Books: Now It Can Be Told

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Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, sitting aloof from all this in personal
safety, must have known before July 1st that his resources in men and
material would be strained to the uttermost by the British attack, but
he could take a broader view than men closer to the scene of battle,
and taking into account the courage of his troops (he had no need to
doubt that), the immense strength of their positions, dug and tunneled
beyond the power of high explosives, the number of his machine-guns,
the concentration of his artillery, and the rawness of the British
troops, he could count up the possible cost and believe that in spite
of a heavy price to pay there would be no break in his lines.

At 7.30 A.M. on July 1st the British infantry, as I have told, left
their trenches and attacked on the right angle down from Gommecourt,
Beaumont Hamel, Thiepval, Ovillers, and La Boisselle, and eastward
from Fricourt, below Mametz and Montauban. For a week the German
troops--Bavarians and Prussians--had been crouching in their dugouts,
listening to the ceaseless crashing of the British "drum-fire." In
places like Beaumont Hamel, the men down in the deep tunnels--some of
them large enough to hold a battalion and a half--were safe as long as
they stayed there. But to get in or out was death. Trenches
disappeared into a sea of shell-craters, and the men holding them--for
some men had to stay on duty there--were blown to fragments.

Many of the shallower dugouts were smashed in by heavy shells, and
officers and men lay dead there as I saw them lying on the first days
of July, in Fricourt and Mametz and Montauban. The living men kept
their courage, but below ground, under that tumult of bursting shells,
and wrote pitiful letters to their people at home describing the
horror of those hours.

"We are quite shut off from the rest of the world," wrote one of them.
"Nothing comes to us. No letters. The English keep such a barrage on
our approaches it is terrible. To-morrow evening it will be seven days
since this bombardment began. We cannot hold out much longer.
Everything is shot to pieces."

Thirst was one of their tortures. In many of the tunneled shelters
there was food enough, but the water could not be sent up. The German
soldiers were maddened by thirst. When rain fell many of them crawled
out and drank filthy water mixed with yellow shell-sulphur, and then
were killed by high explosives. Other men crept out, careless of
death, but compelled to drink. They crouched over the bodies of the
men who lay above, or in, the shell-holes, and lapped up the puddles
and then crawled down again if they were not hit.

When our infantry attacked at Gommecourt and Beaumont Hamel and
Thiepval they were received by waves of machine-gun bullets fired by
men who, in spite of the ordeal of our seven days' bombardment, came
out into the open now, at the moment of attack which they knew through
their periscopes was coming. They brought their guns above the shell-
craters of their destroyed trenches under our barrage and served them.
They ran forward even into No Man's Land, and planted their machine-
guns there, and swept down our men as they charged. Over their heads
the German gunners flung a frightful barrage, plowing gaps in the
ranks of our men.

On the left, by Gommecourt and Beaumont Hamel, the British attack
failed, as I have told, but southward the "impregnable" lines were
smashed by a tide of British soldiers as sand castles are overwhelmed
by the waves. Our men swept up to Fricourt, struck straight up to
Montauban on the right, captured it, and flung a loop round Mametz
village.

For the German generals, receiving their reports with great difficulty
because runners were killed and telephones broken, the question was:
"How will these British troops fight in the open after their first
assault? How will our men stand between the first line and the
second?"

As far as the German troops were concerned, there were no signs of
cowardice, or "low morale" as we called it more kindly, in those early
days of the struggle. They fought with a desperate courage, holding on
to positions in rearguard actions when our guns were slashing them and
when our men were getting near to them, making us pay a heavy price
for every little copse or gully or section of trench, and above all
serving their machine-guns at La Boisselle, Ovillers, above Fricourt,
round Contalmaison, and at all points of their gradual retreat, with a
wonderful obstinacy, until they were killed or captured. But fresh
waves of British soldiers followed those who were checked or broken.

After the first week of battle the German General Staff had learned
the truth about the qualities of those British "New Armies" which had
been mocked and caricatured in German comic papers. They learned that
these "amateur soldiers" had the qualities of the finest troops in the
world--not only extreme valor, but skill and cunning, not only a great
power of endurance under the heaviest fire, but a spirit of attack
which was terrible in its effect. They were fierce bayonet fighters.
Once having gained a bit of earth or a ruined village, nothing would
budge them unless they could be blasted out by gun-fire. General Sixt
von Arnim put down some candid notes in his report to Prince
Rupprecht.

