Books: Now It Can Be Told

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"Three shots to one, sir," said Sir Henry Rawlinson to the King,
"that's the stuff to give them!"

But the Germans struck the first blow up there, not of importance to
the strategical position, but ghastly to two battalions of the 1st
Division, cut off on a spit of land at Lombartzyde and almost
annihilated under a fury of fire.

At this time the enemy was developing his use of a new poison-gas--
mustard gas--which raised blisters and burned men's bodies where the
vapor was condensed into a reddish powder and blinded them for a week
or more, if not forever, and turned their lungs to water. I saw
hundreds of these cases in the 3rd Canadian casualty clearing station
on the coast, and there were thousands all along our front. At Oast
Dunkerque, near Nieuport, I had a whiff of it, and was conscious of a
burning sensation about the lips and eyelids, and for a week afterward
vomited at times, and was scared by queer flutterings of the heart
which at night seemed to have but a feeble beat. It was enough to "put
the wind up." Our men dreaded the new danger, so mysterious, so
stealthy in its approach. It was one of the new plagues of war.

V

The battle of Flanders began round Ypres on July 31st, with a greater
intensity of artillery on our side than had ever been seen before in
this war in spite of the Somme and Messines, when on big days of
battle two thousand guns opened fire on a single corps front. The
enemy was strong also in artillery arranged in great groups, often
shifting to enfilade our lines of attack. The natural strength of his
position along the ridges, which were like a great bony hand
outstretched through Flanders, with streams or "beeks," as they are
called, flowing in the valleys which ran between the fingers of that
clawlike range, were strengthened by chains of little concrete forts
or "pill-boxes," as our soldiers called them, so arranged that they
could defend one another by enfilade machine-gun fire. These were held
by garrisons of machine--gunners of proved resolution, whose duty was
to break up our waves of attack until, even if successful in gaining
ground, only small bodies of survivors would be in a position to
resist the counter-attacks launched by German divisions farther back.
The strength of the pill--boxes made of concrete two inches thick
resisted everything but the direct hit of heavy shells, and they were
not easy targets at long range. The garrisons within them fought often
with the utmost courage, even when surrounded, and again and again
this method of defense proved terribly effective against the desperate
heroic assaults of British infantry.

What our men had suffered in earlier battles was surpassed by what
they were now called upon to endure. All the agonies of war which I
have attempted to describe were piled up in those fields of Flanders.
There was nothing missing in the list of war's abominations. A few
days after the battle began the rains began, and hardly ceased for
four months. Night after night the skies opened and let down steady
torrents, which turned all that country into one great bog of slime.
Those little rivers or "beeks," which ran between the knobby fingers
of the clawlike range of ridges, were blown out of their channels and
slopped over into broad swamps. The hurricanes of artillery fire which
our gunners poured upon the enemy positions for twenty miles in depth
churned up deep shell-craters which intermingled and made pits which
the rains and floods filled to the brim. The only way of walking was
by "duck-boards," tracks laid down across the bogs under enemy fire,
smashed up day by day, laid down again under cover of darkness. Along
a duckboard walk men must march in single file, and if one of our men,
heavily laden in his fighting-kit, stumbled on those greasy boards (as
all of them stumbled at every few yards) and fell off, he sank up to
his knees, often up to his waist, sometimes up to his neck, in mud and
water. If he were wounded when he fell, and darkness was about him, he
could only cry to God or his pals, for he was helpless otherwise. One
of our divisions of Lancashire men--the 66th--took eleven hours in
making three miles or so out of Ypres across that ground on their way
to attack, and then, in spite of their exhaustion, attacked. Yet week
after week, month after month, our masses of men, almost every
division in the British army at one time or another, struggled on
through that Slough of Despond, capturing ridge after ridge, until the
heights at Passchendaele were stormed and won, though even then the
Germans clung to Staden and Westroosebeeke when all our efforts came
to a dead halt, and that Belgian coast attack was never launched.

