Books: Now It Can Be Told

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"We are a nest of spies," said some of the inhabitants, but others had
faith in a miraculous statue, and still others in Sir Herbert Plumer.

Once when a big shell burst very close I looked at Mademoiselle
Suzanne behind the desk. She did not show fear by the flicker of an
eyelid, though officers in the room were startled.

"Vous n'avez pas peur, meme de la mort?" ("You are not afraid, even of
death?") I asked.

She shrugged her shoulders.

"Je m'en fiche de la mort!" ("I don't care a damn for death!")

The Hotel du Sauvage was a pleasant rendezvous, but barred for a time
to young gentlemen of the air force, who lingered too long there
sometimes and were noisy. It was barred to all officers for certain
hours of the day without special permits from the A.P.M., who made
trouble in granting them. Three Scottish officers rode down into
Cassel. They had ridden down from hell-fire to sit at a table covered
with a table-cloth, and drink tea in a room again. They were refused
permission, and their language to me about the A.P.M. was unprintable.
They desired his blood and bones. They raised their hands to heaven to
send down wrath upon all skunks dwelling behind the lines in luxury
and denying any kind of comfort to fighting-men. They included the
P.M. in their rage, and all staff-officers from Cassel to Boulogne,
and away back to Whitehall.

To cheer up the war correspondents' mess when we assembled at night
after miserable days, and when in the darkness gusts of wind and rain
clouted the window-panes and distant gun-fire rumbled, or bombs were
falling in near villages, telling of peasant girls killed in their
beds and soldiers mangled in wayside burns, we had the company
sometimes of an officer (a black-eyed fellow) who told merry little
tales of executions and prison happenings at which he assisted in the
course of his duty.

I remember one about a young officer sentenced to death for cowardice
(there were quite a number of lads like that). He was blindfolded by a
gas-mask fixed on the wrong way round, and pinioned, and tied to a
post. The firing--party lost their nerve and their shots were wild.
The boy was only wounded, and screamed in his mask, and the A.P.M. had
to shoot him twice with his revolver before he died.

That was only one of many little anecdotes told by a gentleman who
seemed to like his job and to enjoy these reminiscences.

The battles of Flanders ended with the capture of Passchendaele by the
Canadians, and that year's fighting on the western front cost us
800,000 casualties, and though we had dealt the enemy heavy blows from
which he reeled back, the drain upon our man-power was too great for
what was to happen next year, and our men were too sorely tried. For
the first time the British army lost its spirit of optimism, and there
was a sense of deadly depression among many officers and men with whom
I came in touch. They saw no ending of the war, and nothing except
continuous slaughter, such as that in Flanders.

Our men were not mythical heroes exalted by the gods above the
limitations of nature. They were human beings, with wives and
children, or mothers and sisters, whom they desired to see again. They
hated this war. Death had no allurement for them, except now and then
as an escape from intolerable life under fire. They would have been
superhuman if they had not revolted in spirit, though still faithful
to discipline, against the foul conditions of warfare in the swamps,
where, in spite of all they had, in that four months or so of
fighting, achieved the greatest effort of human courage and endurance
ever done by masses of men in obedience to command.

VII

At the end of those battles happened that surprising, audacious
adventure in the Cambrai salient organized by the Third Army under
General Byng, when on November 20, 1917, squadrons of tanks broke
through the Hindenburg line, and infantry streamed through the breach,
captured hundreds of guns, ten thousand prisoners, many villages and
ridges, and gave a monstrous shock to the German High Command.

The audacity of the adventure lay in the poverty of manpower with
which it was attempted and supported. The divisions engaged had all
been through the grinding mill of Flanders and were tired men. The
artillery was made up largely of those batteries which had been axle--
deep in Flanders mud. It was clearly understood by General Byng and
Gen. Louis Vaughan, his chief of staff, that Sir Douglas Haig could
not afford to give them strong reserves to exploit any success they
might gain by surprise or to defend the captured ground against
certain counter-attacks. It was to be a surprise assault by tanks and
infantry, with the hope that the cavalry corps might find its gap at
last and sweep round Cambrai before the enemy could recover and
reorganize. With other correspondents I saw Gen. Louis Vaughan, who
expounded the scheme before it was launched. That charming man, with
his professional manner, sweetness of speech, gentleness of voice and
gesture, like an Oxford don analyzing the war correspondence of
Xenophon, made no secret of the economy with which the operation would
have to be made.