"The English infantry shows great dash in attack, a factor to which
immense confidence in its overwhelming artillery greatly contributes .
. . It has shown great tenacity in defense. This was especially
noticeable in the case of small parties, which, when once established
with machine-guns in the corner of a wood or a group of houses, were
very difficult to drive out."

The German losses were piling up. The agony of the German troops under
our shell-fire was reaching unnatural limits of torture. The early
prisoners I saw--Prussians and Bavarians of the 14th Reserve Corps--
were nerve-broken, and told frightful stories of the way in which
their regiments had been cut to pieces. The German generals had to
fill up the gaps, to put new barriers of men against the waves of
British infantry. They flung new troops into the line, called up
hurriedly from reserve depots.

Now, for the first time, their staff-work showed signs of disorder and
demoralization. When the Prussian Guards Reserves were brought up from
Valenciennes to counter--attack at Contalmaison they were sent on to
the battlefield without maps or local guides, and walked straight into
our barrage. A whole battalion was cut to pieces and many others
suffered frightful things. Some of the prisoners told me that they had
lost three-quarters of their number in casualties, and our troops
advanced over heaps of killed and wounded.

The 122d Bavarian Regiment in Contalmaison was among those which
suffered horribly. Owing to our ceaseless gun-fire, they could get no
food-supplies and no water. The dugouts were crowded, so that they had
to take turns to get into these shelters, and outside our shells were
bursting over every yard of ground.

"Those who went outside," a prisoner told me, "were killed or wounded.
Some of them had their heads blown off, and some of them their arms.
But we went on taking turns in the hole, although those who went
outside knew that it was their turn to die, most likely. At last most
of those who came into the hole were wounded, some of them badly, so
that we lay in blood." That is one little picture in a great panorama
of bloodshed.

The German command was not thinking much about the human suffering of
its troops. It was thinking of the next defensive line upon which they
would have to fall back if the pressure of the British offensive could
be maintained--the Longueval-Bazentin-Pozires line. It was getting
nervous. Owing to the enormous efforts made in the Verdun offensive,
the supplies of ammunition were not adequate to the enormous demand.

The German gunners were trying to compete with the British in
continuity of bombardments and the shells were running short. Guns
were wearing out under this incessant strain, and it was difficult to
replace them. General von Gallwitz received reports of "an alarmingly
large number of bursts in the bore, particularly in field-guns."

General von Arnim complained that "reserve supplies of ammunition were
only available in very small quantities." The German telephone system
proved "totally inadequate in consequence of the development which the
fighting took." The German air service was surprisingly weak, and the
British airmen had established temporary mastery.

"The numerical superiority of the enemy's airmen," noted General von
Arnim, "and the fact that their machines were better made, became
disagreeably apparent to us, particularly in their direction of the
enemy's artillery fire and in bomb-dropping."

On July 15th the British troops broke the German second line at
Longueval and the Bazentins, and inflicted great losses upon the
enemy, who fought with their usual courage until the British bayonets
were among them.

A day or two later the fortress of Ovillers fell, and the remnants of
the garrison--one hundred and fifty strong--after a desperate and
gallant resistance in ditches and tunnels, where they had fought to
the last, surrendered with honor.

Then began the long battle of the woods--Devil's Wood, High Wood,
Trones Wood--continued through August with most fierce and bloody
fighting, which ended in our favor and forced the enemy back,
gradually but steadily, in spite of the terrific bombardments which
filled those woods with shell-fire and the constant counter-attacks
delivered by the Germans.

"Counter-attack!" came the order from the German staff, and battalions
of men marched out obediently to certain death, sometimes with
incredible folly on the part of their commanding officers, who ordered
these attacks to be made without the slightest chance of success.

