Books: Now It Can Be Told

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"Nous les aurons les sales Boches! Ah, ils sont foutus, ces bandits!
C'est la victoire, grace a vous, petits soldats anglais!"

Victory! The spirit of victory in the hearts of fighting men, and of
women excited by the sight of those bandaged heads, those bare, brawny
arms splashed with blood, those laughing heroes.

It looked like victory, in those days, as war correspondents, we were
not so expert in balancing the profit and loss as afterward we became.
When I went into Fricourt on the third day of battle, after the last
Germans, who had clung on to its ruins, had been cleared out by the
Yorkshires and Lincolns of the 21st Division, that division which had
been so humiliated at Loos and now was wonderful in courage, and when
the Manchesters and Gordons of the 30th Division had captured
Montauban and repulsed fierce counter-attacks.

It looked like victory, because of the German dead that lay there in
their battered trenches and the filth and stench of death over all
that mangled ground, and the enormous destruction wrought by our guns,
and the fury of fire which we were still pouring over the enemy's
lines from batteries which had moved forward.

I went down flights of steps into German dugouts, astonished by their
depth and strength. Our men did not build like this. This German
industry was a rebuke to us, yet we had captured their work and the
dead bodies of their laborers lay in those dark caverns, killed by our
bombers, who had flung down handgrenades. I drew back from those fat
corpses. They looked monstrous, lying there crumpled up, amid a foul
litter of clothes, stickbombs, old boots, and bottles. Groups of dead
lay in ditches which had once been trenches, flung into chaos by that
bombardment I had seen. They had been bayoneted. I remember one man,
an elderly fellow sitting up with his back to a bit of earth with his
hands half raised. He was smiling a little, though he had been stabbed
through the belly and was stone dead. Victory! some of the German dead
were young boys, too young to be killed for old men's crimes, and
others might have been old or young. One could not tell, because they
had no faces, and were just masses of raw flesh in rags and uniforms.
Legs and arms lay separate, without any bodies thereabouts.

Outside Montauban there was a heap of our own dead. Young Gordons and
Manchesters of the 30th Division, they had been caught by blasts of
machinegun fire, but our dead seemed scarce in the places where I
walked.

Victory? Well, we had gained some ground, and many prisoners, and
here and there some guns. But as I stood by Montauban I saw that our
line was a sharp salient looped round Mametz village and then dipping
sharply southward to Fricourt. 0 God! had we only made another salient
after all that monstrous effort? To the left there was fury at La
Boisselle, where a few broken trees stood black on the skyline on a
chalky ridge. Storms of German shrapnel were bursting there, and
machineguns were firing in spasms. In Contalmaison, round a chateau
which stood high above ruined houses, shells were bursting with
thunderclaps, our shells. German gunners in invisible batteries were
sweeping our lines with barrage fire, it roamed up and down this side
of Montauban Wood, just ahead of me, and now and then shells smashed
among the houses and barns of Fricourt, and over Mametz there was
suddenly a hurricane of "hate." Our men were working like ants in
those muck heaps, a battalion moved up toward Boisselle. From a ridge
above Fricourt, where once I had seen a tall crucifix between two
trees, which our men called the "Poodles," a body of men came down and
shrapnel burst among them and they fell and disappeared in tall grass.
Stretcher bearers came slowly through Fricourt village with living
burdens. Some of them were German soldiers carrying our wounded and
their own. Walking wounded hobbled slowly with their arms round each
other's shoulders, Germans and English together. A boy in a steel hat
stopped me and held up a bloody hand. "A bit of luck!" he said. "I'm
off, after eighteen months of it."

German prisoners came down with a few English soldiers as their
escort. I saw distant groups of them, and a shell smashed into one
group and scattered it. The living ran, leaving their dead. Ambulances
driven by daring fellows drove to the far edge of Fricourt, not a
healthy place, and loaded up with wounded from a dressing station in a
tunnel there.

It was a wonderful picture of war in all its filth and shambles. But
was it Victory? I knew then that it was only a breach in the German
bastion, and that on the left, Gommecourt way, there had been black
tragedy.

VIII

On the left, where the 8th and l0th Corps were directing operations,
the assault had been delivered by the 4th, 29th, 36th, 49th, 32nd,
8th, and 56th Divisions.