Sir Douglas Haig thinks that some of the descriptions of that six
months' horror were "exaggerated." As a man who knows something of the
value of words, and who saw many of those battle scenes in Flanders,
and went out from Ypres many times during those months to the Westhoek
Ridge and the Pilkem Ridge, to the Frezenburg and Inverness Copse and
Glencourse Wood, and beyond to Polygon Wood and Passchendaele, where
his dead lay in the swamps and round the pill-boxes, and where tanks
that had wallowed into the mire were shot into scrap-iron by German
gun-fire (thirty were knocked out by direct hits on the first day of
battle), and where our own guns were being flung up by the harassing
fire of heavy shells, I say now that nothing that has been written is
more than the pale image of the abomination of those battlefields, and
that no pen or brush has yet achieved the picture of that Armageddon
in which so many of our men perished.

They were months of ghastly endurance to gunners when batteries sank
up to their axles as I saw them often while they fired almost
unceasingly for days and nights without sleep, and were living targets
of shells which burst about them. They were months of battle in which
our men advanced through slime into slime, under the slash of machine-
gun bullets, shrapnel, and high explosives, wet to the skin, chilled
to the bone, plastered up to the eyes in mud, with a dreadful way back
for walking wounded, and but little chance sometimes for wounded who
could not walk. The losses in many of these battles amounted almost to
annihilation to many battalions, and whole divisions lost as much as
50 per cent of their strength after a few days in action, before they
were "relieved." Those were dreadful losses. Napoleon said that no
body of men could lose more than 25 per cent of their fighting
strength in an action without being broken in spirit. Our men lost
double that, and more than double, but kept their courage, though in
some cases they lost their hope.

The 55th Division of Lancashire men, in their attacks on a line of
pill-boxes called Plum Farm, Schuler Farm, and Square Farm, below the
Gravenstafel Spur, lost 3,840 men in casualties out of 6,o49. Those
were not uncommon losses. They were usual losses. One day's fighting
in Flanders (on October 4th) cost the British army ten thousand
casualties, and they were considered "light" by the Higher Command in
relation to the objects achieved.

General Harper of the 51st (Highland) Division told me that in his
opinion the official communiques and the war correspondents' articles
gave only one side of the picture of war and were too glowing in their
optimism. (I did not tell him that my articles were accused of being
black in pessimism, pervading gloom.) "We tell the public," he said,
"that an enemy division has been 'shattered.' That is true. But so is
mine. One of my brigades has lost eighty-seven officers and two
thousand men since the spring." He protested that there was not enough
liaison between the fighting-officers and the Higher Command, and
could not blame them for their hatred of "the Staff."

The story of the two Irish divisions--the 36th Ulster; and 16th
(Nationalist)--in their fighting on August 16th is black in tragedy.
They were left in the line for sixteen days before the battle and were
shelled and gassed incessantly as they crouched in wet ditches. Every
day groups of men were blown to bits, until the ditches were bloody
and the living lay by the corpses of their comrades. Every day scores
of wounded crawled back through the bogs, if they had the strength to
crawl. Before the attack on August 16th the Ulster Division had lost
nearly two thousand men. Then they attacked and lost two thousand
more, and over one hundred officers. The 16th Division lost as many
men before the attack and more officers. The 8th Dublins had been
annihilated in holding the line. On the night before the battle
hundreds of men were gassed. Then their comrades attacked and lost
over two thousand more, and one hundred and sixty--two officers. All
the ground below two knolls of earth called Hill 35 and Hill 37, which
were defended by German pill-boxes called Pond Farm and Gallipoli,
Beck House and Borry Farm, became an Irish shambles. In spite of their
dreadful losses the survivors in the Irish battalion went forward to
the assault with desperate valor on the morning of August 16th,
surrounded the pill-boxes, stormed them through blasts of machine-gun
fire, and toward the end of the day small bodies of these men had
gained a footing on the objectives which they had been asked to
capture, but were then too weak to resist German counter-attacks. The
7th and 8th Royal Irish Fusiliers had been almost exterminated in
their efforts to dislodge the enemy from Hill 37. They lost seventeen
officers out of twenty-one, and 64 per cent of their men. One company
of four officers and one hundred men, ordered to capture the concrete
fort known as Borry Farm, at all cost, lost four officers and seventy
men. The 9th Dublins lost fifteen officers out of seventeen, and 66
per cent of their men.