I saw an example of that at close range during a battle at Falfemont
Farm, near Guillemont. Our men had advanced from Wedge Wood, and I
watched them from a trench just south of this, to which I had gone at
a great pace over shell-craters and broken wire, with a young
observing officer who had been detailed to report back to the guns.
(Old "Falstaff," whose songs and stories had filled the tent under the
Red Cross with laughter, toiled after us gallantly, but grunting and
sweating under the sun like his prototype, until we lost him in our
hurry.) Presently a body of Germans came out of a copse called Leuze
Wood, on rising ground, faced round among the thin, slashed trees of
Falfemont, and advanced toward our men, shoulder to shoulder, like a
solid bar. It was sheer suicide. I saw our men get their machineguns
into action, and the right side of the living bar frittered away, and
then the whole line fell into the scorched grass. Another line
followed. They were tall men, and did not falter as they came forward,
but it seemed to me they walked like men conscious of going to death.
They died. The simile is outworn, but it was exactly as though some
invisible scythe had mown them down.

In all the letters written during those weeks of fighting and captured
by us from dead or living men there was one cry of agony and horror.

"I stood on the brink of the most terrible days of my life," wrote one
of them. "They were those of the battle of the Somme. It began with a
night attack on August 13th and 14th. The attack lasted till the
evening of the 18th, when the English wrote on our bodies in letters
of blood, 'It is all over with you.' A handful of half-mad, wretched
creatures, worn out in body and mind, were all that was left of a
whole battalion. We were that handful."

The losses of many of the German battalions were staggering (yet not
greater than our own), and by the middle of August the morale of the
troops was severely shaken. The 117th Division by Pozires suffered
very heavily. The 11th Reserve and 157th Regiments each lost nearly
three-quarters of their effectives. The 9th Reserve Corps had also
lost heavily. The 9th Reserve Jager Battalion lost about three-
quarters, the 84th Reserve and 86th Reserve over half. On August 10th
the 16th Division had six battalions in reserve.

By August 19th, owing to the large number of casualties, the greater
part of those reserves had been absorbed into the front and support
trenches, leaving as available reserves two exhausted battalions.

The weakness of the division and the absolute necessity of reinforcing
it led to the 15th Reserve Infantry Regiment (2d Guards Division)
being brought up to strengthen the right flank in the Leipzig salient.
This regiment had suffered casualties to the extent of over 50 percent
west of Pozires during the middle of July, and showed no eagerness to
return to the fight. These are but a few examples of what was
happening along the whole of the German front on the Somme.

It became apparent by the end of August that the enemy was in trouble
to find fresh troops to relieve his exhausted divisions, and that the
wastage was faster than the arrival of new men. It was noticeable that
he left divisions in the line until incapable of further effort rather
than relieving them earlier so that after resting they might again be
brought on to the battlefield. The only conclusion to be drawn from
this was that the enemy had not sufficient formations available to
make the necessary reliefs.

In July three of these exhausted divisions were sent to the east,
their place being taken by two new divisions, and in August three more
exhausted divisions were sent to Russia, eight new divisions coming to
the Somme front. The British and French offensive was drawing in all
the German reserves and draining them of their life's blood.

"We entrained at Savigny," wrote a man of one of these regiments, "and
at once knew our destination. It was our old blood-bath--the Somme."

In many letters this phrase was used. The Somme was called the "Bath
of Blood" by the German troops who waded across its shell-craters and
in the ditches which were heaped with their dead. But what I have
described is only the beginning of the battle, and the bath was to be
filled deeper in the months that followed.

XXI

The name (that "blood-bath") and the news of battle could not be
hidden from the people of Germany, who had already been chilled with
horror by the losses at Verdun, nor from the soldiers of reserve
regiments quartered in French and Belgian towns like Valenciennes, St.
Quentin, Cambrai, Lille, Bruges, and as far back as Brussels, waiting
to go to the front, nor from the civil population of those towns, held
for two years by their enemy--these blond young men who lived in their
houses, marched down their streets, and made love to their women.

The news was brought down from the Somme front by Red Cross trains,
arriving in endless succession, and packed with maimed and mangled
men. German military policemen formed cordons round the railway
stations, pushed back civilians who came to stare with somber eyes at
these blanketed bundles of living flesh, but when the ambulances
rumbled through the streets toward the hospitals--long processions of
them, with the soles of men's boots turned up over the stretchers on
which they lay quiet and stiff--the tale was told, though no word was
spoken.

