Books: Now It Can Be Told

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

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It was not until July 14th that our High Command ordered another
general attack after the local fighting which had been in progress
since the first day of battle. Our field-batteries, and some of our
"heavies," had moved forward to places like Montauban and
Contalmaison--where German shells came searching for them all day
long--and new divisions had been brought up to relieve some of the men
who had been fighting so hard and so long. It was to be an attack on
the second German line of defense on the ridges by the village of
Bazentin le Grand and Bazentin le Petit to Longueval on the right and
Delville Wood. I went up in the night to see the bombardment and the
beginning of the battle and the swirl of its backwash, and I remember
now the darkness of villages behind the lines through which our cars
crawled, until we reached the edge of the battlefields and saw the sky
rent by incessant flames of gun-fire, while red tongues of flames
leaped up from burning villages. Longueval was on fire, and the two
Bazentins, and another belt of land in France, so beautiful to see,
even as I had seen it first between the sand-bags of our parapets, was
being delivered to the charcoal-burners.

I have described that night scene elsewhere, in all its deviltry, but
one picture which I passed on the way to the battlefield could not
then be told. Yet it was significant of the mentality of our High
Command, as was afterward pointed out derisively by Sixte von Arnim.
It proved the strange unreasoning optimism which still lingered in the
breasts of old-fashioned generals in spite of what had happened on the
left on the first day of July, and their study of trench maps, and
their knowledge of German machine-guns. By an old mill-house called
the Moulin Vivier, outside the village of Meaulte, were masses of
cavalry--Indian cavalry and Dragoons--drawn up densely to leave a
narrow passageway for field-guns and horse-transport moving through
the village, which was in utter darkness. The Indians sat like statues
on their horses, motionless, dead silent. Now and again there was a
jangle of bits. Here and there a British soldier lit a cigarette and
for a second the little flame of his match revealed a bronzed face or
glinted on steel helmets.

Cavalry! . . . So even now there was a serious purpose behind the joke
of English soldiers who had gone forward on the first day, shouting,
"This way to the gap!" and in the conversation of some of those who
actually did ride through Bazentin that day.

A troop or two made their way over the cratered ground and skirted
Delville Wood; the Dragoon Guards charged a machine-gun in a
cornfield, and killed the gunners. Germans rounded up by them clung to
their stirrup leathers crying: "Pity! Pity!" The Indians lowered their
lances, but took prisoners to show their chivalry. But it was nothing
more than a beau geste. It was as futile and absurd as Don Quixote's
charge of the windmill. They were brought to a dead halt by the nature
of the ground and machine-gun fire which killed their horses, and lay
out that night with German shells searching for their bodies.

One of the most disappointed men in the army was on General Haldane's
staff. He was an old cavalry officer, and this major of the old, old
school (belonging in spirit to the time of Charles Lever) was excited
by the thought that there was to be a cavalry adventure. He was one of
those who swore that if he had his chance he would "ride into the
blue." It was the chance he wanted and he nursed his way to it by
delicate attentions to General Haldane. The general's bed was not so
comfortable as his. He changed places. He even went so far as to put a
bunch of flowers on the general's table in his dugout.

"You seem very attentive to me, major," said the general, smelling a
rat.

Then the major blurted out his desire. Could he lead a squadron round
Delville Wood? Could he take that ride into the blue? He would give
his soul to do it.

"Get on with your job," said General Haldane.

That ride into the blue did not encourage the cavalry to the belief
that they would be of real value in a warfare of trench lines and
barbed wire, but for a long time later they were kept moving backward
and forward between the edge of the battlefields and the back areas,
to the great incumbrance of the roads, until they were "guyed" by the
infantry, and irritable, so their officers told me, to the verge of
mutiny. Their irritability was cured by dismounting them for a turn in
the trenches, and I came across the Household Cavalry digging by the
Coniston Steps, this side of Thiepval, and cursing their spade-work.

In this book I will not tell again the narrative of that, fighting in
the summer and autumn of 1916, which I have written with many details
of each day's scene in my collected despatches called The Battles of
the Somme. There is little that I can add to those word-pictures which
I wrote day by day, after haunting experiences amid the ruin of those
fields, except a summing-up of their effect upon the mentality of our
men, and upon the Germans who were in the same "blood-bath," as they
called it, and a closer analysis of the direction and mechanism of our
military machine.

