Books: Now It Can Be Told

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Even the lucky ones who could get some cover from the incessant
bombardment by English guns began to lose their nerves after a day or
two. They were always in fear of British infantry sweeping upon them
suddenly behind the Trommelfeuer, rushing their dugouts with bombs and
bayonets. Sentries became "jumpy," and signaled attacks when there
were no attacks. The gas--alarm was sounded constantly by the clang of
a bell in the trench, and men put on their heavy gas-masks and sat in
them until they were nearly stifled.

Here is a little picture of life in a German dugout near the British
lines, written by a man now dead:

"The telephone bell rings. 'Are you there? Yes, here's Nau's
battalion.' 'Good. That is all.' Then that ceases, and now the wire is
in again perhaps for the twenty-fifth or thirtieth time. Thus the
night is interrupted, and now they come, alarm messages, one after the
other, each more terrifying than the other, of enormous losses through
the bombs and shells of the enemy, of huge masses of troops advancing
upon us, of all possible possibilities, such as a train broken down,
and we are tortured by all the terrors that the mind can invent. Our
nerves quiver. We clench our teeth. None of us can forget the horrors
of the night."

Heavy rain fell and the dugouts became wet and filthy.

"Our sleeping-places were full of water. We had to try and bail out
the trenches with cooking-dishes. I lay down in the water with G-. We
were to have worked on dugouts, but not a soul could do any more. Only
a few sections got coffee. Mine got nothing at all. I was frozen in
every limb, poured the water out of my boots, and lay down again."

Our men suffered exactly the same things, but did not write about
them.

The German generals and their staffs could not be quite indifferent to
all this welter of human suffering among their troops, in spite of the
cold, scientific spirit with which they regarded the problem of war.
The agony of the individual soldier would not trouble them. There is
no war without agony. But the psychology of masses of men had to be
considered, because it affects the efficiency of the machine.

The German General Staff on the western front was becoming seriously
alarmed by the declining morale of its infantry under the increasing
strain of the British attacks, and adopted stern measures to cure it.
But it could not hope to cure the heaps of German dead who were lying
on the battlefields, nor the maimed men who were being carried back to
the dressing stations, nor to bring back the prisoners taken in droves
by the French and British troops.

Before the attack on the Flers line, the capture of Thiepval, and the
German debacle at Beaumont Hamel, in November, the enemy's command was
already filled with a grave anxiety at the enormous losses of its
fighting strength; was compelled to adopt new expedients for
increasing the number of its divisions. It was forced to withdraw
troops badly needed on other fronts, and the successive shocks of the
British offensive reached as far as Germany itself, so that the whole
of its recruiting system had to be revised to fill up the gaps torn
out of the German ranks.

XXII

All through July and August the enemy's troops fought with wonderful
and stubborn courage, defending every bit of broken woodland, every
heap of bricks that was once a village, every line of trenches smashed
by heavy shell-fire, with obstinacy.

It is indeed fair and just to say that throughout those battles of the
Somme our men fought against an enemy hard to beat, grim and resolute,
and inspired sometimes with the courage of despair, which was hardly
less dangerous than the courage of hope.

The Australians who struggled to get the high ground at Pozieres did
not have an easy task. The enemy made many counter-attacks against
them. All the ground thereabouts was, as I have said, so smashed that
the earth became finely powdered, and it was the arena of bloody
fighting at close quarters which did not last a day or two, but many
weeks. Mouquet Farm was like the phoenix which rose again out of its
ashes. In its tunneled ways German soldiers hid and came out to fight
our men in the rear long after the site of the farm was in our hands.

But the German troops were fighting what they knew to be a losing
battle. They were fighting rear-guard actions, trying to gain time for
the hasty digging of ditches behind them, trying to sell their lives
at the highest price.

They lived not only under incessant gun-fire, gradually weakening
their nerve-power, working a physical as well as a moral change in
them, but in constant terror of British attacks.

