Books: Now It Can Be Told

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

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He was talking for my benefit, egged on to further audacities by a
group of comrades who roared with laughter and said: "Go it, Bill!
That's the stuff!" Among these Lilliputians were fellows who sat aloof
and sullen, or spoke of their adventure with its recent horror in
their eyes. Some of them had big heads on small bodies, as though they
suffered from water on the brain . . . Many of them were sent home
afterward. General Haldane, as commander of the 6th Corps, paraded
them, and poked his stick at the more wizened ones, the obviously
unfit, the degenerates, and said at each prod, "You can go . . . You.
. .You. . . ." The Bantam Division ceased to exist.

They afforded many jokes to the army. One anecdote went the round. A
Bantam died--of disease ("and he would," said General Haldane)--and a
comrade came to see his corpse.

"Shut ze door ven you come out," said the old woman of his billet.
"Fermez la porte, mon vieux."

The living Bantam went to see the dead one, and came downstairs much
moved by grief.

"I've seed poor Bill," he said.

"As-tu ferme la porte?" said the old woman, anxiously.

The Bantam wondered at the anxious inquiry; asked the reason of it.

"C'est a cause du chat!" said the old woman. "Ze cat, Monsieur, 'e
'ave 'ad your friend in ze passage tree time already to-day. Trois
fois!"

Poor little men born of diseased civilization! They were volunteers to
a man, and some of them with as much courage as soldiers twice their
size.

They were the Bantams who told me of the Anglican padre at Longueval.
It was Father Hall of Mirfield, attached to the South African Brigade.
He came out to a dressing station established in the one bit of ruin
which could be used for shelter, and devoted himself to the wounded
with a spiritual fervor. They were suffering horribly from thirst,
which made their tongues swell and set their throats on fire.

"Water!" they cried. "Water! For Christ's sake, water!"

There was no water, except at a well in Longueval, under the fire of
German snipers, who picked off our men when they crawled down like
wild dogs with their tongues lolling out. There was one German officer
there in a shell-hole not far from the well, who sat with his revolver
handy, and he was a dead shot.

But he did not shoot the padre. Something in the face and figure of
that chaplain, his disregard of the bullets snapping about him, the
upright, fearless way in which he crossed that way of death, held back
the trigger-finger of the German officer and he let him pass. He
passed many times, untouched by bullets or machine-gun fire, and he
went into bad places, pits of horror, carrying hot tea, which he made
from the well water for men in agony.

XVII

During these battles I saw thousands of German prisoners, and studied
their types and physiognomy, and, by permission of Intelligence
officers, spoke with many of them in their barbed-wire cages or on the
field of battle when they came along under escort. Some of them looked
degraded, bestial men. One could imagine them guilty of the foulest
atrocities. But in the mass they seemed to me decent, simple men,
remarkably like our own lads from the Saxon counties of England,
though not quite so bright and brisk, as was only natural in their
position as prisoners, with all the misery of war in their souls.
Afterward they worked with patient industry in the prison-camps and
established their own discipline, and gave very little trouble if well
handled. In each crowd of them there were fellows who spoke perfect
English, having lived in England as waiters and hairdressers, or
clerks or mechanics. It was with them I spoke most because it was
easiest, but I know enough German to talk with the others, and I found
among them all the same loathing of war, the same bewilderment as to
its causes, the same sense of being driven by evil powers above them.
The officers were different. They lost a good deal of their arrogance,
but to the last had excuses ready for all that Germany had done, and
almost to the last professed to believe that Germany would win. Their
sense of caste was in their nature. They refused to travel in the same
carriages with their men, to stay even for an hour in the same
inclosures with them. They regarded them, for the most part, as
inferior beings. And there were castes even among the officers. I
remember that in the last phase, when we captured a number of cavalry
officers, these elegant sky-blue fellows held aloof from the infantry
officers and would not mix with them. One of them paced up and down
all night alone, and all next day, stiff in the corsets below that
sky-blue uniform, not speaking to a soul, though within a few yards of
him were many officers of infantry regiments.

Our men treated their prisoners, nearly always, after the blood of
battle was out of their eyes, with a good--natured kindness that
astonished the Germans themselves. I have seen them filling German
water-bottles at considerable trouble, and the escorts, two or three
to a big batch of men, were utterly trustful of them. "Here, hold my
rifle, Fritz," said one of our men, getting down from a truck-train to
greet a friend.

