Books: Now It Can Be Told

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The battle of Arras, in which the British army was engaged, began on
April 9th, an Easter Sunday, when there was a gale of sleet and snow.
From ground near the old city of Arras I saw the preliminary
bombardment when the Vimy Ridge was blasted by a hurricane of fire and
the German lines beyond Arras were tossed up in earth and flame. From
one of old Vauban's earthworks outside the walls I saw lines of our
men going up in assault beyond the suburbs of Blangy and St.-Laurent
to Roclincourt, through a veil of sleet and smoke. Our gun-fire was
immense and devastating, and the first blow that fell upon the enemy
was overpowering. The Vimy Ridge was captured from end to end by the
Canadians on the left and the 51st Division of Highlanders on the
right. By the afternoon the entire living German population, more than
seven thousand in the tunnels of Vimy, were down below in the valley
on our side of the lines, and on the ridge were many of their dead as
I saw them afterward horribly mangled by shell-fire in the upheaved
earth. The Highland Division, commanded by General Harper--"Uncle
Harper," he was called--had done as well as the Canadians, though they
had less honor, and took as many prisoners. H.D. was their divisional
sign as I saw it stenciled on many ruined walls throughout the war.
"Well, General," said a Scottish sergeant, "they don't call us
Harper's Duds any more!" . . . On the right English county troops of
the 12th Division, 3d Division, and others, the 15th (Scottish) and
the 36th (London) had broken through, deeply and widely, capturing
many men and guns after hard fighting round machine-gun redoubts. That
night masses of German prisoners suffered terribly from a blizzard in
the barbed-wire cages at Etrun, by Arras, where Julius Caesar had his
camp for a year in other days of history. They herded together with
their bodies bent to the storm, each man sheltering his fellow and
giving a little human warmth. All night through a German commandant
sat in our Intelligence hut with his head bowed on his breast. Every
now and then he said: "It is cold! It is cold!" And our men lay out in
the captured ground beyond Arras and on the Vimy Ridge, under
harassing fire and machine-gun fire, cold, too, in that wild blizzard,
with British dead and German dead in the mangled earth about them.

Ludendorff admits the severity of that defeat.

"The battle near Arras on April 9th formed a bad beginning to the
capital fighting during this year.

"April 10th and the succeeding days were critical days. A breach
twelve thousand to fifteen thousand yards wide and as much as six
thousand yards and more in depth is not a thing to be mended without
more ado. It takes a good deal to repair the inordinate wastage of men
and guns as well as munitions that results from such a breach. It was
the business of the Supreme Command to provide reserves on a large
scale. But in view of the troops available, and of the war situation,
it was simply not possible to hold a second division in readiness
behind each division that might, perhaps, be about to drop out. A day
like April 9th upset all calculations. It was a matter of days before
a new front could be formed and consolidated. Even after the troops
were ultimately in line the issue of the crisis depended, as always in
such cases, very materially upon whether the enemy followed up his
initial success with a fresh attack and by fresh successes made it
difficult for us to create a firm front. In view of the weakening of
the line that inevitably resulted, such successes were only too easy
to achieve.

"From April 10th onward the English attacked in the breach in great
strength, but after all not in the grand manner; they extended their
attack on both wings, especially to the southward as far as
Bullecourt. On April 11th they gained Monchy, while we during the
night before the 12th evacuated the Vimy heights. April 23d and 28th,
and also May 3d, were again days of heavy, pitched battle. In between
there was some bitter local fighting. The struggle continued, we
delivered minor successful counter-attacks, and on the other hand lost
ground slightly at various points."