They could never be sure of safety at any hour of the day or night,
even in their deepest dugouts. The British varied their times of
attack. At dawn, at noon, when the sun was reddening in the west, just
before the dusk, in pitch darkness, even, the steady, regular
bombardment that had never ceased all through the days and nights
would concentrate into the great tumult of sudden drum-fire, and
presently waves of men--English or Scottish or Irish, Australians or
Canadians--would be sweeping on to them and over them, rummaging down
into the dugouts with bombs and bayonets, gathering up prisoners,
quick to kill if men were not quick to surrender.

In this way Thiepval was encircled so that the garrison there--the
180th Regiment, who had held it for two years--knew that they were
doomed. In this way Guillemont and Ginchy fell, so that in the first
place hardly a man out of two thousand men escaped to tell the tale of
horror in German lines, and in the second place there was no long
fight against the Irish, who stormed it in a wild, fierce rush which
even machine-guns could not check. The German General Staff was
getting flurried, grabbing at battalions from other parts of the line,
disorganizing its divisions under the urgent need of flinging in men
to stop this rot in the lines, ordering counter-attacks which were
without any chance of success, so that thin waves of men came out into
the open, as I saw them several times, to be swept down by scythes of
bullets which cut them clean to the earth. Before September 15th they
hoped that the British offensive was wearing itself out. It seemed to
them at least doubtful that after the struggle of two and a half
months the British troops could still have spirit and strength enough
to fling themselves against new lines.

But the machinery of their defense was crumbling. Many of their guns
had worn out, and could not be replaced quickly enough. Many batteries
had been knocked out in their emplacements along the line of Bazentin
and Longueval before the artillery was drawn back to Grand-court and a
new line of safety. Battalion commanders clamored for greater supplies
of hand-grenades, intrenching-tools, trench-mortars, signal rockets,
and all kinds of fighting material enormously in excess of all
previous requirements.

The difficulties of dealing with the wounded, who littered the
battlefields and choked the roads with the traffic of ambulances,
became increasingly severe, owing to the dearth of horses for
transport and the longer range of British guns which had been brought
far forward.

The German General Staff studied its next lines of defense away
through Courcelette, Martinpuich, Lesboeufs, Morval, and Combles, and
they did not look too good, but with luck and the courage of German
soldiers, and the exhaustion--surely those fellows were exhausted!--of
British troops--good enough.

On September 15th the German command had another shock when the whole
line of the British troops on the Somme front south of the Ancre rose
out of their trenches and swept over the German defenses in a tide.

Those defenses broke hopelessly, and the waves dashed through. Here
and there, as on the German left at Morval and Lesboeufs, the bulwarks
stood for a time, but the British pressed against them and round them.
On the German right, below the little river of the Ancre, Courcelette
fell, and Martinpuich, and at last, as I have written, High Wood,
which the Germans desired to hold at all costs, and had held against
incessant attacks by great concentration of artillery, was captured
and left behind by the London men. A new engine of war had come as a
demoralizing influence among German troops, spreading terror among
them on the first day out of the tanks. For the first time the Germans
were outwitted in inventions of destruction; they who had been
foremost in all engines of death. It was the moment of real panic in
the German lines--a panic reaching back from the troops to the High
Command.

Ten days later, on September 25th, when the British made a new
advance--all this time the French were pressing forward, too, on our
right by Roye--Combles was evacuated without a fight and with a litter
of dead in its streets; Gueudecourt, Lesboeufs, and Morval were lost
by the Germans; and a day later Thiepval, the greatest fortress
position next to Beaumont Hamel, fell, with all its garrison taken
prisoners.

They were black days in the German headquarters, where staff-officers
heard the news over their telephones and sent stern orders to
artillery commanders and divisional generals, and after dictating new
instructions that certain trench systems must be held at whatever
price, heard that already they were lost.

It was at this time that the morale of the German troops on the Somme
front showed most signs of breaking. In spite of all their courage,
the ordeal had been too hideous for them, and in spite of all their
discipline, the iron discipline of the German soldier, they were on
the edge of revolt. The intimate and undoubted facts of this break in
the morale of the enemy's troops during this period reveal a pitiful
picture of human agony.