"We must cut our coat according to our cloth," he said.

The whole idea was to seize only as much ground as the initial success
could gain, and not to press if resistance became strong. It was a
gamble, with a chance of luck. The cavalry might do nothing, or score
a big triumph. All depended on the surprise of the tanks. If they were
discovered before the assault the whole adventure would fail at the
start.

They had been brought up secretly by night, four hundred of them, with
supply-tanks for ammunition and petrol lying hidden in woods by day.
So the artillery and infantry and cavalry had been concentrated also.
The enemy believed himself secure in his Hindenburg line, which had
been constructed behind broad hedges of barbed wire with such wide
ditches that no tank could cross.

How, then, would tanks cross? Ah, that was a little trick which would
surprise the Germans mightily. Each tank would advance through the
early morning mists with a bridge on its nose. The bridge was really a
big "fascine," or bundle of fagots about a yard and a half in
diameter, and controlled by a lever and chain from the interior of the
tank. Having plowed through the barbed wire and reached the edge of
the Hindenburg trench, the tank would drop the fascine into the center
of the ditch, stretch out its long body, reach the bundle of fagots,
find support on it, and use it as a stepping-stone to the other side.
Very simple in idea and effect!

So it happened, and the mists favored us, as I saw on the morning of
the attack at a little place called Beaumont, near Villers Pluich. The
enemy was completely surprised, caught at breakfast in his dugouts,
rounded up in batches. The tanks went away through the breach they had
made, with the infantry swarming round them, and captured Havrincourt,
Hermies, Ribecourt, Gouzeaucourt, Masnieres, and Marcoing, and a wide
stretch of country forming a cup or amphitheater below a series of low
ridges south of Bourlon Wood, where the ground rose again.

It was a spectacular battle, such as we had never seen before, and
during the following days, when our troops worked up to Bourlon Wood
and through the intervening villages of Anneux, Graincourt, Containg,
and Fontaine Notre Dame, I saw tanks going into action and cruising
about like landships, with cavalry patrols riding over open ground,
airplanes flying low over German territory, and masses of infantry
beyond all trench-lines, and streams of liberated civilians trudging
through the lines from Marcoing. The enemy was demoralized the first
day and made only slight resistance. The chief losses of the tanks
were due to a German major of artillery who served his own guns and
knocked out a baker's dozen of these monsters as they crawled over the
Flesquieres Ridge. I saw them lying there with the blood and bones of
their pilots and crews within their steel walls. It was a Highland
soldier who checked the German major.

"You're a brave man," he said, "but you've got to dee," and ran him
through the stomach with his bayonet. It was this check at the
Flesquieres Ridge, followed by the breaking of a bridge at Masnieres
under the weight of a tank and the holding of a trench-line called the
Rumilly switch by a battalion of Germans who raced to it from Cambrai
before our men could capture it, which thwarted the plans of the
cavalry. Our cavalry generals were in consultation at their
headquarters, too far back to take immediate advantage of the
situation. They waited for the capture of the Rumilly switch, and held
up masses of cavalry whom I saw riding through the village of
Ribecourt, with excitement and exaltation, because they thought that
at last their chance had come. Finally orders were given to cancel all
previous plans to advance. Only one squadron, belonging to the
Canadian Fort Garry Horse in General Seely's division, failed to
receive the order (their colonel rode after them, but his horse
slipped and fell before he caught them up), and it was their day of
heroic folly. They rode fast and made their way through a gap in the
wire cut by the troopers, and came under rifle and machine-gun fire,
which wounded the captain and several men.