The tale of defeat, of great losses, of grave and increasing anxiety,
was told clearly enough--as I read in captured letters--by the faces
of German officers who went about in these towns behind the lines with
gloomy looks, and whose tempers, never of the sweetest, became
irritable and unbearable, so that the soldiers hated them for all this
cursing and bullying. A certain battalion commander had a nervous
breakdown because he had to meet his colonel in the morning.

"He is dying with fear and anxiety," wrote one of his comrades.

Other men, not battalion commanders, were even more afraid of their
superior officers, upon whom this bad news from the Somme had an evil
effect.

The bad news was spread by divisions taken out of the line and sent
back to rest. The men reported that their battalions had been cut to
pieces. Some of their regiments had lost three-quarters of their
strength. They described the frightful effect of the British
artillery--the smashed trenches, the shell-crater, the horror.

It was not good for the morale of men who were just going up there to
take their turn.

The man who was afraid of his colonel "sits all day long writing home,
with the picture of his wife and children before his eyes." He was
afraid of other things.

Bavarian soldiers quarreled with Prussians, accused them (unjustly) of
shirking the Somme battlefields and leaving the Bavarians to go to the
blood-bath.

"All the Bavarian troops are being sent to the Somme (this much is
certain, you can see no Prussians there), and this in spite of the
losses the 1st Bavarian Corps suffered recently at Verdun! And how we
did suffer! . . . It appears that we are in for another turn--at least
the 5th Bavarian Division. Everybody has been talking about it for a
long time. To the devil with it! Every Bavarian regiment is being sent
into it, and it's a swindle."

It was in no cheerful mood that men went away to the Somme
battlefields. Those battalions of gray-clad men entrained without any
of the old enthusiasm with which they had gone to earlier battles.
Their gloom was noticed by the officers.

"Sing, you sheeps' heads, sing!" they shouted.

They were compelled to sing, by order.

"In the afternoon," wrote a man of the 18th Reserve Division, "we had
to go out again; we were to learn to sing. The greater part did not
join in, and the song went feebly. Then we had to march round in a
circle and sing, and that went no better. After that we had an hour
off, and on the way back to billets we were to sing 'Deutschland uber
Alles,' but this broke down completely. One never hears songs of the
Fatherland any more."

They were silent, grave-eyed men who marched through the streets of
French and Belgian towns to be entrained for the Somme front, for they
had forebodings of the fate before them. Yet none of their forebodings
were equal in intensity of fear to the frightful reality into which
they were flung.

The journey to the Somme front, on the German side, was a way of
terror, ugliness, and death. Not all the imagination of morbid minds
searching obscenely for foulness and blood in the great, deep pits of
human agony could surpass these scenes along the way to the German
lines round Courcelette and Flers, Gueudecourt, Morval, and Lesboeufs.

Many times, long before a German battalion had arrived near the
trenches, it was but a collection of nerve--broken men bemoaning
losses already suffered far behind the lines and filled with hideous
apprehension. For British long-range guns were hurling high explosives
into distant villages, barraging crossroads, reaching out to rail-
heads and ammunition-dumps, while British airmen were on bombing
flights over railway stations and rest-billets and highroads down
which the German troops came marching at Cambrai, Bapaume, in the
valley between Irles and Warlencourt, at Ligny-Thilloy, Busigny, and
many other places on the lines of route.

German soldiers arriving one morning at Cambrai by train found
themselves under the fire of a single airplane which flew very low and
dropped bombs. They exploded with heavy crashes, and one bomb hit the
first carriage behind the engine, killing and wounding several men. A
second bomb hit the station buildings, and there was a clatter of
broken glass, the rending of wood, and the fall of bricks. All lights
went out, and the German soldiers groped about in the darkness amid
the splinters of glass and the fallen bricks, searching for the
wounded by the sound of their groans. It was but one scene along the
way to that blood-bath through which they had to wade to the trenches
of the Somme.

Flights of British airplanes circled over the villages on the way. At
Grevilliers, in August, eleven 112-16 bombs fell in the market square,
so that the center of the village collapsed in a state of ruin,
burying soldiers billeted there. Every day the British airmen paid
these visits, meeting the Germans far up the roads on their way to the
Somme, and swooping over them like a flying death. Even on the march
in open country the German soldiers tramping silently along--not
singing in spite of orders--were bombed and shot at by these British
aviators, who flew down very low, pouring out streams of machine-gun
bullets. The Germans lost their nerve at such times, and scattered
into the ditches, falling over one another, struck and cursed by their
Unteroffizieren, and leaving their dead and wounded in the roadway.