The positions in front of them were Gommecourt and Beaumont Hamel on
the left side of the River Ancre, and Thiepval Wood on the right side
of the Ancre leading up to Thiepval Chateau on the crest of the cliff.
These were the hardest positions to attack, because of the rising
ground and the immense strength of the enemy's earthworks and tunneled
defenses. But our generals were confident that the gun power at their
disposal was sufficient to smash down that defensive system and make
an easy way through for the infantry. They were wrong. In spite of
that tornado of shell-fire which I had seen tearing up the earth, many
tunnels were still unbroken, and out of them came masses of German
machine-gunners and riflemen, when our infantry rose from their own
trenches on that morning of July 1st.

Our guns had shifted their barrage forward at that moment, farther
ahead of the infantry than was afterward allowed, the men being
trained to follow close to the lines of bursting shells, trained to
expect a number of casualties from their own guns--it needs some
training--in order to secure the general safety gained by keeping the
enemy below ground until our bayonets were round his dugouts.

The Germans had been trained, too, to an act of amazing courage. Their
discipline, that immense power of discipline which dominates men in
the mass, was strong enough to make them obey the order to rush
through that barrage of ours, that advancing wall of explosion and, if
they lived through it, to face our men in the open with massed
machine-gun fire. So they did; and as English, Irish, Scottish, and
Welsh battalions of our assaulting divisions trudged forward over what
had been No Man's Land, machine-gun bullets sprayed upon them, and
they fell like grass to the scythe. Line after line of men followed
them, and each line crumpled, and only small groups and single
figures, seeking comradeship, hurried forward. German machine-gunners
were bayoneted as their thumbs were still pressed to their triggers.
In German front-line trenches at the bottom of Thiepval Wood, outside
Beaumont Hamel and on the edge of Gommecourt Park, the field-gray men
who came out of their dugouts fought fiercely with stick-bombs and
rifles, and our officers and men, in places where they had strength
enough, clubbed them to death, stuck them with bayonets, and blew
their brains out with revolvers at short range. Then those English and
Irish and Scottish troops, grievously weak because of all the dead and
wounded behind them, struggled through to the second German line, from
which there came a still fiercer rattle of machine-gun and rifle-fire.
Some of them broke through that line, too, and went ahead in isolated
parties across the wild crater land, over chasms and ditches and
fallen trees, toward the highest ground, which had been their goal.
Nothing was seen of them. They disappeared into clouds of smoke and
flame. Gunner observers saw rockets go up in far places--our rockets--
showing that outposts had penetrated into the German lines. Runners
came back--survivors of many predecessors who had fallen on the way--
with scribbled messages from company officers. One came from the Essex
and King's Own of the 4th Division, at a place called Pendant Copse,
southeast of Serre. "For God's sake send us bombs." It was impossible
to send them bombs. No men could get to them through the deep barrage
of shell-fire which was between them and our supporting troops. Many
tried and died.

The Ulster men went forward toward Beaumont Hamel with a grim valor
which was reckless of their losses. Beaumont Hamel was a German
fortress. Machine-gun fire raked every yard of the Ulster way.
Hundreds of the Irish fell. I met hundreds of them wounded--tall,
strong, powerful men, from Queen's Island and Belfast factories, and
Tyneside Irish and Tyneside Scots.

"They gave us no chance," said one of them--a sergeant-major. "They
just murdered us."

But bunches of them went right into the heart of the German positions,
and then found behind them crowds of Germans who had come up out of
their tunnels and flung bombs at them. Only a few came back alive in
the darkness.

Into Thiepval Wood men of ours smashed their way through the German
trenches, not counting those who fell, and killing any German who
stood in their way. Inside that wood of dead trees and charred
branches they reformed, astonished at the fewness of their numbers.
Germans coming up from holes in the earth attacked them, and they held
firm and took two hundred prisoners. Other Germans came closing in
like wolves, in packs, and to a German officer who said, "Surrender!"
our men shouted, "No surrender!" and fought in Thiepval Wood until
most were dead and only a few wounded crawled out to tell that tale.

The Londoners of the 56th Division had no luck at all. Theirs was the
worst luck because, by a desperate courage in assault, they did break
through the German lines at Gommecourt. Their left was held by the
London Rifle Brigade. The Rangers and the Queen Victoria Rifles--the
old "Vics "--formed their center. Their right was made up by the
London Scottish, and behind came the Queen's Westminsters and the
Kensingtons, who were to advance through their comrades to a farther
objective. Across a wide No Man's Land they suffered from the bursting
of heavy crumps, and many fell. But they escaped annihilation by
machine-gun fire and stormed through the upheaved earth into
Gommecourt Park, killing many Germans and sending back batches of
prisoners. They had done what they had been asked to do, and started
building up barricades of earth and sand-bags, and then found they
were in a death-trap. There were no troops on their right or left.
They had thrust out into a salient, which presently the enemy saw. The
German gunners, with deadly skill, boxed it round with shell-fire, so
that the Londoners were inclosed by explosive walls, and then very
slowly and carefully drew a line of bursting shells up and down, up
and down that captured ground, ravaging its earth anew and smashing
the life that crouched there--London life.