Looking back upon those battles in the light of knowledge gained in
the years that followed, it seems clear that our High Command was too
prodigal in its expenditure of life in small sectional battles, and
that the army corps and divisional staffs had not established an
efficient system of communication with the fighting units under their
control. It seemed to an outsider like myself that a number of
separate battles were being fought without reference to one another in
different parts of the field. It seemed as though our generals, after
conferring with one another over telephones, said, "All right, tell
So-and-so to have a go at Thiepval," or, "To-day we will send such-
and-such a division to capture Delville Wood," or, "We must get that
line of trenches outside Bazentin." Orders were drawn up on the basis
of that decision and passed down to brigades, who read them as their
sentence of death, and obeyed with or without protest, and sent three
or four battalions to assault a place which was covered by German
batteries round an arc of twenty miles, ready to open out a tempest of
fire directly a rocket rose from their infantry, and to tear up the
woods and earth in that neighborhood if our men gained ground. If the
whole battle-line moved forward the German fire would have been
dispersed, but in these separate attacks on places like Trones Wood
and Delville Wood, and later on High Wood, it was a vast concentration
of explosives which plowed up our men.

So it was that Delville Wood was captured and lost several times and
became "Devil's" Wood to men who lay there under the crash and fury of
massed gun-fire until a wretched remnant of what had been a glorious
brigade of youth crawled out stricken and bleeding when relieved by
another brigade ordered to take their turn in that devil's caldron, or
to recapture it when German bombing-parties and machine-gunners had
followed in the wake of fire, and had crouched again among the fallen
trees, and in the shell-craters and ditches, with our dead and their
dead to keep them company. In Delville Wood the South African Brigade
of the 9th Division was cut to pieces, and I saw the survivors come
out with few officers to lead them.

In Trones Wood, in Bernafay Wood, in Mametz Wood, there had been great
slaughter of English troops and Welsh. The 18th Division and the 38th
suffered horribly. In Delville Wood many battalions were slashed to
pieces before these South Africans. And after that came High Wood . .
. All that was left of High Wood in the autumn of 1916 was a thin row
of branchless trees, but in July and August there were still glades
under heavy foliage, until the branches were lopped off and the leaves
scattered by our incessant fire. It was an important position, vital
for the enemy's defense, and our attack on the right flank of the
Pozieres Ridge, above Bazentin and Delville Wood, giving on the
reverse slope a fine observation of the enemy's lines above
Martinpuich and Courcellette away to Bapaume. For that reason the
Germans were ordered to hold it at all costs, and many German
batteries had registered on it to blast our men out if they gained a
foothold on our side of the slope or theirs.

So High Wood became another hell, on a day of great battle--September
14, 1916--when for the first time tanks were used, demoralizing the
enemy in certain places, though they were too few in number to strike
a paralyzing blow. The Londoners gained part of High Wood at frightful
cost and then were blown out of it. Other divisions followed them and
found the wood stuffed with machine-guns which they had to capture
through hurricanes of bullets before they crouched in craters amid
dead Germans and dead English, and then were blown out like the
Londoners, under shell-fire, in which no human life could stay for
long.

The 7th Division was cut up there. The 33d Division lost six thousand
men in an advance against uncut wire in the wood, which they were told
was already captured.

Hundreds of men were vomiting from the effect of gas-shells, choking
and blinded. Behind, the transport wagons and horses were smashed to
bits.

The divisional staffs were often ignorant of what was happening to the
fighting-men when the attack was launched. Light signals, rockets,
heliographing, were of small avail through the dust--and smoke-clouds.
Forward observing officers crouching behind parapets, as I often saw
them, and sometimes stood with them, watched fires burning, red
rockets and green, gusts of flame, and bursting shells, and were
doubtful what to make of it all. Telephone wires trailed across the
ground for miles, were cut into short lengths by shrapnel and high
explosive. Accidents happened as part of the inevitable blunders of
war. It was all a vast tangle and complexity of strife.

