Books: Now It Can Be Told

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

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Then older men, men beyond middle age, who correspond to the French
Territorial class, exempted from fighting service and kept on lines of
communication, were also called to the front, and whole garrisons of
these gray heads were removed from German towns to fill up the ranks.

"The view is held here," wrote a German soldier of the Somme, "that
the Higher Command intends gradually to have more and more Landsturm
battalions (men of the oldest reserves) trained in trench warfare for
a few weeks, as we have been, according to the quality of the men, and
thus to secure by degrees a body of troops on which it can count in an
emergency."

In the month of November the German High Command believed that the
British attacks were definitely at an end, "having broken down," as
they claimed, "in mud and blood," but another shock came to them when
once more British troops--the 51st Highland Division and the 63d Naval
Division--left their trenches, in fog and snow, and captured the
strongest fortress position on the enemy's front, at Beaumont Hamel,
bringing back over six thousand prisoners. It was after that they
began their retreat.

These studies of mine, of what happened on both sides of the shifting
lines in the Somme, must be as horrible to read as they were to write.
But they are less than the actual truth, for no pen will ever in one
book, or in hundreds, give the full record of the individual agony,
the broken heart-springs, the soul-shock as well as the shell-shock,
of that frightful struggle in which, on one side and the other, two
million men were engulfed. Modern civilization was wrecked on those
fire-blasted fields, though they led to what we called "Victory." More
died there than the flower of our youth and German manhood. The Old
Order of the world died there, because many men who came alive out of
that conflict were changed, and vowed not to tolerate a system of
thought which had led up to such a monstrous massacre of human beings
who prayed to the same God, loved the same joys of life, and had no
hatred of one another except as it had been lighted and inflamed by
their governors, their philosophers, and their newspapers. The German
soldier cursed the militarism which had plunged him into that horror.
The British soldier cursed the German as the direct cause of all his
trouble, but looked back on his side of the lines and saw an evil
there which was also his enemy--the evil of a secret diplomacy which
juggled with the lives of humble men so that war might be sprung upon
them without their knowledge or consent, and the evil of rulers who
hated German militarism not because of its wickedness, but because of
its strength in rivalry and the evil of a folly in the minds of men
which had taught them to regard war as a glorious adventure, and
patriotism as the right to dominate other peoples, and liberty as a
catch--word of politicians in search of power. After the Somme battles
there were many other battles as bloody and terrible, but they only
confirmed greater numbers of men in the faith that the old world had
been wrong in its "make-up" and wrong in its religion of life. Lip
service to Christian ethics was not good enough as an argument for
this. Either the heart of the world must be changed by a real
obedience to the gospel of Christ or Christianity must be abandoned
for a new creed which would give better results between men and
nations. There could be no reconciling of bayonet-drill and high
explosives with the words "Love one another." Or if bayonet-drill and
high-explosive force were to be the rule of life in preparation for
another struggle such as this, then at least let men put hypocrisy
away and return to the primitive law of the survival of the fittest in
a jungle world subservient to the king of beasts. The devotion of
military chaplains to the wounded, their valor, their decorations for
gallantry under fire, their human comradeship and spiritual sincerity,
would not bridge the gulf in the minds of many soldiers between a
gospel of love and this argument by bayonet and bomb, gas-shell and
high velocity, blunderbuss, club, and trench-shovel. Some time or
other, when German militarism acknowledged defeat by the break of its
machine or by the revolt of its people--not until then--there must be
a new order of things, which would prevent such another massacre in
the fair fields of life, and that could come only by a faith in the
hearts of many peoples breaking down old barriers of hatred and
reaching out to one another in a fellowship of common sense based on
common interests, and inspired by an ideal higher than this beast-like
rivalry of nations. So thinking men thought and talked. So said the
soldier--poets who wrote from the trenches. So said many onlookers.
The simple soldier did not talk like that unless he were a Frenchman.
Our men only began to talk like that after the war--as many of them
are now talking--and the revolt of the spirit, vague but passionate,
against the evil that had produced this devil's trap of war, and the
German challenge, was subconscious as they sat in their dugouts and
crowded in their ditches in the battles of the Somme.