An officer standing by took notice of this.

"Take your rifle back at once! Is that the way to guard your
prisoners?"

Our man was astonished.

"Lor' bless you, sir, they don't want no guarding. They're glad to be
took. They guard themselves."

"Your men are extraordinary," a German officer told me. "They asked me
whether I would care to go down at once or wait till the barrage had
passed."

He seemed amazed at that thoughtfulness for his comfort. It was in the
early days of the Somme fighting, and crowds of our men stood on the
banks above a sunken road, watching the prisoners coming down. This
officer who spoke to me had an Iron Cross, and the men wanted to see
it and handle it.

"Will they give it back again?" he asked, nervously, fumbling at the
ribbon.

"Certainly," I assured him.

He handed it to me, and I gave it to the men, who passed it from one
to the other and then back to the owner.

"Your men are extraordinary," he said. "They are wonderful."

One of the most interesting prisoners I met on the field of battle was
a tall, black-bearded man whom I saw walking away from La Boisselle
when that place was smoking with shell-bursts. An English soldier was
on each side of him, and each man carried a hand-bag, while this
black-bearded giant chatted with them.

It was a strange group, and I edged nearer to them and spoke to one of
the men.

"Who's this? Why do you carry his bags?"

"Oh, we're giving him special privileges," said the man. "He stayed
behind to look after our wounded. Said his job was to look after
wounded, whoever they were. So there he's been, in a dugout bandaging
our lads; and no joke, either. It's hell up there. We're glad to get
out of it."

I spoke to the German doctor and walked with him. He discussed the
philosophy of the war simply and with what seemed like sincerity.

"This war!" he said, with a sad, ironical laugh. "We go on killing one
another-to no purpose. Europe is being bled to death and will be
impoverished for long years. We Germans thought it was a war for
Kultur--our civilization. Now we know it is a war against Kultur,
against religion, against all civilization."

"How will it end?" I asked him.

"I see no end to it," he answered. "It is the suicide of nations.
Germany is strong, and England is strong, and France is strong. It is
impossible for one side to crush the other, so when is the end to
come?"

I met many other prisoners then and a year afterward who could see no
end of the massacre. They believed the war would go on until living
humanity on all sides revolted from the unceasing sacrifice. In the
autumn of 1918, when at last the end came in sight, by German defeat,
unexpected a few months before even by the greatest optimist in the
British armies, the German soldiers were glad. They did not care how
the war ended so long as it ended. Defeat? What did that matter? Was
it worse to be defeated than for the race to perish by bleeding to
death?

XVIII

The struggle for the Pozieres ridge and High Wood lasted from the
beginning of August until the middle of September--six weeks of
fighting as desperate as any in the history of the world until that
time. The Australians dealt with Pozieres itself, working round Moquet
Farm, where the Germans refused to be routed from their tunnels, and
up to the Windmill on the high ground of Pozieres, for which there was
unceasing slaughter on both sides because the Germans counter-attacked
again and again, and waves of men surged up and fell around that mound
of forsaken brick, which I saw as a reddish cone through flame and
smoke.

Those Australians whom I had seen arrive in France had proved their
quality. They had come believing that nothing could be worse than
their ordeal in the Dardanelles. Now they knew that Pozieres was the
last word in frightfulness. The intensity of the shell-fire under
which they lay shook them, if it did not kill them. Many of their
wounded told me that it had broken their nerve. They would never fight
again without a sense of horror.

"Our men are more highly strung than the English," said one Australian
officer, and I was astonished to hear these words, because those
Australians seemed to me without nerves, and as tough as gristle in
their fiber.