The command was carried on by a young lieutenant, who rode with his
men until they reached the camouflaged road southeast of the village
of Rumilly, where they went through in sections under the fire of the
enemy hidden in the banks. Here they came up against a battery of
field-guns, one of which fired point-blank at them. They charged the
battery, putting the guns out of action and killing some of the
gunners. Those who were not destroyed surrendered, and the prisoners
were left to be sent back by the supports. The squadron then dealt
with the German infantry in the neighborhood. Some of them fled, while
some were killed or surrendered. All these operations were done at a
gallop under fire from flanking blockhouses. The squadron then slowed
down to a walk and took up a position in a sunken road one kilometer
east of Rumilly. Darkness crept down upon them, and gradually they
were surrounded by German infantry with machine-guns, so that they
were in great danger of capture or destruction. Only five of their
horses remained unhit, and the lieutenant in command decided that they
must endeavor to cut their way through and get back. The horses were
stampeded in the direction of the enemy in order to draw the machine-
gun fire, and while these riderless horses galloped wildly out of one
end of the sunken road, the officer and his surviving troopers escaped
from the other end. On the way back they encountered four bodies of
the enemy, whom they attacked and routed. On one occasion their escape
was due to the cunning of another young lieutenant, who spoke German
and held conversations with the enemy in the darkness, deceiving them
as to the identity of his force until they were able to take the
German troops by surprise and hack a way through. This lieutenant was
hit in the face by a bullet, and when he arrived back in Masnieres
with his men in advance of the rear-guard he was only able to make his
report before falling in a state of collapse.

Other small bodies of cavalry--among them the 8th Dragoons and 5th
Hussars--had wild, heroic adventures in the Cambrai salient, where
they rode under blasts of machine-gun fire and rounded up prisoners in
the ruined villages of Noyelles and Fontaine Notre Dame. Some of them
went into the Folie Wood nearby and met seven German officers
strolling about the glades, as though no war was on. They took them
prisoners, but had to release some of them later, as they could not be
bothered with them. Later they came across six ammunition--wagons and
destroyed them. In the heart of the wood was one of the German
divisional headquarters, and one of our cavalry officers dismounted
and approached the cottage stealthily, and looked through the windows.
Inside was a party of German officers seated at a table, with beer
mugs in front of them, apparently unconscious of any danger near them.
Our officer fired his revolver through the windows and then, like a
schoolboy who has thrown a stone, ran away as hard as he could and
joined his troop. Youthful folly of gallant hearts!

After the enemy's surprise his resistance stiffened and he held the
village of Fontaine Notre Dame, and Bourlon Wood, on the hill above,
with strong rear-guards. Very quickly, too, he brought new batteries
into action, and things became unpleasant in fields and villages where
our men, as I saw them on those days, hunted around for souvenirs in
German dugouts and found field-glasses, automatic pistols, and other
good booty.

It seemed to me that the plan as outlined by Gen. Louis Vaughan, not
to exploit success farther than justified by the initial surprise, was
abandoned for a time. A brigade of Guards was put in to attack
Fontaine Notre Dame, and suffered heavily from machine-gun fire before
taking it. The 62d (Yorkshire) Division lost many good men in Bourlon
Village and Bourlon Wood, into which the enemy poured gas-shells and
high explosives.

Then on November 30th the Germans, under the direction of General von
Marwitz, came back upon us with a tiger's pounce, in a surprise attack
which we ought to have anticipated. I happened to be on the way to
Gouzeaucourt early that morning, and, going through the village of
Fins, next to it, I saw men straggling back in some disorder, and gun-
teams wedged in a dense traffic moving in what seemed to me the wrong
direction.

"I don't know what to do," said a young gunner officer. "My battery
has been captured and I can't get into touch with the brigade."

"What has happened?" I asked.

He looked at me in surprise.

"Don't you know? The enemy has broken through."

"Broken through where?"

The gunner officer pointed down the road.

"At the present moment he's in Gouzeaucourt."

I went northward, and saw that places like Hermies and Havrincourt,
which had been peaceful spots for a few days, were under heavy fire.
Bourlon Wood beyond was a fiery furnace. Hell had broken out again and
things looked bad. There was a general packing up of dumps and field
hospitals and heavy batteries. In Gouzeaucourt and other places our
divisional and brigade headquarters were caught napping. Officers were
in their pajamas or in their baths when they heard the snap of
machine-gun bullets. I saw the Guards go forward to Gouzeaucourt for a
counter-attack. They came along munching apples and whistling, as
though on peace maneuvers. Next day, after they had gained back
Gouzeaucourt, I saw many of them wounded, lying under tarpaulins, all
dirty and bloody.

The Germans had adopted our own way of attack. They had assembled
masses of troops secretly, moving them forward by night under the
cover of woods, so that our air scouts saw no movement by day. Our
line was weakly held along the front--the 55th Division, thinned out
by losses, was holding a line of thirteen thousand yards, three times
as much as any troops can hold, in safety--and the German storm-
troops, after a short, terrific bombardment, broke through to a
distance of five miles.