I remember many pictures of that fighting round Arras in the days that
followed the first day. I remember the sinister beauty of the city
itself, when there was a surging traffic of men and guns through its
ruined streets in spite of long-range shells which came crashing into
the houses. Our soldiers, in their steel hats and goatskin coats,
looked like medieval men-at-arms. The Highlanders who crowded Arras
had their pipe-bands there and they played in the Petite Place, and
the skirl of the pipes shattered against the gables of old houses.
There were tunnels beneath Arras through which our men advanced to the
German lines, and I went along them when one line of men was going
into battle and another was coming back, wounded, some of them blind,
bloody, vomiting with the fumes of gas in their lungs--their steel
hats clinking as they groped past one another. In vaults each side of
these passages men played cards on barrels, to the light of candles
stuck in bottles, or slept until their turn to fight, with gas-masks
for their pillows. Outside the Citadel of Arras, built by Vauban under
Louis XIV, there were long queues of wounded men taking their turn to
the surgeons who were working in a deep crypt with a high-vaulted
roof. One day there were three thousand of them, silent, patient,
muddy, blood-stained. Blind boys or men with smashed faces swathed in
bloody rags groped forward to the dark passage leading to the vault,
led by comrades. On the grass outside lay men with leg wounds and
stomach wounds. The way past the station to the Arras-Cambrai road was
a death-trap for our transport and I saw the bodies of horses and men
horribly mangled there. Dead horses were thick on each side of an
avenue of trees on the southern side of the city, lying in their blood
and bowels. The traffic policeman on "point duty" on the Arras-Cambrai
road had an impassive face under his steel helmet, as though in
Piccadilly Circus; only turned his head a little at the scream of a
shell which plunged through the gable of a corner house above him.
There was a Pioneer battalion along the road out to Observatory Ridge,
which was a German target. They were mending the road beyond the last
trench, through which our men had smashed their way. They were busy
with bricks and shovels, only stopping to stare at shells plowing
holes in the fields on each side of them. When I came back one morning
a number of them lay covered with blankets, as though asleep. They
were dead, but their comrades worked on grimly, with no joy of labor
in their sweat.

Monchy Hill was the key position, high above the valley of the Scarpe.
I saw it first when there was a white village there, hardly touched by
fire, and afterward when there was no village. I was in the village
below Observatory Ridge on the morning of April 11th when cavalry was
massed on that ground, waiting for orders to go into action. The
headquarters of the cavalry division was in a ditch covered by planks,
and the cavalry generals and their staffs sat huddled together with
maps over their knees. "I am afraid the general is busy for the
moment," said a young staff-officer on top of the ditch. He looked
about the fields and said, "It's very unhealthy here." I agreed with
him. The bodies of many young soldiers lay about. Five-point-nines
(5.9's) were coming over in a haphazard way. It was no ground for
cavalry. But some squadrons of the 10th Hussars, Essex Yeomanry, and
the Blues were ordered to take Monchy, and rode up the hill in a
flurry of snow and were seen by German gunners and slashed by
shrapnel. Most of their horses were killed in the village or outside
it, and the men suffered many casualties, including their general--
Bulkely Johnson--whose body I saw carried back on a stretcher to the
ruin of Thilloy, where crumps were bursting. It is an astonishing
thing that two withered old French women stayed in the village all
through the fighting. When our troops rode in these women came running
forward, frightened and crying "Camarades!" as though in fear of the
enemy. When our men surrounded them they were full of joy and held up
their scraggy old faces to be kissed by these troopers. Afterward
Monchy was filled with a fury of shell-fire and the troopers crawled
out from the ruins, leaving the village on the hill to be attacked and
captured again by our infantry of the 15th and 37th Divisions, who
were also badly hammered.

Heroic folly! The cavalry in reserve below Observatory Hill stood to
their horses, staring up at a German airplane which came overhead,
careless of our "Archies." The eye of the German pilot must have
widened at the sight of that mass of men and horses. He carried back
glad tidings to the guns.

One of the cavalry officers spoke to me.

"You look ill."

"No, I'm all right. Only cold."

The officer himself looked worn and haggard after a night in the open.

"Do you think the Germans will get their range as far as this? I'm
nervous about the men and the horses. We've been here for hours, and
it seems no good."

I did not remind him that the airplane was undoubtedly the herald of
long-range shells. They came within a few minutes. Some men and horses
were killed. I was with a Highland officer and we took cover in a
ditch not more than breast high. Shells were bursting damnably close,
scattering us with dirt.

"Let's strike away from the road," said Major Schiach. "They always
tape it out."

We struck across country, back to Arras, glad to get there . . . other
men had to stay.