I have written elsewhere (in The Battles of the Somme) how young
officers and small bodies of these London men held the barricades
against German attacks while others tried to break a way back through
that murderous shell-fire, and how groups of lads who set out on that
adventure to their old lines were shattered so that only a few from
each group crawled back alive, wounded or unwounded.

At the end of the day the Germans acted with chivalry, which I was not
allowed to tell at the time. The general of the London Division
(Philip Howell) told me that the enemy sent over a message by a low-
flying airplane, proposing a truce while the stretcher-bearers worked,
and offering the service of their own men in that work of mercy. This
offer was accepted without reference to G.H.Q., and German stretcher-
bearers helped to carry our wounded to a point where they could be
reached.

Many, in spite of that, remained lying out in No Man's Land, some for
three or four days and nights. I met one man who lay out there
wounded, with a group of comrades more badly hurt than he was, until
July 6th. At night he crawled over to the bodies of the dead and took
their water-bottles and "iron" rations, and so brought drink and food
to his stricken friends. Then at last he made his way through roving
shells to our lines and even then asked to lead the stretcher-bearers
who volunteered on a search-party for his "pals."

"Physical courage was very common in the war," said a friend of mine
who saw nothing of war. "It is proved that physical courage is the
commonest quality of mankind, as moral courage is the rarest." But
that soldier's courage was spiritual, and there were many like him in
the battles of the Somme and in other later battles as tragic as
those.

IX

I have told how, before "The Big Push," as we called the beginning of
these battles, little towns of tents were built under the sign of the
Red Cross. For a time they were inhabited only by medical officers,
nurses, and orderlies, busily getting ready for a sudden invasion, and
spending their surplus energy, which seemed inexhaustible, on the
decoration of their camps by chalk-lined paths, red crosses painted on
canvas or built up in red and white chalk on leveled earth, and
flowers planted outside the tents--all very pretty and picturesque in
the sunshine and the breezes over the valley of the Somme.

On the morning of battle the doctors, nurses, and orderlies waited for
their patients and said, "Now we shan't be long!" They were merry and
bright with that wonderful cheerfulness which enabled them to face the
tragedy of mangled manhood without horror, and almost, it seemed,
without pity, because it was their work, and they were there to heal
what might be healed. It was with a rush that their first cases came,
and the M.O.'s whistled and said, "Ye gods! how many more?" Many more.
The tide did not slacken. It became a spate brought down by waves of
ambulances. Three thousand wounded came to Daours on the Somme, three
thousand to Corbie, thousands to Dernancourt, Heilly, Puchevillers,
Toutencourt, and many other "clearing stations."

At Daours the tents were filled to overflowing, until there was no
more room. The wounded were laid down on the grass to wait their turn
for the surgeon's knife. Some of them crawled over to haycocks and
covered themselves with hay and went to sleep, as I saw them sleeping
there, like dead men. Here and there shell-shocked boys sat weeping or
moaning, and shaking with an ague. Most of the wounded were quiet and
did not give any groan or moan. The lightly wounded sat in groups,
telling their adventures, cursing the German machine-gunners. Young
officers spoke in a different way, and with that sporting spirit which
they had learned in public schools praised their enemy.

"The machine-gunners are wonderful fellows--topping. Fight until
they're killed. They gave us hell."

Each man among those thousands of wounded had escaped death a dozen
times or more by the merest flukes of luck. It was this luck of theirs
which they hugged with a kind of laughing excitement.

"It's a marvel I'm here! That shell burst all round me. Killed six of
my pals. I've got through with a blighty wound. No bones broken. . .
God! What luck!"

The death of other men did not grieve them. They could not waste this
sense of luck in pity. The escape of their own individuality, this
possession of life, was a glorious thought. They were alive! What
luck! What luck!