They fought stubbornly, grimly, in ground so ravaged with fire that
the earth was finely powdered. They stormed the Pozieres ridge yard by
yard, and held its crest under sweeping barrages which tore up their
trenches as soon as they were dug and buried and mangled their living
flesh. In six weeks they suffered twenty thousand casualties, and
Pozieres now is an Australian graveyard, and the memorial that stands
there is to the ghosts of that splendid youth which fell in heaps
about that plateau and the slopes below. Many English boys of the
Sussex, West Kents, Surrey, and Warwick regiments, in the 18th
Division, died at their side, not less patient in sacrifice, not
liking it better. Many Scots of the 15th and 9th Divisions, many New-
Zealanders, many London men of the 47th and 56th Divisions, fell,
killed or wounded, to the right of them, on the way to Martinpuich,
and Eaucourt l'Abbaye and Flers, from High Wood and Longueval, and
Bazentin. The 3d Division of Yorkshires and Northumberland Fusiliers,
Royal Scots and Gordons, were earning that name of the Iron Division,
and not by any easy heroism. Every division in the British army took
its turn in the blood-bath of the Somme and was duly blooded, at a
cost of 25 per cent. and sometimes 50 per cent. of their fighting
strength. The Canadians took up the struggle at Courcelette and
captured it in a fierce and bloody battle. The Australians worked up
on the right of the Albert-Bapaume road to Thilloy and Ligny Thilloy.
On the far left the fortress of Thiepval had fallen at last after
repeated and frightful assaults, which I watched from ditches close
enough to see our infantry--Wiltshires and Worcesters of the 25th
Division--trudging through infernal fire. And then at last, after five
months of superhuman effort, enormous sacrifice, mass-heroism,
desperate will-power, and the tenacity of each individual human ant in
this wild ant-heap, the German lines were smashed, the Australians
surged into Bapaume, and the enemy, stricken by the prolonged fury of
our attack, fell back in a far and wide retreat across a country which
he laid waste, to the shelter of his Hindenburg line, from Bullecourt
to St.-Quentin.

XIX

The goal of our desire seemed attained when at last we reached Bapaume
after these terrific battles in which all our divisions, numbering
nearly a million men, took part, with not much difference in courage,
not much difference in average of loss. By the end of that year's
fighting our casualties had mounted up to the frightful total of four
hundred thousand men. Those fields were strewn with our dead. Our
graveyards were growing forests of little white crosses. The German
dead lay in heaps. There were twelve hundred corpses littered over the
earth below Loupart Wood, in one mass, and eight hundred of them were
German. I could not walk without treading on them there. When I fell
in the slime I clutched arms and legs. The stench of death was strong
and awful.

But our men who had escaped death and shell-shock kept their sanity
through all this wilderness of slaughter, kept--oh, marvelous!--their
spirit of humor, their faith in some kind of victory. I was with the
Australians on that day when they swarmed into Bapaume, and they
brought out trophies like men at a country fair . . . I remember an
Australian colonel who came riding with a German beer-mug at his
saddle . . . Next day, though shells were still bursting in the ruins,
some Australian boys set up some painted scenery which they had found
among the rubbish, and chalked up the name of the "Coo-ee Theater."

The enemy was in retreat to his Hindenburg line, over a wide stretch
of country which he laid waste behind him, making a desert of French
villages and orchards and parks, so that even the fruit-trees were cut
down, and the churches blown up, and the graves ransacked for their
lead. It was the enemy's first retreat on the western front, and that
ferocious fighting of the British troops had smashed the strongest
defenses ever built in war, and our raw recruits had broken the most
famous regiments of the German army, so in spite of all tragedy and
all agony our men were not downcast, but followed up their enemy with
a sense of excitement because it seemed so much like victory and the
end of war.

When the Germans retreated from Gommecourt, where so many boys of the
56th (London) Division had fallen on the 1st of July, I went through
that evil place by way of Fonquevillers (which we called "Funky
Villas"), and, stumbling over the shell-craters and broken trenches
and dead bodies between the dead masts of slashed and branchless
trees, came into the open country to our outpost line. I met there a
friendly sergeant who surprised me by referring in a casual way to a
little old book of mine.

"This place," he said, glancing at me, "is a strange Street of
Adventure."

It reminded me of another reference to that tale of mine when I was
among a crowd of London lads who had just been engaged in a bloody
fight at a place called The Hairpin.

A young officer sent for me and I found him in the loft of a stinking
barn, sitting in a tub as naked as he was born.

"I just wanted to ask you," he said, "whether Katharine married
Frank?"

The sergeant at Gommecourt was anxious to show me his own Street of
Adventure.

"I belong to Toc-emmas," he said (meaning trench--mortars), "and my
officers would be very pleased if you would have a look at their
latest stunt. We've got a 9.2 mortar in Pigeon Wood, away beyond the
infantry. It's never been done before and we're going to blow old
Fritz out of Kite Copse."

