Books: Now It Can Be Told

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

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It consisted in a penetration of our lines by wedges of machine-
gunners constantly reinforced and working inward so that our men,
attacked frontally after terrific bombardment, found themselves under
flanking fire on their right and left and in danger of being cut off.
Taking advantage of a dense fog, for which they had waited according
to meteorological forecast, the Germans had easily made their way
between our forward redoubts on the Fifth Army front, where our
garrisons held out for a long time, completely surrounded, and
penetrated our inner battle zone. Through the gaps they made they came
in masses at a great pace with immense machine--gun strength and light
artillery. On the Third Army front where penetrations were made,
notably near Bullecourt between the 6th and 51st Divisions, the whole
of our army machine was upset for a time like a watch with a broken
mainspring and loose wheels. Staffs lost touch with fighting units.
Communications were broken down. Orders were given but not received.
After enormous losses of men and guns, our heavy artillery was choking
the roads of escape, while our rear-guards fought for time rather than
for ground. The crossings of the Somme were lost too easily. In the
confusion and tumult of those days some of our men, being human, were
demoralized and panic-stricken, and gave ground which might have been
longer held. But on the whole, and in the mass, there was no panic,
and a most grim valor of men who fought for days and nights without
sleep; fought when they were almost surrounded or quite surrounded,
and until few of them remained to hold any kind of line. Fortunately
the Germans were unable to drag their heavy guns over the desert they
had made a year before in their own retreat, and at the end of a week
their pace slackened and they halted, in exhaustion.

I went into the swirl of our retreat day after day up by Guiscard and
Hum; then, as the line moved back, by Peronne and Bapaume, and at last
on a dreadful day by the windmill at Pozieres, our old heroic
fighting-ground, where once again after many battles the enemy was in
Courcelette and High Wood and Delville Wood, and, as I saw by going to
the right through Albert, driving hard up to Mametz and Montauban.
That meant the loss of all the old Somme battlefields, and that struck
a chill in one's heart. But what I marveled at always was the absence
of panic, the fatalistic acceptance of the turn of fortune's wheel by
many officers and men, and the refusal of corps and divisional staffs
to give way to despair in those days of tragedy and crisis.

The northern attack was in many ways worse to bear and worse to see.
The menace to the coast was frightful when the enemy struck up to
Bailleul and captured Kemmel Hill from a French regiment which had
come up to relieve some of our exhausted and unsupported men. All
through this country between Estaires and Merville, to Steenwerck,
Metern, and Bailleul, thousands of civilians had been living on the
edge of the battlefields, believing themselves safe behind our lines.
Now the line had slipped and they were caught by German shell-fire and
German guns, and after nearly four years of war had to abandon their
homes like the first fugitives. I saw old women coming down lanes
where 5.9's were bursting and where our gunners were getting into
action. I saw young mothers packing their babies and their bundles
into perambulators while shells came hurtling over the thatched roofs
of their cottages. I stood on the Mont des Chats looking down upon a
wide sweep of battle, and saw many little farmsteads on fire and
Bailleul one torch of flame and smoke.

There was an old monastery on the Mont des Chats which had been in the
midst of a cavalry battle in October of 1914, when Prince Max of
Hesse, the Kaiser's cousin, was mortally wounded by a shot from one of
our troopers. He was carried into the cell of the old prior, who
watched over him in his dying hours when he spoke of his family and
friends. Then his body was borne down the hill at night and buried
secretly by a parish priest; and when the Kaiser wrote to the Pope,
desiring to know the whereabouts of his cousin's grave, the priest to
whom his message was conveyed said, "Tell the Kaiser he shall know
when the German armies have departed from Belgium and when reparation
has been made for all their evil deeds." It was the prior who told me
that story and who described to me how the British cavalry had forged
their way up the hill. He showed me the scars of bullets on the walls
and the windows from which the monks looked out upon the battle.

"All that is a wonderful memory," said the prior. "Thanks to the
English, we are safe and beyond the range of German shells."

I thought of his words that day I climbed the hill to see the sweep of
battle beyond. The monastery was no longer beyond the range of German
shells. An eight--inch shell had just smashed into the prior's parlor.
Others had opened gaps in the high roofs and walls. The monks had fled
by order of the prior, who stayed behind, like the captain of a
sinking ship. His corridors resounded to the tramp of army boots. The
Ulster gunners had made their headquarters in the refectory, but did
not stay there long. A few days later the monastery was a ruin.

From many little villages caught by the oncoming tide of war our
soldiers helped the people to escape in lorries or on gun-wagons. They
did not weep, nor say much, but were wonderfully brave. I remember a
little family in Robecq whom I packed into my car when shells began to
fall among the houses. A pretty girl, with a little invalid brother in
her arms, and a mother by her side, pointed the way to a cottage in a
wood some miles away. She was gay and smiling when she said, "Au
revoir et merci!" A few days later the cottage and the wood were
behind the German lines.