As the roads went nearer to the battlefields they were choked with the
traffic of war, with artillery and transport wagons and horse
ambulances, and always thousands of gray men marching up to the lines,
or back from them, exhausted and broken after many days in the fires
of hell up there. Officers sat on their horses by the roadside,
directing all the traffic with the usual swearing and cursing, and
rode alongside the transport wagons and the troops, urging them
forward at a quicker pace because of stern orders received from
headquarters demanding quicker movement. The reserves, it seemed, were
desperately wanted up in the lines. The English were attacking again .
. . God alone knew what was happening. Regiments had lost their way.
Wounded were pouring back. Officers had gone mad. Into the midst of
all this turmoil shells fell--shells from long-range guns. Transport
wagons were blown to bits. The bodies and fragments of artillery
horses lay all over the roads. Men lay dead or bleeding under the
debris of gun-wheels and broken bricks. Above all the noise of this
confusion and death in the night the hard, stern voices of German
officers rang out, and German discipline prevailed, and men marched on
to greater perils.

They were in the shell-zone now, and sometimes a regiment on the march
was tracked all along the way by British gun-fire directed from
airplanes and captive balloons. It was the fate of a captured officer
I met who had detrained at Bapaume for the trenches at Contalmaison.

At Bapaume his battalion was hit by fragments of twelve-inch shells.
Nearer to the line they came under the fire of eight-inch and six-inch
shells. Four-point-sevens (4.7's) found them somewhere by Bazentin. At
Contalmaison they marched into a barrage, and here the officer was
taken prisoner. Of his battalion there were few men left.

It was so with the 3d Jager Battalion, ordered up hurriedly to make a
counter-attack near Flers. They suffered so heavily on the way to the
trenches that no attack could be made. The stretcher-bearers had all
the work to do.

The way up to the trenches became more tragic as every kilometer was
passed, until the stench of corruption was wafted on the wind, so that
men were sickened, and tried not to breathe, and marched hurriedly to
get on the lee side of its foulness. They walked now through places
which had once been villages, but were sinister ruins where death lay
in wait for German soldiers.

"It seems queer to me," wrote one of them, "that whole villages close
to the front look as flattened as a child's toy run over by a steam-
roller. Not one stone remains on another. The streets are one line of
shell--holes. Add to that the thunder of the guns, and you will see
with what feelings we come into the line--into trenches where for
months shells of all caliber have rained. . . Flers is a scrap heap."

Again and again men lost their way up to the lines. The reliefs could
only be made at night lest they should be discovered by British airmen
and British gunners, and even if these German soldiers had trench maps
the guidance was but little good when many trenches had been smashed
in and only shell-craters could be found.

"In the front line of Flers," wrote one of these Germans, "the men
were only occupying shell-holes. Behind there was the intense smell of
putrefaction which filled the trench--almost unbearably. The corpses
lie either quite insufficiently covered with earth on the edge of the
trench or quite close under the bottom of the trench, so that the
earth lets the stench through. In some places bodies lie quite
uncovered in a trench recess, and no one seems to trouble about them.
One sees horrible pictures--here an arm, here a foot, here a head,
sticking out of the earth. And these are all German soldiers-heroes!

"Not far from us, at the entrance to a dugout, nine men were buried,
of whom three were dead. All along the trench men kept on getting
buried. What had been a perfect trench a few hours before was in parts
completely blown in . . . The men are getting weaker. It is impossible
to hold out any longer. Losses can no longer be reckoned accurately.
Without a doubt many of our people are killed."

That is only one out of thousands of such gruesome pictures, true as
the death they described, true to the pictures on our side of the line
as on their side, which went back to German homes during the battles
of the Somme. Those German soldiers were great letter-writers, and men
sitting in wet ditches, in "fox-holes," as they called their dugouts,
"up to my waist in mud," as one of them described, scribbled pitiful
things which they hoped might reach their people at home, as a voice
from the dead. For they had had little hope of escape from the blood--
bath. "When you get this I shall be a corpse," wrote one of them, and
one finds the same foreboding in many of these documents.