The two Irish divisions were broken to bits, and their brigadiers
called it murder. They were violent in their denunciation of the Fifth
Army for having put their men into the attack after those thirteen
days of heavy shelling, and after the battle they complained that they
were cast aside like old shoes, no care being taken for the comfort of
the men who had survived. No motor-lorries were sent to meet them and
bring them down, but they had to tramp back, exhausted and dazed. The
remnants of the 16th Division, the poor, despairing remnants, were
sent, without rest or baths, straight into the line again, down south.

I found a general opinion among officers and men, not only of the
Irish Division, under the command of the Fifth Army, that they had
been the victims of atrocious staff-work, tragic in its consequences.
From what I saw of some of the Fifth Army staff-officers I was of the
same opinion. Some of these young gentlemen, and some of the elderly
officers, were arrogant and supercilious without revealing any
symptoms of intelligence. If they had wisdom it was deeply camouflaged
by an air of inefficiency. If they had knowledge they hid it as a
secret of their own. General Gough, commanding the Fifth Army in
Flanders, and afterward north and south of St.-Quentin, where the
enemy broke through, was extremely courteous, of most amiable
character, with a high sense of duty. But in Flanders, if not
personally responsible for many tragic happenings, he was badly served
by some of his subordinates; and battalion officers and divisional
staffs raged against the whole of the Fifth Army organization, or lack
of organization, with an extreme passion of speech.

"You must be glad to leave Flanders," I said to a group of officers
trekking toward the Cambrai salient.

One of them answered, violently: "God be thanked we are leaving the
Fifth Army area!"

In an earlier chapter of this book I have already paid a tribute to
the Second Army, and especially to Sir John Harington, its chief of
staff. There was a thoroughness of method, a minute attention to
detail, a care for the comfort and spirit of the men throughout the
Second Army staff which did at least inspire the troops with the
belief that whatever they did in the fighting-lines had been prepared,
and would be supported, with every possible help that organization
could provide. That belief was founded not upon fine words spoken on
parade, but by strenuous work, a driving zeal, and the fine
intelligence of a chief of staff whose brain was like a high-power
engine.

I remember a historic little scene in the Second Army headquarters at
Cassel, in a room where many of the great battles had been planned,
when Sir John Harington made the dramatic announcement that Sir
Herbert Plumer, and he, as General Plumer's chief of staff, had been
ordered to Italy--in the middle of a battle--to report on the
situation which had become so grave there. He expressed his regret
that he should have to leave Flanders without completing all his
plans, but was glad that Passchendaele had been captured before his
going.

In front of him was the map of the great range from Wytschaete to
Staden, and he laid his hand upon it and smiled and said: "I often
used to think how much of that range we should get this year. Now it
is nearly all ours." He thanked the war correspondents for all their
articles, which had been very helpful to the army, and said how glad
he had been to have our co-operation.

"It was my ambition," he said, speaking with some emotion, "to make
cordial relations between battalion officers and the staff, and to get
rid of that criticism (sometimes just) which has been directed against
the staff. The Second Army has been able to show the fighting soldiers
that the success of a battle depends greatly on efficient staff work,
and has inspired them with confidence in the preparations and
organization behind the lines."

Yet it seemed to me, in my pessimism, and seems to me still, in my
memory of all that ghastly fighting, that the fine mechanism of the
Second Army applied to those battles in Flanders was utterly misspent,
that after the first heavy rains had fallen the offensive ought to
have been abandoned, and that it was a frightful error of judgment to
ask masses of men to attack in conditions where they had not a dog's
chance of victory, except at a cost which made it of Pyrrhic irony.

Nevertheless, it was wearing the enemy out, as well as our own
strength in man-power. He could less afford to lose his one man than
we could our three, now that the United States had entered the war.
Ludendorff has described the German agony, and days of battle which he
calls "terrific," inflicting "enormous loss" upon his armies and
increasing his anxiety at the "reduction of our fighting strength."

"Enormous masses of ammunition, the like of which no mortal mind
before the war had conceived, were hurled against human beings who
lay, eking out but a bare existence, scattered in shell-holes that
were deep in slime. The terror of it surpassed even that of the shell-
pitted field before Verdun. This was not life; it was agony
unspeakable. And out of the universe of slime the attacker wallowed
forward, slowly but continually, and in dense masses. Time and again
the enemy, struck by the hail of our projectiles in the fore field,
collapsed, and our lonely men in the shell-holes breathed again. Then
the mass came on. Rifle and machine-gun were beslimed. The struggle
was man to man, and--only too often--it was the mass that won.