Part Seven

THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON

I

During the two years that followed the battles of the Somme I recorded
in my daily despatches, republished in book form ("The Struggle in
Flanders" and "The Way to Victory"), the narrative of that continuous
conflict in which the British forces on the western front were at
death-grips with the German monster where now one side and then the
other heaved themselves upon their adversary and struggled for the
knock-out blow, until at last, after staggering losses on both sides,
the enemy was broken to bits in the last combined attack by British,
Belgian, French, and American armies. There is no need for me to
retell all that history in detail, and I am glad to know that there is
nothing I need alter in the record of events which I wrote as they
happened, because they have not been falsified by any new evidence;
and those detailed descriptions of mine stand true in fact and in the
emotion of the hours that passed, while masses of men were slaughtered
in the fields of Armageddon.

But now, looking back upon those last two years of the war as an eye-
witness of many tragic and heroic things, I see the frightful drama of
them as a whole and as one act was related to another, and as the plot
which seemed so tangled and confused, led by inevitable stages, not
under the control of any field-marshal or chief of staff, to the
climax in which empires crashed and exhausted nations looked round
upon the ruin which followed defeat and victory. I see also, as in one
picture, the colossal scale of that human struggle in that Armageddon
of our civilization, which at the time one reckoned only by each day's
success or failure, each day's slaughter on that side or the other.
One may add up the whole sum according to the bookkeeping of Fate, by
double-entry, credit and debit, profit and loss. One may set our
attacks in the battles of Flanders against the strength of the German
defense, and say our losses of three to one (as Ludendorff reckons
them, and as many of us guessed) were in our favor, because we could
afford the difference of exchange and the enemy could not put so many
human counters into the pool for the final "kitty" in this gamble with
life and death. One may balance the German offensive in March of '18
with the weight that was piling up against them by the entry of the
Americans. One may also see now, very clearly, the paramount
importance of the human factor in this arithmetic of war, the morale
of men being of greater influence than generalship, though dependent
on it, the spirit of peoples being as vital to success as the
mechanical efficiency of the war-machine; and above all, one is now
able to observe how each side blundered on in a blind, desperate way,
sacrificing masses of human life without a clear vision of the
consequences, until at last one side blundered more than another and
was lost. It will be impossible to pretend in history that our High
Command, or any other, foresaw the thread of plot as it was unraveled
to the end, and so arranged its plan that events happened according to
design. The events of March, 1918, were not foreseen nor prevented by
French or British. The ability of our generals was not imaginative nor
inventive, but limited to the piling up of men and munitions, always
more men and more munitions, against positions of enormous strength
and overcoming obstacles by sheer weight of flesh and blood and high
explosives. They were not cunning so far as I could see, nor in the
judgment of the men under their command, but simple and
straightforward gentlemen who said "once more unto the breach," and
sent up new battering-rams by brigades and divisions. There was no
evidence that I could find of high directing brains choosing the
weakest spot in the enemy's armor and piercing it with a sharp sword,
or avoiding a direct assault against the enemy's most formidable
positions and leaping upon him from some unguarded way. Perhaps that
was impossible in the conditions of modern warfare and the limitations
of the British front until the arrival of the tanks, which, for a long
time, were wasted in the impassable bogs of Flanders, where their
steel skeletons still lie rusting as a proof of heroic efforts vainly
used. Possible or not, and rare genius alone could prove it one way or
another, it appeared to the onlooker, as well as to the soldier who
carried out commands that our method of warfare was to search the map
for a place which was strongest in the enemy's lines, most difficult
to attack, most powerfully defended, and then after due advertisement,
not to take an unfair advantage of the enemy, to launch the assault.
That had always been the English way and that was our way in many
battles of the great war, which were won (unless they were lost) by
the sheer valor of men who at great cost smashed their way through all
obstructions.