Our tired men, who had gained the first victory, fought heroic rear-
guard actions back from Masnieres and Marcoing, and back from Bourlon
Wood on the northern side of the salient. They made the enemy pay a
high price in blood for the success of his counter-attack, but we lost
many thousands of brave fellows, and the joy bells which had rung in
London on November 20th became sad and ironical music in the hearts of
our disappointed people.

So ended 1917, our black year; and in the spring of 1918, after all
the losses of that year, our armies on the western front were
threatened by the greatest menace that had ever drawn near to them,
and the British Empire was in jeopardy.

VIII

In the autumn of 1917 the Italian disaster of Caporetto had happened,
and Sir Herbert Plumer, with his chief of staff, Sir John Harington,
and many staff-officers of the Second Army, had, as I have told, been
sent to Italy with some of our best divisions, so weakening Sir
Douglas Haig's command. At that very time, also, after the bloody
losses in Flanders, the French government and General Headquarters
brought severe pressure upon the British War Council to take over a
greater length of line in France, in order to release some of the
older classes of the French army who had been under arms since 1914.
We yielded to that pressure and Sir Douglas Haig extended his lines
north and south of St.-Quentin, where the Fifth Army, under General
Gough, was intrusted with the defense.

I went over all that new ground of ours, out from Noyon to Chaulny and
Barisis and the floods of the Oise by La Fere; out from Ham to Holmon
Forest and Francilly and the Epine de Dullon, and the Fort de Liez by
St.-Quentin; and from Peronne to Hargicourt and Jeancourt and La
Verguier. It was a pleasant country, with living trees and green
fields not annihilated by shell-fire, though with the naked eye I
could see the scarred walls of St.-Quentin cathedral, and the villages
near the frontlines had been damaged in the usual way. It was dead
quiet there for miles, except for short bursts of harassing fire now
and then, and odd shells here and there, and bursts of black shrapnel
in the blue sky of mild days.

"Paradise, after Flanders!" said our men, but I knew that there was a
great movement of troops westward from Russia, and wondered how long
this paradise would last.

I looked about for trench systems, support lines, and did not see
them, and wondered what our defense would be if the enemy attacked
here in great strength. Our army seemed wonderfully thinned out. There
were few men to be seen in our outpost line or in reserve. It was all
strangely quiet. Alarmingly quiet.

Yet, pleasant for the time being. I had a brother commanding a battery
along the railway line south of St.-Quentin. I went to see him, and we
had a picnic meal on a little hill staring straight toward St.-Quentin
cathedral. One of his junior officers set the gramophone going. The
colonel of the artillery brigade came jogging up on his horse and
called out, "Fine morning, and a pretty spot!" The infantry divisions
were cheerful. "Like a rest-cure!" they said. They had sports almost
within sight of the German lines. I saw a boxing-match in an Irish
battalion, and while two fellows hammered each other I glanced away
from them to winding, wavy lines of chalk on the opposite hillsides,
and wondered what was happening behind them in that quietude.

"What do you think about this German offensive?" I asked the general
of a London division (General Gorringe of the 47th) standing on a
wagon and watching a tug-of--war. From that place also we could see
the German positions.

"G.H.Q. has got the wind-up," he said. "It is all bluff."

General Hall, temporarily commanding the Irish Division, was of the
same opinion, and took some pains to explain the folly of thinking the
Germans would attack. Yet day after day, week after week, the
Intelligence reports were full of evidence of immense movements of
troops westward, of intensive training of German divisions in back
areas, of new hospitals, ammunition-dumps, airplanes, battery
positions. There was overwhelming evidence as to the enemy's
intentions. Intelligence officers took me on one side and said:
"England ought to know. The people ought to be prepared. All this is
very serious. We shall be 'up against it.'" G.H.Q. was convinced. On
February 23d the war correspondents published articles summarizing the
evidence, pointing out the gravity of the menace, and they were passed
by the censorship. But England was not scared. Dances were in full
swing in London. Little ladies laughed as usual, light-hearted.
Flanders had made no difference to national optimism, though the
hospitals were crowded with blind and maimed and shell-shocked.