"What the German soldier accomplished, lived through, and suffered
during the Flanders battle will stand in his honor for all time as a
brazen monument that he set himself with his own hands on enemy soil!

"The enemy's losses, too, were heavy. When, in the spring of 1918, we
occupied the battlefield, it presented a horrible spectacle with its
many unburied dead. Their number ran into thousands. Two-thirds of
them were enemy dead; one-third were German soldiers who had met here
a hero's death.

"And yet the truth must be told; individual units no longer surmounted
as before the demoralizing influences of the defensive campaign.

"October 26th and 30th and November 6th and 10th were also days of
pitched battle of the heaviest kind. The enemy stormed like a wild
bull against the iron wall that kept him at a distance from our U-boat
base. He hurled his weight against the Houthulst Wood; he hurled it
against Poelcapelle, Passchendaele, Becelaere, Gheluvelt, and
Zandvoorde; at very many points he dented the line. It seemed as if he
would charge down the wall; but, although a slight tremor passed
through its foundation, the wall held. The impressions that I
continued to receive were extremely grave. Tactically everything had
been done; the fore field was good. Our artillery practice had
materially improved. Behind nearly every fighting--division there
stood a second, as rear wave. In the third line, too, there were still
reserves. We knew that the wear and tear of the enemy's forces was
high. But we also knew that the enemy was extraordinarily strong and,
what was equally important, possessed extraordinary will-power."

That was the impression of the cold brain directing the machinery of
war from German headquarters. More human and more tragic is a letter
of an unknown German officer which we found among hundreds of others,
telling the same tale, in the mud of the battlefield:

"If it were not for the men who have been spared me on this fierce day
and are lying around me, and looking timidly at me, I should shed hot
and bitter tears over the terrors that have menaced me during these
hours. On the morning of September 18th my dugout containing seventeen
men was shot to pieces over our heads. I am the only one who withstood
the maddening bombardment of three days and still survives. You cannot
imagine the frightful mental torments I have undergone in those few
hours. After crawling out through the bleeding remnants of my
comrades, and through the smoke and debris, wandering and running in
the midst of the raging gun-fire in search of a refuge, I am now
awaiting death at any moment. You do not know what Flanders means.
Flanders means endless human endurance. Flanders means blood and
scraps of human bodies. Flanders means heroic courage and faithfulness
even unto death."

To British and to Germans it meant the same.

VI

During the four and a half months of that fighting the war
correspondents were billeted in the old town of Cassel, where, perched
on a hill which looks over a wide stretch of Flanders, through our
glasses we could see the sand-dunes beyond Dunkirk and with the naked
eyes the whole vista of the battle-line round Ypres and in the wide
curve all the countryside lying between Aire and Hazebrouck and Notre
Dame de Lorette. My billet was in a monastery for old priests, on the
eastern edge of the town, and at night my window was lighted by
distant shell-fire, and I gazed out to a sky of darkness rent by vivid
flashes, bursts of red flame, and rockets rising high. The priests
used to tap at my door when I came back from the battlefields all
muddy, with a slime-plastered face, writing furiously, and an old
padre used to plague me like that, saying:

"What news? It goes well, eh? Not too well, perhaps! Alas! it is a
slaughter on both sides."

"It is all your fault," I said once, chaffingly, to get rid of him.
"You do not pray enough."

He grasped my wrist with his skinny old hand.

"Monsieur," he whispered, "after eighty years I nearly lose my faith
in God. That is terrible, is it not? Why does not God give us victory?
Alas! perhaps we have sinned too much!"

One needed great faith for courage then, and my courage (never much to
boast about) ebbed low those days, when I agonized over our losses and
saw the suffering of our men and those foul swamps where the bodies of
our boys lay in pools of slime, vividly colored by the metallic vapors
of high explosives, beside the gashed tree-stumps; and the mangled
corpses of Germans who had died outside their pill-boxes; and when I
saw dead horses on the roads out of Ypres, and transport drivers dead
beside their broken wagons, and officers of ours with the look of
doomed men, nerve-shaken, soul-stricken, in captured blockhouses,
where I took a nip of whisky with them now and then before they
attacked again; and groups of dazed prisoners coming down the tracks
through their own harrowing fire; and always, always, streams of
wounded by tens of thousands.