The battles to the east of Arras that went before the capture of
Monchy and followed it were hard, nagging actions along the valley of
the Scarpe, which formed a glacis, where our men were terribly exposed
to machine--gun fire, and suffered heavily day after day, week after
week, for no object apparent to our battalion officers and men, who
did not know that they were doing team-work for the French. The
Londoners of the 56th Division made a record advance through Neuville-
Vitasse to Henin and Heninel, and broke a switch-line of the
Hindenburg system across the little Cojeul River by Wancourt. There
was a fatal attack in the dark on May 3d, when East Kents and Surreys
and Londoners saw a gray dawn come, revealing the enemy between them
and our main line, and had to hack their way through if they could,
There were many who could not, and even divisional generals were
embittered by these needless losses and by the hard driving of their
men, saying fierce things about our High Command.

Their language was mild compared with that of some of our young
officers. I remember one I met near Henin. He was one of a group of
three, all gunner officers who were looking about for better gun
positions not so clearly visible to the enemy, who was in two little
woods--the Bois de Sart and Bois Vert--which stared down upon them
like green eyes. Some of their guns had been destroyed, many of their
horses killed; some of their men. A few minutes before our meeting a
shell had crashed into a bath close to their hut, where men were
washing themselves. The explosion filled the bath with blood and bits
of flesh. The younger officer stared at me under the tilt forward of
his steel hat and said, "Hullo, Gibbs!" I had played chess with him at
Groom's Cafe in Fleet Street in days before the war. I went back to
his hut and had tea with him, close to that bath, hoping that we
should not be cut up with the cake. There were noises "off," as they
say in stage directions, which were enormously disconcerting to one's
peace of mind, and not very far off. I had heard before some hard
words about our generalship and staff-work, but never anything so
passionate, so violent, as from that gunner officer. His view of the
business was summed up in the word "murder." He raged against the
impossible orders sent down from headquarters, against the brutality
with which men were left in the line week after week, and against the
monstrous, abominable futility of all our so-called strategy. His
nerves were in rags, as I could see by the way in which his hand shook
when he lighted one cigarette after another. His spirit was in a flame
of revolt against the misery of his sleeplessness, filth, and imminent
peril of death. Every shell that burst near Henin sent a shudder
through him. I stayed an hour in his hut, and then went away toward
Neuville-Vitasse with harassing fire following along the way. I looked
back many times to the valley, and to the ridges where the enemy lived
above it, invisible but deadly. The sun was setting and there was a
tawny glamour in the sky, and a mystical beauty over the landscape
despite the desert that war had made there, leaving only white ruins
and slaughtered trees where once there were good villages with church
spires rising out of sheltering woods. The German gunners were doing
their evening hate. Crumps were bursting heavily again amid our gun
positions.

Heninel was not a choice spot. There were other places of extreme
unhealthfulness where our men had fought their way up to the
Hindenburg line, or, as the Germans called it, the Siegfried line.
Croisille and Cherisy were targets of German guns, and I saw them
ravaging among the ruins, and dodged them. But our men, who lived
close to these places, stayed there too long to dodge them always.
They were inhabitants, not visitors. The Australians settled down in
front of Bullecourt, captured it after many desperate fights, which
left them with a bitter grudge against tanks which had failed them and
some English troops who were held up on the left while they went
forward and were slaughtered. The 4th Australian Division lost three
thousand men in an experimental attack directed by the Fifth Army.
They made their gun emplacements in the Noreuil Valley, the valley of
death as they called it, and Australian gunners made little slit
trenches and scuttled into them when the Germans ranged on their
batteries, blowing gun spokes and wheels and breech-blocks into the
air. Queant, the bastion of the Hindenburg line, stared straight down
the valley, and it was evil ground, as I knew when I went walking
there with another war correspondent and an Australian officer who at
a great pace led us round about, amid 5.9's, and debouched a little to
see one of our ammunition-dumps exploding like a Brock's Benefit, and
chattered brightly under "woolly bears" which made a rending tumult
above our heads. I think he enjoyed his afternoon out from staff-work
in the headquarters huts. Afterward I was told that he was mad, but I
think he was only brave. I hated those hours, but put on the mask that
royalty wears when it takes an intelligent interest in factory-work.

The streams of wounded poured down into the casualty clearing stations
day by day, week by week, and I saw the crowded Butchers' Shops of
war, where busy surgeons lopped at limbs and plugged men's wounds.