The Germans, on the whole, showed more original genius in military
science, varying their methods of attack and defense according to
circumstances, building trenches and dugouts which we never equaled;
inventing the concrete blockhouse or "pill-box" for a forward
defensive zone thinly held in advance of the main battle zone, in
order to lessen their slaughter under the weight of our gun-fire (it
cost us dearly for a time); scattering their men in organized shell-
craters in order to distract our barrage fire; using the "elastic
system of defense" with frightful success against Nivelle's attack in
the Champagne; creating the system of assault of "infiltration" which
broke the Italian lines at Caporetto in 1917 and ours and the French
in 1918. Against all that we may set only our tanks, which in the end
led the way to victory, but the German High Command blundered
atrociously in all the larger calculations of war, so that they
brought about the doom of their empire by a series of acts which would
seem deliberate if we had not known that they were merely blind. With
a folly that still seems incredible, they took the risk of adding the
greatest power in the world--in numbers of men and in potential
energy--to their list of enemies at a time when their own man-power
was on the wane. With deliberate arrogance they flouted the United
States and forced her to declare war. Their temptation, of course, was
great. The British naval blockade was causing severe suffering by food
shortage to the German people and denying them access to raw material
which they needed for the machinery of war.

The submarine campaign, ruthlessly carried out, would and did inflict
immense damage upon British and Allied shipping, and was a deadly
menace to England. But German calculations were utterly wrong, as
Ludendorff in his Memoirs now admits, in estimating the amount of time
needed to break her bonds by submarine warfare before America could
send over great armies to Europe. The German war lords were wrong
again in underestimating the defensive and offensive success of the
British navy and mercantile marine against submarine activities. By
those miscalculations they lost the war in the long run, and by other
errors they made their loss more certain.

One mistake they made was their utter callousness regarding the
psychology and temper of their soldiers and civilian population. They
put a greater strain upon them than human nature could bear, and by
driving their fighting-men into one shambles after another, while they
doped their people with false promises which were never fulfilled,
they sowed the seeds of revolt and despair which finally launched them
into gulfs of ruin. I have read nothing more horrible than the cold-
blooded cruelty of Ludendorff's Memoirs, in which, without any attempt
at self-excuse, he reveals himself as using the lives of millions of
men upon a gambling chance of victory with the hazards weighted
against him, as he admits. Writing of January, 1917, he says: "A
collapse on the part of Russia was by no means to be contemplated and
was, indeed, not reckoned upon by any one. . . Failing the U-boat
campaign we reckoned with the collapse of the Quadruple Alliance
during 1917." Yet with that enormous risk visible ahead, Ludendorff
continued to play the grand jeu, the great game, and did not advise
any surrender of imperial ambitions in order to obtain a peace for his
people, and was furious with the Majority party in the Reichstag for
preparing a peace resolution. The collapse of Russia inspired him with
new hopes of victory in the west, and again he prepared to sacrifice
masses of men in the slaughter-fields. But he blundered again, and
this time fatally. His time-table was out of gear. The U--boat war had
failed. American manhood was pouring into France, and German soldiers
on the Russian front had been infected with ideas most dangerous to
German discipline and the "will to win." At the end, as at the
beginning, the German war lords failed to understand the psychology of
human nature as they had failed to understand the spirit of France, of
Belgium, of Great Britain, and of America. One of the most important
admissions in history is made by Ludendorff when he writes:

"Looking back, I say our decline began clearly with the outbreak of
the revolution in Russia. On the one side the government was dominated
by the fear that the infection would spread, and on the other by the
feeling of their helplessness to instil fresh strength into the masses
of the people and to strengthen their warlike ardor, waning as it was
through a combination of innumerable circumstances."

So the web of fate was spun, and men who thought they were directing
the destiny of the world were merely caught in those woven threads
like puppets tied to strings and made to dance. It was the old Dance
of Death which has happened before in the folly of mankind.