There was an old mill-house near Vlamertinghe, beyond Goldfish
Chateau, which was made into a casualty clearing station, and scores
of times when I passed it I saw it crowded with the "walking wounded,"
who had trudged down from the fighting-line, taking eleven hours,
fourteen hours sometimes, to get so far. They were no longer
"cheerful" like the gay lads who came lightly wounded out of earlier
battles, glad of life, excited by their luck. They were silent,
shivering, stricken men; boys in age, but old and weary in the
knowledge of war. The slime of the battlefields had engulfed them.
Their clothes were plastered to their bodies. Their faces and hands
were coated with that whitish clay. Their steel hats and rifles were
caked with it. Their eyes, brooding, were strangely alive in those
corpselike figures of mud who huddled round charcoal stoves or sat
motionless on wooden forms, waiting for ambulances. Yet they were
stark in spirit still.

"Only the mud beat us," they said. Man after man said that.

"We should have gone much farther except for the mud."

Along the Menin road there were wayside dressing stations for wounded,
with surgeons at work, and I saw the same scenes there. They were not
beyond the danger zone. Doctors and orderlies were killed by long-
range shells. Wounded were wounded again or finished off. Some
ambulances were blown to bits. A colonel who had been standing in talk
with a doctor was killed halfway through a sentence.

There was never a day in which Ypres was not shelled by long-range
high velocities which came howling overhead as I heard them scores of
times in passing through those ruins with gas-mask at the alert,
according to orders, and steel hat strapped on, and a deadly sense of
nostalgia because of what was happening in the fields of horror that
lay beyond. Yet to the soldier farther up the Menin road Ypres was
sanctuary and God's heaven.

The little old town of Cassel on the hill--where once a Duke of York
marched up and then marched down again--was beyond shell-range, though
the enemy tried to reach it and dropped twelve-inch shells (which make
holes deep enough to bury a coach and horses) round its base. There is
an inn there--the Hotel du Sauvage--which belongs now to English
history, and Scottish and Irish and Welsh and Australian and Canadian.
It was the last place along the road to Ypres where men who loved life
could get a dinner sitting with their knees below a table-cloth, with
candle-light glinting in glasses, while outside the windows the
flickering fires of death told them how short might be their tarrying
in the good places of the world. This was a good place where the
blinds were pulled down by Madame, who understood. Behind the desk was
Mademoiselle Suzanne, "a dainty rogue in porcelain," with wonderfully
bright eyes and just a little greeting of a smile for any young
officer who looked her way trying to get that greeting, because it was
ever so long since he had seen a pretty face and might be ever so long
again. Sometimes it was a smile met in the mirror against the wall, to
which Suzanne looked to touch her curls and see, like the Lady of
Shalott, the pictures of life that passed. A man would tilt his chair
to get that angle of vision. Outside, on these nights of war, it was
often blusterous, very dark, wet with heavy rain. The door opened, and
other officers came in with waterproofs sagging round their legs and
top-boots muddy to the tags, abashed because they made pools of water
on polished boards.

"Pardon, Madame."

"Ca ne fait rien, Monsieur."

There was a klip-klop of horses' hoofs in the yard. I thought of
D'Artagnan and the Musketeers who might have ridden into this very
yard, strode into this very room, on their way to Dunkirk or Calais.
Madame played the piano remarkably well, classical music of all kinds,
and any accompaniment to any song. Our young officers sang. Some of
them touched the piano with a loving touch and said, "Ye gods, a piano
again!" and played old melodies or merry ragtime. Before Passchendaele
was taken a Canadian boy brought a fiddle with him, and played last of
all, after other tunes, "The Long, Long Trail," which his comrades
sang.

"Come and play to us again," said Madame.

"If I come back," said the boy.

He did not come back along the road through Ypres to Cassel.

From the balcony one could see the nightbirds fly. On every moonlight
night German raiders were about bombing our camps and villages. One
could see just below the hill how the bombs crashed into St.-Marie
Capelle and many hamlets where British soldiers lay, and where
peasants and children were killed with them. For some strange reason
Cassel itself was never bombed.