On July 17th I stood in a tent by a staff-officer who was directing a
group of heavy guns supporting the 3d Division. He was tired, as I
could see by the black lines under his eyes and tightly drawn lips. On
a camp-table in front of him, upon which he leaned his elbows, there
was a telephone apparatus, and the little bell kept ringing as we
talked. Now and then a shell burst in the field outside the tent, and
he raised his head and said: "They keep crumping about here. Hope they
won't tear this tent to ribbons. . . .That sounds like a gas-shell."

Then he turned to the telephone again and listened to some voice
speaking.

"Yes, I can hear you. Yes, go on. 'Our men seen leaving High Wood.'
Yes. 'Shelled by our artillery.' Are you sure of that? I say, are you
sure they were our men? Another message. Well, carry on. 'Men digging
on road from High Wood southeast to Longueval.' Yes, I've got that.
'They are our men and not Boches.' Oh, hell! . . . Get off the line.
Get off the line, can't you? . . . 'Our men and not Boches.' Yes, I
have that. 'Heavily shelled by our guns.' "

The staff-officer tapped on the table with a lead-pencil a tattoo,
while his forehead puckered. Then he spoke into the telephone again.

"Are you there, 'Heavies'? . . . Well, don't disturb those fellows for
half an hour. After that I will give you new orders. Try and confirm
if they are our men."

He rang off and turned to me.

"That's the trouble. Looks as if we had been pounding our own men like
hell. Some damn fool reports 'Boches.' Gives the reference number.
Asks for the 'Heavies'. Then some other fellow says: 'Not Boches. For
God's sake cease fire!' How is one to tell?"

I could not answer that question, but I hated the idea of our men sent
forward to capture a road or a trench or a wood and then "pounded" by
our guns. They had enough pounding from the enemy's guns. There seemed
a missing link in the system somewhere. Probably it was quite
inevitable.

Over and over again the wounded swore to God that they had been
shelled by our own guns. The Londoners said so from High Wood. The
Australians said so from Mouquet Farm. The Scots said so from
Longueval! They said: "Why the hell do we get murdered by British
gunners? What's the good of fighting if we're slaughtered by our own
side?"

In some cases they were mistaken. It was enfilade fire from German
batteries. But often it happened according to the way of that
telephone conversation in the tent by Bronfay Farm.

The difference between British soldiers and German soldiers crawling
over shell-craters or crouching below the banks of a sunken road was
no more than the difference between two tribes of ants. Our flying
scouts, however low they flew, risking the Archies and machine-gun
bullets, often mistook khaki for field gray, and came back with false
reports which led to tragedy.

XI

People who read my war despatches will remember my first descriptions
of the tanks and those of other correspondents. They caused a
sensation, a sense of excitement, laughter which shook the nation
because of the comicality, the grotesque surprise, the possibility of
quicker victory, which caught hold of the imagination of people who
heard for the first time of those new engines of war, so beast-like in
appearance and performance. The vagueness of our descriptions was due
to the censorship, which forbade, wisely enough, any technical and
exact definition, so that we had to compare them to giant toads,
mammoths, and prehistoric animals of all kinds. Our accounts did,
however, reproduce the psychological effect of the tanks upon the
British troops when these engines appeared for the first time to their
astonished gaze on September 13th. Our soldiers roared with laughter,
as I did, when they saw them lolloping up the roads. On the morning of
the great battle of September 15th the presence of the tanks going
into action excited all the troops along the front with a sense of
comical relief in the midst of the grim and deadly business of attack.
Men followed them, laughing and cheering. There was a wonderful thrill
in the airman's message, "Tank walking up the High Street of Flers
with the British army cheering behind." Wounded boys whom I met that
morning grinned in spite of their wounds at our first word about the
tanks. "Crikey!" said a cockney lad of the 47th Division. "I can't
help laughing every time I think of them tanks. I saw them stamping
down German machine-guns as though they were wasps' nests." The
adventures of Creme de Menthe, Cordon Rouge, and the Byng Boys, on
both sides of the Bapaume road, when they smashed down barbed wire,
climbed over trenches, sat on German redoubts, and received the
surrender of German prisoners who held their hands up to these
monsters and cried, "Kamerad!" were like fairy-tales of war by H. G.
Wells.

Yet their romance had a sharp edge of reality as I saw in those
battles of the Somme, and afterward, more grievously, in the Cambrai
salient and Flanders, when the tanks were put out of action by direct
hits of field-guns and nothing of humankind remained in them but the
charred bones of their gallant crews.