"I am skeptical of the German offensive" said Mr. Bonar Law.

Nobody believed the war correspondents. Nobody ever did believe us,
though some of us wrote the truth from first to last as far as the
facts of war go apart from deeper psychology, and a naked realism of
horrors and losses, and criticism of facts, which did not come within
our liberty of the pen.

They were strange months for me. I felt that I was in possession, as
indeed I was, of a terrible secret which might lead to the ending of
the world--our world, as we knew it--with our liberties and power. For
weeks I had been pledged to say no word about it, to write not a word
about it, and it was like being haunted by a specter all day long. One
laughed, but the specter echoed one's laughter and said, "Wait!" The
mild sunshine of those spring days was pleasant to one's spirit in the
woods above La Fere, and in fields where machine-guns chattered a
little, while overhead our airplanes dodged German "Archies." But the
specter chilled one's blood at the reminder of vast masses of field-
gray men drawing nearer to our lines in overwhelming numbers. I
motored to many parts of the front, and my companion sometimes was a
little Frenchman who had lost a leg in the war--D'Artagnan with a
wooden peg, most valiant, most gay. Along the way he recited the poems
of Ronsard. At the journey's end one day he sang old French chansons,
in an English mess, within gunshot of the German lines. He climbed up
a tree and gazed at the German positions, and made sketches while he
hummed little tunes and said between them, "Ah, les sacres Boches! . .
. If only I could fight again!"

I remember a pleasant dinner in the old town of Noyon, in a little
restaurant where two pretty girls waited. They had come from Paris
with their parents to start this business, now that Noyon was safe.
(Safe, O Lord!) And everything was very dainty and clean. At dinner
that night there was a hostile air raid overhead. Bombs crashed. But
the girls were brave. One of them volunteered to go with an officer
across the square to show him the way to the A.P.M., from where he had
to get a pass to stay for dinner. Shrapnel bullets were whipping the
flagstones of the Grande Place, from anti-aircraft guns. The officer
wore his steel helmet. The girl was going out without any hat above
her braided hair. We did not let her go, and the officer had another
guide. One night I brought my brother to the place from his battery
near St. Quentin. We dined well, slept well.

"Noyon is a good spot," he said. "I shall come here again when you
give me a lift."

A few days later my brother was firing at masses of Germans with open
sights, and the British army was in a full-tide retreat, and the
junior officer who had played his gramophone was dead, with other
officers and men of that battery. When I next passed through Noyon
shells were falling into it, and later I saw it in ruins, with the
glory of the Romanesque cathedral sadly scarred. I have ofttimes
wondered what happened to the little family in the old hotel.

So March 21st came, as we knew it would come, even to the very date,
and Ludendorff played his trump cards and the great game.

Before that date I had an interview with General Gough, commanding the
Fifth Army. He pulled out his maps, showed his method of forward
redoubts beyond the main battle zone, and in a quiet, amiable way
spoke some words which froze my blood.

"We may have to give ground," he said, "if the enemy attacks in
strength. We may have to fall back to our main battle zone. That will
not matter very much. It is possible that we may have to go farther
back. Our real line of defense is the Somme. It will be nothing like a
tragedy if we hold that. If we lose the crossings of the Somme it
will, of course, be serious. But not a tragedy even then. It will only
be tragic if we lose Amiens, and we must not do that."

"The crossings of the Somme . . . Amiens!"

Such a thought had never entered my imagination. General Gough had
suggested terrible possibilities.

All but the worst happened. In my despatches, reprinted in book form
with explanatory prefaces, I have told in full detail the meaning and
measure of the British retreat, when forty-eight of our divisions were
attacked by one hundred and fourteen German divisions and fell back
fighting stubborn rear-guard actions which at last brought the enemy
to a dead halt outside Amiens and along the River Ancre northward from
Albert, where afterward in a northern attack the enemy under Prince
Rupprecht of Bavaria broke through the Portuguese between Givenchy and
Festubert, where our wings held, drove up to Bailleul, which was
burned to the ground, and caused us to abandon all the ridges of
Flanders which had been gained at such great cost, and fall back to
the edge of Ypres. In this book I need not narrate all this history
again.

They were evil days for us. The German offensive was conducted with
masterly skill, according to the new method of "infiltration" which
had been tried against Italy with great success in the autumn of '17
at Caporetto.