"We are now fighting on the Somme with the English," wrote a man of
the 17th Bavarian Regiment. "You can no longer call it war. It is mere
murder. We are at the focal-point of the present battle in Foureaux
Wood (near Guillemont). All my previous experiences in this war--the
slaughter at Ypres and the battle in the gravel-pit at Hulluch--are
the purest child's play compared with this massacre, and that is much
too mild a description. I hardly think they will bring us into the
fight again, for we are in a very bad way."

"From September 12th to 27th we were on the Somme," wrote a man of the
l0th Bavarians, "and my regiment had fifteen hundred casualties."

A detailed picture of the German losses under our bombardment was
given in the diary of an officer captured in a trench near Flers, and
dated September 22d.

"The four days ending September 4th, spent in the trenches, were
characterized by a continual enemy bombardment that did not abate for
a single instant. The enemy had registered on our trenches with light,
as well as medium and heavy, batteries, notwithstanding that he had no
direct observation from his trenches, which lie on the other side of
the summit. His registering was done by his excellent air service,
which renders perfect reports of everything observed.

"During the first day, for instance, whenever the slightest movement
was visible in our trenches during the presence, as is usually the
case, of enemy aircraft flying as low as three and four hundred yards,
a heavy bombardment of the particular section took place. The very
heavy losses during the first day brought about the resolution to
evacuate the trenches during the daytime. Only a small garrison was
left, the remainder withdrawing to a part of the line on the left of
the Martinpuich-Pozieres road.

"The signal for a bombardment by 'heavies' was given by the English
airplanes. On the first day we tried to fire by platoons on the
airplanes, but a second airplane retaliated by dropping bombs and
firing his machine-gun at our troops. Our own airmen appeared only
once for a short time behind our lines.

"While many airplanes are observing from early morning till late at
night, our own hardly ever venture near. The opinion is that our
trenches cannot protect troops during a barrage of the shortest
duration, owing to lack of dugouts.

"The enemy understands how to prevent, with his terrible barrage, the
bringing up of building material, and even how to hinder the work
itself. The consequence is that our trenches are always ready for an
assault on his part. Our artillery, which does occasionally put a
heavy barrage on the enemy trenches at a great expense of ammunition,
cannot cause similar destruction to him. He can bring his building
material up, can repair his trenches as well as build new ones, can
bring up rations and ammunition, and remove the wounded.

"The continual barrage on our lines of communication makes it very
difficult for us to ration and relieve our troops, to supply water,
ammunition, and building material, to evacuate wounded, and causes
heavy losses. This and the lack of protection from artillery fire and
the weather, the lack of hot meals, the continual necessity of lying
still in the same place, the danger of being buried, the long time the
wounded have to remain in the trenches, and chiefly the terrible
effect of the machine--and heavy-artillery fire, controlled by an
excellent air service, has a most demoralizing effect on the troops.

"Only with the greatest difficulty could the men be persuaded to stay
in the trenches under those conditions."

There were some who could not be persuaded to stay if they could see
any chance of deserting or malingering. For the first time on our
front the German officers could not trust the courage of their men,
nor their loyalty, nor their sense of discipline. All this horror of
men blown to bits over living men, of trenches heaped with dead and
dying, was stronger than courage, stronger than loyalty, stronger than
discipline. A moral rot was threatening to bring the German troops on
the Somme front to disaster.

Large numbers of men reported sick and tried by every kind of trick to
be sent back to base hospitals.

In the 4th Bavarian Division desertions were frequent, and several
times whole bodies of men refused to go forward into the front line.
The morale of men in the 393d Regiment, taken at Courcelette, seemed
to be very weak. One of the prisoners declared that they gave
themselves up without firing a shot, because they could trust the
English not to kill them.

The platoon commander had gone away, and the prisoner was ordered to
alarm the platoon in case of attack, but did not do so on purpose.
They did not shoot with rifles or machine-guns and did not throw
bombs.

Many of the German officers were as demoralized as the men, shirking
their posts in the trenches, shamming sickness, and even leading the
way to surrender. Prisoners of the 351st Regiment, which lost thirteen
hundred men in fifteen days, told of officers who had refused to take
their men up to the front-line, and of whole companies who had
declined to move when ordered to do so. An officer of the 74th
Landwehr Regiment is said by prisoners to have told his men during our
preliminary bombardment to surrender as soon as we attacked.