Before the battle in September of '16 I talked with the pilots of the
first tanks, and although they were convinced of the value of these
new engines of war and were out to prove it, they did not disguise
from me nor from their own souls that they were going forth upon a
perilous adventure with the odds of luck against them. I remember one
young pilot--a tiny fellow like a jockey, who took me on one side and
said, "I want you to do me a favor," and then scribbled down his
mother's address and asked me to write to her if "anything" happened
to him.

He and other tank officers were anxious. They had not complete
confidence in the steering and control of their engines. It was a
difficult and clumsy kind of gear, which was apt to break down at a
critical moment, as I saw when I rode in one on their field of
maneuver. These first tanks were only experimental, and the tail
arrangement was very weak. Worse than all mechanical troubles was the
short-sighted policy of some authority at G.H.Q., who had insisted
upon A.S.C. drivers being put to this job a few days before the
battle, without proper training.

"It is mad and murderous," said one of the officers, "These fellows
may have pluck, all right--I don't doubt it--but they don't know their
engines, nor the double steering trick, and they have never been under
shell-fire. It is asking for trouble."

As it turned out, the A.S.C. drivers proved their pluck, for the most
part, splendidly, but many tanks broke down before they reached the
enemy's lines, and in that action and later battles there were times
when they bitterly disappointed the infantry commanders and the
troops.

Individual tanks, commanded by gallant young officers and served by
brave crews, did astounding feats, and some of these men came back
dazed and deaf and dumb, after forty hours or more of fighting and
maneuvering within steel walls, intensely hot, filled with the fumes
of their engines, jolted and banged about over rough ground, and
steering an uncertain course, after the loss of their "tails," which
had snapped at the spine. But there had not been anything like enough
tanks to secure an annihilating surprise over the enemy as afterward
was attained in the first battle of Cambrai; and the troops who had
been buoyed up with the hope that at last the machine--gun evil was
going to be scotched were disillusioned and dejected when they saw
tanks ditched behind the lines or nowhere in sight when once again
they had to trudge forward under the flail of machine-gun bullets from
earthwork redoubts. It was a failure in generalship to give away our
secret before it could be made effective.

I remember sitting in a mess of the Gordons in the village of
Franvillers along the Albert road, and listening to a long monologue
by a Gordon officer on the future of the tanks. He was a dreamer and
visionary, and his fellow-officers laughed at him.

"A few tanks are no good," he said. "Forty or fifty tanks are no good
on a modern battle-front. We want hundreds of tanks, brought up
secretly, fed with ammunition by tank carriers, bringing up field-guns
and going into action without any preliminary barrage. They can smash
through the enemy's wire and get over his trenches before he is aware
that an attack has been organized. Up to now all our offensives have
been futile because of our preliminary advertisement by prolonged
bombardment. The tanks can bring back surprise to modern warfare, but
we must have hundreds of them."

Prolonged laughter greeted this speech. But the Celtic dreamer did not
smile. He was staring into the future. . . And what he saw was true,
though he did not live to see it, for in the Cambrai battle of
November 11th the tanks did advance in hundreds, and gained an
enormous surprise over the enemy, and led the way to a striking
victory, which turned to tragedy because of risks too lightly taken.

XII

One branch of our military machine developed with astonishing rapidity
and skill during those Somme battles. The young gentlemen of the Air
Force went "all out" for victory, and were reckless in audacity. How
far they acted under orders and against their own judgment of what was
sensible and sound in fighting-risks I do not know. General Trenchard,
their supreme chief, believed in an aggressive policy at all costs,
and was a Napoleon in this war of the skies, intolerant of timidity,
not squeamish of heavy losses if the balance were tipped against the
enemy. Some young flying-men complained to me bitterly that they were
expected to fly or die over the German lines, whatever the weather or
whatever the risks. Many of them, after repeated escapes from anti-
aircraft shells and hostile craft, lost their nerve, shirked another
journey, found themselves crying in their tents, and were sent back
home for a spell by squadron commanders, with quick observation for
the breaking-point; or made a few more flights and fell to earth like
broken birds.