I followed him into the blue, as it seemed to me, and we fell in with
a young officer also on his way to Pigeon Wood. He was in a merry
mood, in spite of harassing fire round about and the occasional howl
of a 5.9. He kept stopping to look at enormous holes in the ground and
laughing at something that seemed to tickle his sense of humor.

"See that?" he said. "That's old Charlie Lowndes's work."

At another pit in upheaved earth he said: "That's Charlie Lowndes
again . . . Old Charlie gave 'em hell. He's a topping chap. You must
meet him . . . My God! look at that!"

He roared with laughter again, on the edge of an unusually large
crater.

"Who is Charlie?" I asked. "Where can I find him?"

"Oh, we shall meet him in Pigeon Wood. He's as pleased as Punch at
having got beyond the infantry. First time it has ever been done. Took
a bit of doing, too, with the largest size of Toc-emma."

We entered Pigeon Wood after a long walk over wild chaos, and, guided
by the officer and sergeant, I dived down into a deep dugout just
captured from the Germans, who were two hundred yards away in Kite
Copse.

"What cheer, Charlie!" shouted the young officer.

"Hullo, fellow-my-lad! . . . Come in. We're getting gloriously binged
on a rare find of German brandy."

"Topping and I've brought a visitor."

Capt. Charles Lowndes--"dear old Charlie"--received us most politely
in one of the best dugouts I ever saw, with smoothly paneled walls
fitted up with shelves, and good deal furniture made to match.

"This is a nice little home in hell," said Charles. "At any moment, of
course, we may be blown to bits, but meanwhile it is very comfy down
here, and what makes everything good is a bottle of rare old brandy
and an unlimited supply of German soda-water. Also to add to the
gaiety of indecent minds there is a complete outfit of ladies'
clothing in a neighboring dugout. Funny fellows those German officers.
Take a pew, won't you? and have a drink. Orderly!"

He shouted for his man and ordered a further supply of German soda-
water.

We drank to the confusion of the enemy, in his own brandy and soda-
water, out of his own mugs, sitting on his own chairs at his own
table, and "dear old Charlie," who was a little etoile, as afterward I
became, with a sense of deep satisfaction (the noise of shells seemed
more remote), discoursed on war, which he hated, German psychology,
trench-mortar barrages (they had simply blown the Boche out of
Gommecourt), and his particular fancy stunt of stealing a march on the
infantry, who, said Captain Lowndes, are "laps behind." Other officers
crowded into the dugout. One of them said: "You must come round to
mine. It's a blasted palace," and I went round later and he told me on
the way that he had escaped so often from shell-bursts that he thought
the average of luck was up and he was bound to get "done in" before
long.

Charlie Lowndes dispensed drinks with noble generosity. There was much
laughter among us, and afterward we went upstairs and to the edge of
the wood, to which a heavy, wet mist was clinging, and I saw the
trench-mortar section play the devil with Kite Copse, over the way.
Late in the afternoon I took my leave of a merry company in that far-
flung outpost of our line, and wished them luck. A few shells crashed
through the wood as I left, but I was disdainful of them after that
admirable brandy. It was a long walk back to "Funky Villas," not
without the interest of arithmetical calculations about the odds of
luck in harassing fire, but a thousand yards or so from Pigeon Wood I
looked back and saw that the enemy had begun to "take notice." Heavy
shells were smashing through the trees there ferociously. I hoped my
friends were safe in their dugouts again. . . .

And I thought of the laughter and gallant spirit of the young men,
after five months of the greatest battles in the history of the world.
It seemed to me wonderful.

XX

I have described what happened on our side of the lines, our fearful
losses, the stream of wounded that came back day by day, the
"Butchers' Shops," the agony in men's souls, the shell-shock cases,
the welter and bewilderment of battle, the shelling of our own troops,
the lack of communication between fighting units and the command, the
filth and stench of the hideous shambles which were our battlefields.
But to complete the picture of that human conflict in the Somme I must
now tell what happened on the German side of the lines, as I was able
to piece the tale together from German prisoners with whom I talked,
German letters which I found in their abandoned dugouts, and documents
which fell into the hands of our staff--officers.