A German regimental order says: "I must state with the greatest regret
that the regiment, during this change of position, had to take notice
of the sad fact that men of four of the companies, inspired by
shameful cowardice, left their companies on their own initiative and
did not move into line."

Another order contains the same fact, and a warning of what punishment
may be meted out:

"Proofs are multiplying of men leaving the position without permission
and hiding at the rear. It is our duty . . . each at his post--to deal
with this fact with energy and success."

Many Bavarians complained that their officers did not accompany them
into the trenches, but went down to the hospitals with imaginary
diseases. In any case there was a great deal of real sickness, mental
and physical. The ranks were depleted by men suffering from fever,
pleurisy, jaundice, and stomach complaints of all kinds, twisted up
with rheumatism after lying in waterlogged holes, lamed for life by
bad cases of trench-foot, and nerve-broken so that they could do
nothing but weep.

The nervous cases were the worst and in greatest number. Many men went
raving mad. The shell-shock victims clawed at their mouths
unceasingly, or lay motionless like corpses with staring eyes, or
trembled in every limb, moaning miserably and afflicted with a great
terror.

To the Germans (barely less to British troops) the Somme battlefields
were not only shambles, but a territory which the devil claimed as his
own for the torture of men's brains and souls before they died in the
furnace fires. A spirit of revolt against all this crept into the
minds of men who retained their sanity--a revolt against the people
who had ordained this vast outrage against God and humanity.

Into German letters there crept bitter, burning words against "the
millionaires--who grow rich out of the war," against the high people
who live in comfort behind the lines. Letters from home inflamed these
thoughts.

It was not good reading for men under shell-fire.

"It seems that you soldiers fight so that official stay-at-homes can
treat us as female criminals. Tell me, dear husband, are you a
criminal when you fight in the trenches, or why do people treat women
and children here as such? . . .

"For the poor here it is terrible, and yet the rich, the gilded ones,
the bloated aristocrats, gobble up everything in front of our very
eyes . . . All soldiers--friend and foe--ought to throw down their
weapons and go on strike, so that this war which enslaves the people
more than ever may cease.

Thousands of letters, all in this strain, were reaching the German
soldiers on the Somme, and they did not strengthen the morale of men
already victims of terror and despair.

Behind the lines deserters were shot in batches. To those in front
came Orders of the Day warning them, exhorting them, commanding them
to hold fast.

"To the hesitating and faint-hearted in the regiment," says one of
these Orders, "I would say the following:

"What the Englishman can do the German can do also. Or if, on the
other hand, the Englishman really is a better and superior being, he
would be quite justified in his aim as regards this war, viz., the
extermination of the German. There is a further point to be noted:
this is the first time we have been in the line on the Somme, and what
is more, we are there at a time when things are more calm. The English
regiments opposing us have been in the firing-line for the second, and
in some cases even the third, time. Heads up and play the man!"

It was easy to write such documents. It was more difficult to bring up
reserves of men and ammunition. The German command was harder pressed
by the end of September.

From July 1st to September 8th, according to trustworthy information,
fifty-three German divisions in all were engaged against the Allies on
the Somme battlefront. Out of these fourteen were still in the line on
September 8th.

Twenty-eight had been withdrawn, broken and exhausted, to quieter
areas. Eleven more had been withdrawn to rest-billets. Under the
Allies' artillery fire and infantry attacks the average life of a
German division as a unit fit for service on the Somme was nineteen
days. More than two new German divisions had to be brought into the
front-line every week since the end of June, to replace those smashed
in the process of resisting the Allied attack. In November it was
reckoned by competent observers in the field that well over one
hundred and twenty German divisions had been passed through the ordeal
of the Somme, this number including those which have appeared there
more than once.

XXIII

By September 25th, when the British troops made another attack, the
morale of the German troops was reaching its lowest ebb. Except on
their right, at Beaumont Hamel and Beaucourt, they were far beyond the
great system of protective dugouts which had given them a sense of
safety before July 1st. Their second and third lines of defense had
been carried, and they were existing in shell-craters and trenches
hastily scraped up under ceaseless artillery fire.