Sooner or later, apart from rare cases, every man was found to lose
his nerve, unless he lost his life first. That was a physical and
mental law. But until that time these flying-men were the knights-
errant of the war, and most of them did not need any driving to the
risks they took with boyish recklessness.

They were mostly boys--babes, as they seemed to me, when I saw them in
their tents or dismounting from their machines. On "dud" days, when
there was no visibility at all, they spent their leisure hours joy-
riding to Amiens or some other town where they could have a "binge."
They drank many cocktails and roared with laughter over, bottles of
cheap champagne, and flirted with any girl who happened to come within
their orbit. If not allowed beyond their tents, they sulked like baby
Achilles, reading novelettes, with their knees hunched up, playing the
gramophone, and ragging each other.

There was one child so young that his squadron leader would not let
him go out across the battle-lines to challenge any German scout in
the clouds or do any of the fancy "stunts" that were part of the next
day's program. He went to bed sulkily, and then came back again, in
his pajamas, with rumpled hair.

"Look here, sir," he said. "Can't I go? I've got my wings. It's
perfectly rotten being left behind."

The squadron commander, who told me of the tale, yielded.

"All right. Only don't do any fool tricks."

Next morning the boy flew off, played a lone hand, chased a German
scout, dropped low over the enemy's lines, machine-gunned infantry on
the march, scattered them, bombed a train, chased a German motor-car,
and after many adventures came back alive and said, "I've had a rare
old time!"

On a stormy day, which loosened the tent poles and slapped the wet
canvas, I sat in a mess with a group of flying-officers, drinking tea
out of a tin mug. One boy, the youngest of them, had just brought down
his first "Hun." He told me the tale of it with many details, his eyes
alight as he described the fight. They had maneuvered round each other
for a long time. Then he shot his man en passant. The machine crashed
on our side of the lines. He had taken off the iron crosses on the
wings, and a bit of the propeller, as mementoes. He showed me these
things (while the squadron commander, who had brought down twenty-four
Germans, winked at me) and told me he was going to send them home to
hang beside his college trophies . . . I guessed he was less than
nineteen years old. Such a kid! . . . A few days later, when I went to
the tent again, I asked about him. "How's that boy who brought down
his first 'Hun'?" The squadron commander said:

"Didn't you hear? He's gone west. Brought down in a dog-fight. He had
a chance of escape, but went back to rescue a pal . . . a nice boy."

They became fatalists after a few fights, and believed in their luck,
or their mascots--teddy-bears, a bullet that had missed them, china
dolls, a girl's lock of hair, a silver ring. Yet at the back of their
brains, most Of them, I fancy, knew that it was only a question of
time before they "went west," and with that subconscious thought they
crowded in all life intensely in the hours that were given to them,
seized all chance of laughter, of wine, of every kind of pleasure
within reach, and said their prayers (some of them) with great fervor,
between one escape and another, like young Paul Bensher, who has
revealed his soul in verse, his secret terror, his tears, his hatred
of death, his love of life, when he went bombing over Bruges.

On the mornings of the battles of the Somme I saw them as the heralds
of a new day of strife flying toward the lines in the first light of
dawn. When the sun rose its rays touched their wings, made them white
like cabbage butterflies, or changed them to silver, all a sparkle. I
saw them fly over the German positions, not changing their course.
Then all about them burst black puffs of German shrapnel, so that many
times I held my breath because they seemed in the center of the burst.
But generally when the cloud cleared they were flying again, until
they disappeared in the mists over the enemy's country. There they did
deadly work, in single fights with German airmen, or against great
odds, until they had an air space to themselves and skimmed the earth
like albatrosses in low flight, attacking machine-gun nests, killing
or scattering the gunners by a burst of bullets from their Lewis guns,
dropping bombs on German wagon transports, infantry, railway trains
(one man cut a train in half and saw men and horses falling out), and
ammunition--dumps, directing the fire of our guns upon living targets,
photographing new trenches and works, bombing villages crowded with
German troops. That they struck terror into these German troops was
proved afterward when we went into Bapaume and Peronne and many
villages from which the enemy retreated after the battles of the
Somme. Everywhere there were signboards on which was written "Flieger
Schutz!" (aircraft shelter) or German warnings of: "Keep to the
sidewalks. This road is constantly bombed by British airmen."