II

During the German retreat to their Hindenburg line we saw the full
ruthlessness of war as never before on the western front, in the
laying waste of a beautiful countryside, not by rational fighting, but
by carefully organized destruction. Ludendorff claims, quite justly,
that it was in accordance with the laws of war. That is true. It is
only that our laws of war are not justified by any code of humanity
above that of primitive savages. "The decision to retreat," he says,
"was not reached without a painful struggle. It implied a confession
of weakness that was bound to raise the morale of the enemy and to
lower our own. But as it was necessary for military reasons we had no
choice. It had to be carried out. . . The whole movement was a
brilliant performance. . . The retirement proved in a high degree
remunerative."

I saw the brilliant performance in its operation. I went into
beautiful little towns like Peronne, where the houses were being
gutted by smoldering fire, and into hundreds of villages where the
enemy had just gone out of them after touching off explosive charges
which had made all their cottages collapse like card houses, their
roofs spread flat upon their ruins, and their churches, after
centuries of worship in them, fall into chaotic heaps of masonry. I
wandered through the ruins of old French chateaux, once very stately
in their terraced gardens, now a litter of brickwork, broken statuary,
and twisted iron--work above open vaults where not even the dead had
been left to lie in peace. I saw the little old fruit-trees of French
peasants sawn off at the base, and the tall trees along the roadsides
stretched out like dead giants to bar our passage. Enormous craters
had been blown in the roadways, which had to be bridged for our
traffic of men and guns, following hard upon the enemy's retreat.

There was a queer sense of illusion as one traveled through this
desolation. At a short distance many of the villages seemed to stand
as before the war. One expected to find inhabitants there. But upon
close approach one saw that each house was but an empty shell blown
out from cellar to roof, and one wandered through the streets of the
ruins in a silence that was broken only by the sound of one's own
voice or by a few shells crashing into the gutted houses. The enemy
was in the next village, or the next but one, with a few field-guns
and a rear-guard of machine-gunners.

In most villages, in many of his dugouts, and by contraptions with
objects lying amid the litter, he had left "booby traps" to blow our
men to bits if they knocked a wire, or stirred an old boot, or picked
up a fountain-pen, or walked too often over a board where beneath acid
was eating through a metal plate to a high-explosive charge. I little
knew when I walked round the tower of the town hall of Bapaume that in
another week, with the enemy far away, it would go up in dust and
ashes. Only a few of our men were killed or blinded by these monkey-
tricks. Our engineers found most of them before they were touched off,
but one went down dugouts or into ruined houses with a sense of
imminent danger. All through the devastated region one walked with an
uncanny feeling of an evil spirit left behind by masses of men whose
bodies had gone away. It exuded from scraps of old clothing, it was in
the stench of the dugouts and in the ruins they had made.

In some few villages there were living people left behind, some
hundreds in Nesle and Roye, and, all told, some thousands. They had
been driven in from the other villages burning around them, their own
villages, whose devastation they wept to see. I met these people who
had lived under German rule and talked with many of them--old women,
wrinkled like dried-up apples, young women waxen of skin, hollow-eyed,
with sharp cheekbones, old peasant farmers and the gamekeepers of
French chateaux, and young boys and girls pinched by years of hunger
that was not quite starvation. It was from these people that I learned
a good deal about the psychology of German soldiers during the battles
of the Somme. They told me of the terror of these men at the
increasing fury of our gun-fire, of their desertion and revolt to
escape the slaughter, and of their rage against the "Great People" who
used them for gun-fodder. Habitually many of them talked of the war as
the "Great Swindle." These French civilians hated the Germans in the
mass with a cold, deadly hatred. They spoke with shrill passion at the
thought of German discipline, fines, punishments, requisitions, which
they had suffered in these years. The hope of vengeance was like water
to parched throats. Yet I noticed that nearly every one of these
people had something good to say about some German soldier who had
been billeted with them. "He was a good-natured fellow. He chopped
wood for me and gave the children his own bread. He wept when he told
me that the village was to be destroyed." Even some of the German
officers had deplored this destruction. "The world will have a right
to call us barbarians," said one of them in Ham. "But what can we do?
We are under orders. If we do not obey we shall be shot. It is the
cruelty of the High Command. It is the cruelty of war."