We called the hospital at Corbie the "Butcher's Shop." It was in a
pretty spot in that little town with a big church whose tall white
towers looked down a broad sweep of the Somme, so that for miles they
were a landmark behind the battlefields. Behind the lines during those
first battles, but later, in 1918, when the enemy came nearly to the
gates of Amiens, a stronghold of the Australians, who garrisoned it
and sniped pigeons for their pots off the top of the towers, and took
no great notice of "whizz-bangs" which broke through the roofs of
cottages and barns. It was a safe, snug place in July of '16, but that
Butcher's Shop at a corner of the square was not a pretty spot. After
a visit there I had to wipe cold sweat from my forehead, and found
myself trembling in a queer way. It was the medical officer--a
colonel--who called it that name. "This is our Butcher's Shop," he
said, cheerily. "Come and have a look at my cases. They're the worst
possible; stomach wounds, compound fractures, and all that. We lop off
limbs here all day long, and all night. You've no idea!"

I had no idea, but I did not wish to see its reality. The M.O. could
not understand my reluctance to see his show. He put it down to my
desire to save his time--and explained that he was going the rounds
and would take it as a favor if I would walk with him. I yielded
weakly, and cursed myself for not taking to flight. Yet, I argued,
what men are brave enough to suffer I ought to have the courage to
see. . . I saw and sickened.

These were the victims of "Victory" and the red fruit of war's
harvest-fields. A new batch of "cases" had just arrived. More were
being brought in on stretchers. They were laid down in rows on the
floor-boards. The colonel bent down to some of them and drew their
blankets back, and now and then felt a man's pulse. Most of them were
unconscious, breathing with the hard snuffle of dying men. Their skin
was already darkening to the death-tint, which is not white. They were
all plastered with a gray clay and this mud on their faces was, in
some cases, mixed with thick clots of blood, making a hard
incrustation from scalp to chin.

"That fellow won't last long," said the M. O., rising from a
stretcher. "Hardly a heart-beat left in him. Sure to die on the
operating-table if he gets as far as that. . . Step back against the
wall a minute, will you?"

We flattened ourselves against the passage wall while ambulance-men
brought in a line of stretchers. No sound came from most of those
bundles under the blankets, but from one came a long, agonizing wail,
the cry of an animal in torture.

"Come through the wards," said the colonel. "They're pretty bright,
though we could do with more space and light."

In one long, narrow room there were about thirty beds, and in each bed
lay a young British soldier, or part of a young British soldier. There
was not much left of one of them. Both his legs had been amputated to
the thigh, and both his arms to the shoulder-blades.

"Remarkable man, that," said the colonel. "Simply refuses to die. His
vitality is so tremendous that it is putting up a terrific fight
against mortality. . . There's another case of the same kind; one leg
gone and the other going, and one arm. Deliberate refusal to give in.
'You're not going to kill me, doctor,' he said. 'I'm going to stick it
through.' What spirit, eh?"

I spoke to that man. He was quite conscious, with bright eyes. His
right leg was uncovered, and supported on a board hung from the
ceiling. Its flesh was like that of a chicken badly carved-white,
flabby, and in tatters. He thought I was a surgeon, and spoke to me
pleadingly:

"I guess you can save that leg, sir. It's doing fine. I should hate to
lose it."

I murmured something about a chance for it, and the M. O. broke in
cheerfully.

"You won't lose it if I can help it. How's your pulse? Oh, not bad.
Keep cheerful and we'll pull you through." The man smiled gallantly.

"Bound to come off," said the doctor as we passed to another bed. "Gas
gangrene. That's the thing that does us down."

In bed after bed I saw men of ours, very young men, who had been
lopped of limbs a few hours ago or a few minutes, some of them
unconscious, some of them strangely and terribly conscious, with a
look in their eyes as though staring at the death which sat near to
them, and edged nearer.

"Yes," said the M. O., "they look bad, some of 'em, but youth is on
their side. I dare say seventy-five per cent. will get through. If it
wasn't for gas gangrene--"

He jerked his head to a boy sitting up in bed, smiling at the nurse
who felt his pulse.

"Looks fairly fit after the knife, doesn't he? But we shall have to
cut higher up. The gas again. I'm afraid he'll be dead before to-
morrow. Come into the operating-theater. It's very well equipped."

I refused that invitation. I walked stiffly out of the Butcher's Shop
of Corbie past the man who had lost both arms and both legs, that
vital trunk, past rows of men lying under blankets, past a stench of
mud and blood and anesthetics, to the fresh air of the gateway, where
a column of ambulances had just arrived with a new harvest from the
fields of the Somme.

"Come in again, any time!" shouted out the cheery colonel, waving his
hand.

I never went again, though I saw many other Butcher's Shops in the
years that followed, where there was a great carving of human flesh
which was of our boyhood, while the old men directed their sacrifice,
and the profiteers grew rich, and the fires of hate were stoked up at
patriotic banquets and in editorial chairs.