Our men were at least inspirited by the knowledge that they were
beating their enemy back, in spite of their own bloody losses. The
Germans had not even that source of comfort, for whatever it might be
worth under barrage fire. The mistakes of our generalship, the
inefficiency of our staff-work, were not greater than the blunderings
of the German High Command, and their problem was more difficult than
ours because of the weakness of their reserves, owing to enormous
preoccupation on the Russian front. The agony of their men was greater
than ours.

To understand the German situation it must be remembered that from
January to May, 1916, the German command on the western front was
concentrating all its energy and available strength in man-power and
gun--power upon the attack of Verdun. The Crown Prince had staked his
reputation upon that adventure, which he believed would end in the
capture of the strongest French fortress and the destruction of the
French armies. He demanded men and more men, until every unit that
could be spared from other fronts of the line had been thrown into
that furnace. Divisions were called in from other theaters of war, and
increased the strength on the western front to a total of about one
hundred and thirty divisions.

But the months passed and Verdun still held out above piles of German
corpses on its slopes, and in June Germany looked east and saw a great
menace. The Russian offensive was becoming violent. German generals on
the Russian fronts sent desperate messages for help. "Send us more
men," they said, and from the western front four divisions containing
thirty-nine battalions were sent to them.

They must have been sent grudgingly, for now another menace threatened
the enemy, and it was ours. The British armies were getting ready to
strike. In spite of Verdun, France still had men enough---withdrawn
from that part of the line in which they had been relieved by the
British---to co-operate in a new attack.

It was our offensive that the German command feared most, for they had
no exact knowledge of our strength or of the quality of our new
troops. They knew that our army had grown prodigiously since the
assault on Loos, nearly a year before.

They had heard of the Canadian reinforcements, and the coming of the
Australians, and the steady increase of recruiting in England, and
month by month they had heard the louder roar of our guns along the
line, and had seen their destructive effect spreading and becoming
more terrible. They knew of the steady, quiet concentration of
batteries and divisions on the west and south of the Ancre.

The German command expected a heavy blow and, prepared for it, but as
yet had no knowledge of the driving force behind it. What confidence
they had of being able to resist the British attack was based upon the
wonderful strength of the lines which they had been digging and
fortifying since the autumn of the first year of war--"impregnable
positions," they had called them--the inexperience of our troops,
their own immense quantity of machine-guns, the courage and skill of
their gunners, and their profound belief in the superiority of German
generalship.

In order to prevent espionage during the coming struggle, and to
conceal the movement of troops and guns, they ordered the civil
populations to be removed from villages close behind their positions,
drew cordons of military police across the country, picketed
crossroads, and established a network of counter espionage to prevent
any leakage of information.

To inspire the German troops with a spirit of martial fervor (not
easily aroused to fever pitch after the bloody losses before Verdun)
Orders of the Day were issued to the battalions counseling them to
hold fast against the hated English, who stood foremost in the way of
peace (that was the gist of a manifesto by Prince Rupprecht of
Bavaria, which I found in a dugout at Montauban), and promising them a
speedy ending to the war.

Great stores of material and munitions were concentrated at rail-heads
and dumps ready to be sent up to the firing-lines, and the perfection
of German organization may well have seemed flawless--before the
attack began.

When they began they found that in "heavies" and in expenditure of
high explosives they were outclassed.

They were startled, too, by the skill and accuracy of the British
gunners, whom they had scorned as "amateurs," and by the daring of our
airmen, who flew over their lines with the utmost audacity, "spotting"
for the guns, and registering on batteries, communication trenches,
crossroads, rail-heads, and every vital point of organization in the
German war-machine working opposite the British lines north and south
of the Ancre.

Even before the British infantry had left their trenches at dawn on
July 1st, German officers behind the firing--lines saw with anxiety
that all the organization which had worked so smoothly in times of
ordinary trench--warfare was now working only in a hazardous way under
a deadly storm of shells.

Food and supplies of all kinds could not be sent up to front-line
trenches without many casualties, and sometimes could not be sent up
at all. Telephone wires were cut, and communications broken between
the front and headquarters staffs. Staff-officers sent up to report
were killed on the way to the lines. Troops moving forward from
reserve areas came under heavy fire and lost many men before arriving
in the support trenches.