentier had discretion and loyalty and did
not repeat these things to people who had no right to know. She would
have been far more efficient as a staff officer than many of the young
gentlemen with red tabs on their tunics who came into the shop,
flipping beautiful top-boots with riding-crops, sitting on the
counter, and turning over the pages of La Vie for the latest
convention in ladies' legs.