X

The failure on the left hardly balanced by the partial success on the
right caused a sudden pause in the operations, camouflaged by small
attacks on minor positions around and above Fricourt and Mametz. The
Lincolns and others went over to Fricourt Wood and routed out German
machine-gunners. The West Yorks attacked the sunken road at Fricourt.
The Dorsets, Manchesters, Highland Light Infantry, Lancashire
Fusiliers, and Borderers of the 32d Division were in possession of La
Boisselle and clearing out communication trenches to which the Germans
were hanging on with desperate valor. The 21st Division--
Northumberland Fusiliers, Durhams, Yorkshires-were making a flanking
attack on Contalmaison, but weakened after their heavy losses on the
first day of battle. The fighting for a time was local, in small
copses--Lozenge Wood, Peak Wood, Caterpillar Wood, Acid Drop Copse--
where English and German troops fought ferociously for yards of
ground, hummocks of earth, ditches.

G. H. Q. had been shocked by the disaster on the left and the failure
of all the big hopes they had held for a break-through on both sides
of the German positions. Rumors came to us that the Commander-in-Chief
had decided to restrict future operations to minor actions for
strengthening the line and to abandon the great offensive. It was
believed by officers I met that Sir Henry Rawlinson was arguing,
persuading, in favor of continued assaults on the grand scale.

Whatever division of opinion existed in the High Command I do not
know; it was visible to all of us that for some days there were
uncertainty of direction, hesitation, conflicting orders. On July 7th
the 17th Division, under General Pilcher, attacked Contalmaison, and a
whole battalion of the Prussian Guard hurried up from Valenciennes
and, thrown on to the battlefield without maps or guidance, walked
into the barrage which covered the advance of our men and were almost
annihilated. But although some bodies of our men entered Contalmaison,
in an attack which I was able to see, they were smashed out of it
again by storms of fire followed by masses of men who poured out from
Mametz Wood. The Welsh were attacking Mametz Wood.

They were handled, as Marbot said of his men in a Napoleonic battle,
"like turnips." Battalion commanders received orders in direct
conflict with one another. Bodies of Welshmen were advanced, and then
retired, and left to lie nakedly without cover, under dreadful fire.
The 17th Division, under General Pilcher, did not attack at the
expected time. There was no co-ordination of divisions; no knowledge
among battalion officers of the strategy or tactics of a battle in
which their men were involved.

"Goodness knows what's happening," said an officer I met near Mametz.
He had been waiting all night and half a day with a body of troops who
had expected to go forward, and were still hanging about under
harassing fire.

On July 9th Contalmaison was taken. I saw that attack very clearly, so
clearly that I could almost count the bricks in the old chateau set in
a little wood, and saw the left-hand tower knocked off by the direct
hit of a fifteen-inch shell. At four o'clock in the afternoon our guns
concentrated on the village, and under the cover of that fire our men
advanced on three sides of it, hemmed it in, and captured it with the
garrison of the 122d Bavarian Regiment, who had suffered the agonies
of hell inside its ruins. Now our men stayed in the ruins, and this
time German shells smashed into the chateau and the cottages and left
nothing but rubbish heaps of brick through which a few days later I
went walking with the smell of death in my nostrils. Our men were now
being shelled in that place.

Beyond La Boisselle, on the left of the Albert-Bapaume road, there had
been a village called Ovillers. It was no longer there. Our guns has
removed every trace of it, except as it lay in heaps of pounded brick.
The Germans had a network of trenches about it, and in their ditches
and their dugouts they fought like wolves. Our 12th Division was
ordered to drive them out--a division of English county troops,
including the Sussex, Essex, Bedfords, and Middlesex--and those
country boys of ours fought their way among communication trenches,
burrowed into tunnels, crouched below hummocks of earth and brick, and
with bombs and bayonets and broken rifles, and boulders of stone, and
German stick-bombs, and any weapon that would kill, gained yard by
yard over the dead bodies of the enemy, or by the capture of small
batches of cornered men, until after seventeen days of this one
hundred and forty men of the 3rd Prussian Guard, the last of their
garrison, without food or water, raised a signal of surrender, and
came out with their hands up. Ovillers was a shambles, in a fight of
primitive earth-men like human beasts. Yet our men were not beast-
like. They came out from those places--if they had the luck to come
out--apparently unchanged, without any mark of the beast on them, and
when they cleansed themselves of mud and filth, boiled the lice out of
their shirts, and assembled in a village street behind the lines, they
whistled, laughed, gossiped, as though nothing had happened to their
souls--though something had really happened, as now we know.