Yet in those days, as before and afterward, as at the beginning and as
at the end, the spirits of British soldiers kept high unless their
bodies were laid low. Between battles they enjoyed their spells of
rest behind the lines. In that early summer of '17 there was laughter
in Arras, lots of fun in spite of high velocities, the music of massed
pipers and brass bands, jolly comradeship in billets with paneled
walls upon which perhaps Robespierre's shadow had fallen in the
candle-light before the Revolution, when he was the good young man of
Arras.

As a guest of the Gordons, of the 15th Division, I listened to the
pipers who marched round the table and stood behind the colonel's
chair and mine, and played the martial music of Scotland, until
something seemed to break in my soul and my ear-drums. I introduced a
French friend to the mess, and as a guest of honor he sat next to the
colonel, and the eight pipers played behind his chair. He went pale,
deadly white, and presently swooned off his chair . . . and the
Gordons thought it the finest tribute to their pipes!

The officers danced reels in stocking feet with challenging cries,
Gaelic exhortations, with fine grace and passion, though they were
tangled sometimes in the maze . . . many of them fell in the fields
outside or in the bogs of Flanders.

On the western side of Arras there were field sports by London men,
and Surreys, Buffs, Sussex, Norfolks, Suffolks, and Devons. They
played cricket between their turns in the line, lived in the sunshine
of the day, and did not look forward to the morrow. At such times one
found no trace of war's agony in their faces or their eyes nor in the
quality of their laughter.

My dwelling-place at that time, with other war correspondents, was in
an old white chateau between St.-Pol and Hesdin, from which we motored
out to the line, Arras way or Vimy way, for those walks in Queer
Street. The contrast of our retreat with that Armageddon beyond was
profound and bewildering. Behind the old white house were winding
walks through little woods beside the stream which Henry crossed on
his way to Agincourt; tapestried in early spring with bluebells and
daffodils and all the flowers that Ronsard wove into his verse in the
springtime of France. Birds sang their love-songs in the thickets. The
tits twittered fearfully at the laugh of the jay. All that beauty was
like a sharp pain at one's heart after hearing the close tumult of the
guns and trudging over the blasted fields of war, in the routine of
our task, week by week, month by month.

"This makes for madness," said a friend of mine, a musician surprised
to find himself a soldier. "In the morning we see boys with their
heads blown off"--that morning beyond the Point du Jour and Thelus we
had passed a group of headless boys, and another coming up stared at
them with a silly smile and said, "They've copped it all right!" and
went on to the same risk; and we had crouched below mounds of earth
when shells had scattered dirt over us and scared us horribly, so that
we felt a little sick in the stomach--"and in the afternoon we walk
through this garden where the birds are singing. . . There is no
sense in it. It's just midsummer madness!"

But only one of us went really mad and tried to cut his throat, and
died. One of the best, as I knew him at his best.

IV

The battles of the Third Army beyond Arras petered out and on June 7th
there was the battle of Messines and Wytschaete when the Second Army
revealed its mastery of organization and detail. It was the beginning
of a vastly ambitious scheme to capture the whole line of ridges
through Flanders, of which this was the southern hook, and then to
liberate the Belgian coast as far inland as Bruges by a combined sea-
and-land attack with shoregoing tanks, directed by the Fourth Army.
This first blow at the Messines Ridge was completely and wonderfully
successful, due to the explosion of seventeen enormous mines under the
German positions, followed by an attack "in depth," divisions passing
through each other, or "leap-frogging," as it was called, to the final
objectives against an enemy demoralized by the earthquake of the
explosions.

For two years there had been fierce underground fighting at Hill 60
and elsewhere, when our tunnelers saw the Germans had listened to one
another's workings, racing to strike through first to their enemies'
galleries and touch off their high-explosive charges. Our miners,
aided by the magnificent work of Australian and Canadian tunnelers,
had beaten the enemy into sheer terror of their method of fighting and
they had abandoned it, believing that we had also. But we did not, as
they found to their cost.