The horrors of the battlefield were piled up to heights of agony and
terror. Living men dwelt among the unburied dead, made their way to
the front-lines over heaps of corpses, breathed in the smell of human
corruption and had always in their ears the cries of the wounded they
could not rescue. They wrote these things in tragic letters--thousands
of them--which never reached their homes in Germany, but lay in their
captured ditches.

"The number of dead lying about is awful. One stumbles over them."

"The stench of the dead lying round us is unbearable."

"We are no longer men here. We are worse than beasts."

"It is hell let loose." . . . "It is horrible." . . . "We've lived
in misery."

"If the dear ones at home could see all this perhaps there would be a
change. But they are never told."

"The ceaseless roar of the guns is driving us mad."

Poor, pitiful letters, out of their cries of agony one gets to the
real truth of war-the "glory" and the "splendor" of it preached by the
German philosophers and British Jingoes, who upheld it as the great
strengthening tonic for their race, and as the noblest experience of
men. Every line these German soldiers wrote might have been written by
one of ours; from both sides of the shifting lines there was the same
death and the same hell.

Behind the lines the German General Staff, counting up the losses of
battalions and divisions who staggered out weakly, performed juggling
tricks with what reserves it could lay its hands on, and flung up
stray units to relieve the poor wretches in the trenches. Many of
those reliefs lost their way in going up, and came up late, already
shattered by the shell-fire through which they passed.

"Our position," wrote a German infantry officer, "was, of course,
quite different from what we had been told. Our company alone relieved
a whole battalion. We had been told we were to relieve a company of
fifty men weakened by casualties.

"The men we relieved had no idea where the enemy was, how far off he
was, or whether any of our own troops were in front of us. We got no
idea of our support position until six o'clock this evening. The
English are four hundred yards away, by the windmill over the hill."

One German soldier wrote that the British "seem to relieve their
infantry very quickly, while the German commands work on the principle
of relieving only in the direst need, and leaving the divisions in as
long as possible."

Another wrote that:

"The leadership of the divisions really fell through. For the most
part we did not get orders, and the regiment had to manage as best it
could. If orders arrived they generally came too late or were dealt
out 'from the green table' without knowledge of the conditions in
front, so that to carry them out was impossible."

All this was a sign of demoralization, not only among the troops who
were doing the fighting and the suffering, but among the organizing
generals behind, who were directing the operations. The continual
hammer-strokes of the British and French armies on the Somme
battlefields strained the German war-machine on the western front
almost to breaking-point.

It seemed as though a real debacle might happen, and that they would
be forced to effect a general retreat--a withdrawal more or less at
ease or a retirement under pressure from the enemy . . . .

But they had luck--astonishing luck. At the very time when the morale
of the German soldiers was lowest and when the strain on the High
Command was greatest the weather turned in their favor and gave them
just the breathing-space they desperately needed. Rain fell heavily in
the middle of October, autumn mists prevented airplane activity and
artillery-work, and the ground became a quagmire, so that the British
troops found it difficult to get up their supplies for a new advance.

The Germans were able in this respite to bring up new divisions, fresh
and strong enough to make heavy counter--attacks in the Stuff and
Schwaben and Regina trenches, and to hold the lines more securely for
a time, while great digging was done farther back at Bapaume and the
next line of defense. Successive weeks of bad weather and our own
tragic losses checked the impetus of the British and French driving
power, and the Germans were able to reorganize and reform.

As I have said, the shock of our offensive reached as far as Germany,
and caused a complete reorganization in the system of obtaining
reserves of man-power. The process of "combing out," as we call it,
was pursued with astounding ruthlessness, and German mothers, already
stricken with the loss of their elder sons, raised cries of despair
when the youngest born were also seized--boys of eighteen belonging to
the 1918 class.

The whole of the 1917 class had joined the depots in March and May of
this year, receiving a three months' training before being transferred
to the field-recruit depots in June and July. About the middle of July
the first large drafts joined their units and made their appearance at
the front, and soon after the beginning of our offensive at least half
this class was in the front-line regiments. The massacre of the boys
had begun.