On the whole it seemed they had not misused the women. I heard no
tales of actual atrocity, though some of brutal passion. But many
women shrugged their shoulders when I questioned them about this and
said: "They had no need to use violence in their way of love--making.
There were many volunteers."

They rubbed their thumbs and fingers together as though touching money
and said, "You understand?"

I understood when I went to a convent in Amiens and saw a crowd of
young mothers with flaxen-haired babies, just arrived from the
liberated districts. "All those are the children of German fathers,"
said the old Reverend Mother. "That is the worst tragedy of war. How
will God punish all this? Alas! it is the innocent who suffer for the
guilty."

Eighteen months later, or thereabouts, I went into a house in Cologne,
where a British outpost was on the Hohenzollern bridge. There was a
babies' creche in an upper room, and a German lady was tending thirty
little ones whose chorus of "Guten Tag! Guten Tag!" was like the
quacking of ducks.

"After to-morrow there will be no more milk for them," she said.

"And then?" I asked.

"And then many of them will die."

She wept a little. I thought of those other babies in Amiens, and of
the old Reverend Mother.

"How will God punish all this? Alas! it is the innocent who suffer for
the guilty."

Of those things General Ludendorff does not write in his Memoirs,
which deal with the strategy and machinery of war.

III

Sir Douglas Haig was not misled into the error of following up the
German retreat, across that devastated country, with masses of men. He
sent forward outposts to keep in touch with the German rear-guards and
prepared to deliver big blows at the Vimy Ridge and the lines round
Arras. This new battle by British troops was dictated by French
strategy rather than by ours. General Nivelle, the new generalissimo,
was organizing a great offensive in the Champagne and desired the
British army to strike first and keep on striking in order to engage
and exhaust German divisions until he was ready to launch his own
legions. The "secret" of his preparations was known by every officer
in the French army and by Hindenburg and his staff, who prepared a new
method of defense to meet it. The French officers with whom I talked
were supremely confident of success. "We shall go through," they said.
"It is certain. Anybody who thinks otherwise is a traitor who betrays
his country by the poison of pessimism. Nivelle will deal the death--
blow." So spoke an officer of the Chasseurs Alpins, and a friend in
the infantry of the line, over a cup of coffee in an estaminet crammed
with other French soldiers who were on their way to the Champagne
front.

Nivelle did not launch his offensive until April 16th, seven days
after the British had captured the heights of Vimy and gone far to the
east of Arras. Hindenburg was ready. He adopted his "elastic system of
defense," which consisted in withdrawing the main body of his troops
beyond the range of the French barrage fire, leaving only a few
outposts to camouflage the withdrawal and be sacrificed for the sake
of the others (those German outposts must have disliked their
martyrdom under orders, and I doubt whether they, poor devils, were
exhilarated by the thought of their heroic service). He also withdrew
the full power of his artillery beyond the range of French counter-
battery work and to such a distance that when it was the German turn
to fire the French infantry would be beyond the effective protection
of their own guns. They were to be allowed an easy walk through to
their death-trap. That is what happened. The French infantry,
advancing with masses of black troops in the Colonial Corps in the
front-line of assault, all exultant and inspired by a belief in
victory, swept through the forward zone of the German defenses,
astonished, and then disconcerted by the scarcity of Germans, until an
annihilating barrage fire dropped upon them and smashed their human
waves. From French officers and nurses I heard appalling tales of this
tragedy. The death--wail of the black troops froze the blood of
Frenchmen with horror. Their own losses were immense in a bloody
shambles. I was told by French officers that their losses on the first
day of battle were 150,000 casualties, and these figures were
generally believed. They were not so bad as that, though terrible.
Semi-official figures state that the operations which lasted from
April 16th to April 25th cost France 28,000 killed on the field of
battle, 5,000 who died of wounds in hospital, 4,000 prisoners, and
80,000 wounded. General Nivelle's offensive was called off, and French
officers who had said, "We shall break through. . . It is certain,"
now said: "We came up against a bec de gaz. As you English would say,
we 'got it in the neck.' It is a great misfortune."