I had seen the working of the tunnelers up by Hill 70 and elsewhere. I
had gone into the darkness of the tunnels, crouching low, striking my
steel hat with sharp, spine-jarring knocks against the low beams
overhead, coming into galleries where one could stand upright and walk
at ease in electric light, hearing the vibrant hum of great engines,
the murmur of men's voices in dark crypts, seeing numbers of men
sleeping on bunks in the gloom of caverns close beneath the German
lines, and listening through a queer little instrument called a
microphone, by which I heard the scuffle of German feet in German
galleries a thousand yards away, the dropping of a pick or shovel, the
knocking out of German pipes against charcoal stoves. It was by that
listening instrument, more perfect than the enemy's, that we had
beaten him, and by the grim determination of those underground men of
ours, whose skin was the color of the chalk in which they worked, who
coughed in the dampness of the caves, and who packed high explosives
at the shaft-heads--hundreds of tons of it--for the moment when a
button should be touched far away, and an electric current would pass
down a wire, and the enemy and his works would be blown into dust.

That moment came at Hill 60 and sixteen other places below the
Wytschaete and Messines Ridge at three-thirty on the morning of June
7th, after a quiet night of war, when a few of our batteries had fired
in a desultory way and the enemy had sent over some flocks of gas-
shells, and before the dawn I heard the cocks crow on Kemmel Hill. I
saw the seventeen mines go up, and earth and flame gush out of them as
though the fires of hell had risen. A terrible sight, as the work of
men against their fellow--creatures. . . It was the signal for seven
hundred and fifty of our heavy guns and two thousand of our field--
guns to open fire, and behind a moving wall of bursting shells
English, Irish, and New Zealand soldiers moved forward in dense waves.
It was almost a "walk-over." Only here and there groups of Germans
served their machine-guns to the death. Most of the living were
stupefied amid their dead in the upheaved trenches, slashed woods, and
deepest dugouts. I walked to the edge of the mine-craters and stared
into their great gulfs, wondering how many German bodies had been
engulfed there. The following day I walked through Wytschaete Wood to
the ruins of the Hospice on the ridge. In 1914 some of our cavalry had
passed this way when the Hospice was a big red-brick building with
wings and outhouses and a large community of nuns and children.
Through my glasses I had often seen its ruins from Kemmel Hill and the
Scherpenberg. Now nothing was left but a pile of broken bricks, not
very high. Our losses were comparatively small, though some brave men
had died, including Major Willie Redmond, whose death in Wytschaete
Wood was heard with grief in Ireland.

Ludendorff admits the severity of the blow:

"The moral effect of the explosions was simply staggering. . . The
7th of June cost us dear, and, owing to the success of the enemy
attack, the price we paid was very heavy. Here, too, it was many days
before the front was again secure. The British army did not press its
advantage; apparently it only intended to improve its position for the
launching of the great Flanders offensive. It thereupon resumed
operations between the old Arras battlefield and also between La
Bassee and Lens. The object of the enemy was to wear us down and
distract our attention from Ypres."

That was true. The Canadians made heavy attacks at Lens, some of which
I saw from ground beyond Notre Dame de Lorette and the Vimy Ridge and
the enemy country by Grenay, when those men besieged a long chain of
mining villages which girdled Lens itself, where every house was a
machine-gun fort above deep tunnels. I saw them after desperate
struggles, covered in clay, parched with thirst, gassed, wounded, but
indomitable. Lens was the Troy of the Canadian Corps and the English
troops of the First Army, and it was only owing to other battles they
were called upon to fight in Flanders that they had to leave it at
last uncaptured, for the enemy to escape.

All this was subsidiary to the great offensive in Flanders, with its
ambitious objects. But when the battles of Flanders began the year was
getting past its middle age, and events on other fronts had upset the
strategical plan of Sir Douglas Haig and our High Command. The failure
and abandonment of the Nivelle offensive in the Champagne were
disastrous to us. It liberated many German divisions who could be sent
up to relieve exhausted divisions in Flanders. Instead of attacking
the enemy when he was weakening under assaults elsewhere, we attacked
him when all was quiet on the French front. The collapse of Russia was
now happening and our policy ought to have been to save men for the
tremendous moment of 1918, when we should need all our strength. So it
seems certain now, though it is easy to prophesy after the event.

I went along the coast as far as Coxyde and Nieuport and saw secret
preparations for the coast offensive. We were building enormous gun
emplacements at Malo-les--Bains for long-range naval guns, camouflaged
in sand--dunes. Our men were being trained for fighting in the dunes.
Our artillery positions were mapped out.