The northern defense, by the 55th Lancashires, 51st Highlanders (who
had been all through the Somme retreat), the 25th Division of
Cheshires, Wiltshires and Lancashire Fusiliers, and the 9th Scottish
Division, and others, who fought "with their backs to the wall," as
Sir Douglas Haig demanded of them, without reliefs, until they were
worn thin, was heroic and tragic in its ordeal, until Foch sent up his
cavalry (I saw them riding in clouds of dust and heard the panting of
their horses), followed by divisions of blue men in hundreds of blue
lorries tearing up the roads, and forming a strong blue line behind
our thin brown line. Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria had twenty-six fresh
divisions in reserve, but had to hold them until other plans were
developed--the Crown Prince's plan against the French, and the attack
on Arras.

The defense of Arras by the 3d and 56th Divisions--the Iron Division
and the London Division on the left, and by the 15th Division and
Guards on the right, saved the center of our line and all our line. We
had a breathing--space while heavy blows fell against the French and
against three British divisions who had been sent to hold "a quiet
sector" on their right. The Germans drove across the Chemin des Dames,
struck right and left, terrific blows, beat the French back, reached
the Marne again, and threatened Paris.

Foch waited to strike. The genius of Foch was that he waited until the
last minute of safety, taking immense risks in order to be certain of
his counter-stroke. For a time he had to dissipate his reserves, but
he gathered them together again. As quick as the blue men had come up
behind our lines they were withdrawn again. Three of our divisions
went with them, the 51st Highlanders and 15th Scottish, and the 48th
English. The flower of the French army, the veterans of many battles,
was massed behind the Marne, and at Chateau Thierry the American
marines and infantry were given their first big job to do. What
happened all the world knows. The Crown Prince's army was attacked on
both flanks and in the center, and was sent reeling back to escape
complete annihilation.

IX

Ludendorff's great offensive had failed and had turned to ruin. Some
of the twenty-six fresh divisions under Rupprecht of Bavaria were put
into the melting-pot to save the Crown Prince. The British army, with
its gaps filled up by 300,000 new drafts from England, the young
brothers of the elder brothers who had gone before, was ready to
strike again, and on August 8th the Canadians and Australians north
and south of the Somme, led by many tanks, broke the enemy's line
beyond Amiens and slowly but surely rolled it back with enormous
losses.

For the first time in the war the cavalry had their chance of pursuit,
and made full use of it, rounding up great batches of prisoners,
capturing batteries of heavy and light guns, and fighting in many
actions.

"August 8th," writes Ludendorff, "was the black day of the German army
in the history of this war."

He describes from the German point of view what I and others have
described from the British point of view, and the general narrative is
the same--a succession of hammer-blows by the British armies, which
broke not only the German war-machine, but the German spirit. It was a
marvelous feat when the 19th Division and the Welsh waded at dusk
across the foul waters of the River Ancre, under the heights of
Thiepval, assembled under the guns of the enemy up there, and then,
wet to their skins, and in small numbers compared with the strength of
the enemy, stormed the huge ridges from both sides, and hurled the
enemy back from what he thought was an impregnable position, and
followed him day by day, taking thousands of prisoners and smashing
his rear-guard defenses one by one.

The most decisive battle of the British front in the "come-back,"
after our days of retreat, was when with the gallant help of American
troops of the 27th New York Division our men of the English Midlands,
the 46th Division, and others, broke the main Hindenburg line along
the St.-Quentin Canal. That canal was sixty feet wide, with steep
cliffs rising sheer to a wonderful system of German machine-gun
redoubts and tunneled defenses, between the villages of Bellicourt and
Bellinglis. It seemed to me an impossible place to assault and
capture. If the enemy could not hold that line they could hold
nothing. In a dense fog on Sunday morning, September 30th, our men,
with the Americans and Australians in support, went down to the canal-
bank, waded across where the water was shallow, swam across in life-
belts where it was deep, or got across somehow and anyhow, under
blasts of machine-gun fire, by rafts and plank bridges. A few hours
after the beginning of the battle they were far out beyond the German
side of the canal, with masses of prisoners in their hands. The
Americans on the left of the attack, where the canal goes below
ground, showed superb and reckless gallantry (they forgot, however, to
"mop up" behind them, so that the enemy came out of his tunnels and
the Australians had to cut their way through), and that evening I met
their escorts with droves of captured Germans. They had helped to
break the last defensive system of the enemy opposite the British
front, and after that our troops fought through open country on the
way to victory.

I saw many of the scenes which led up to Mons and Le Cateau and
afterward to the Rhine. Something of the horror of war passed when the
enemy drew back slowly in retreat from the lands he had invaded, and
we liberated great cities like Lille and Roubaix and Tourcoing, and
scores of towns and villages where the people had been waiting for us
so long, and now wept with joy to see us. The entry into Lille was
unforgetable, when old men and women and girls and boys and little
children crowded round us and kissed our hands. So it was in other
places. Yet not all the horror had passed. In Courtrai, in St.-Amand
by Valenciennes, in Bohain, and other villages, the enemy's shell-fire
and poison-gas killed and injured many of the people who had been
under the German yoke so long and now thought they were safe.
Hospitals were filled with women gasping for breath, with gas-fumes in
their lungs, and with dying children. In Valenciennes the cellars were
flooded when I walked there on its day of capture, so that when shells
began to fall the people could not go down to shelter. Some of them
did not try to go down. At an open window sat an old veteran of 1870
with his medal on his breast, and with his daughter and granddaughter
on each side of his chair. He called out, "Merci! Merci!" when English
soldiers passed, and when I stopped a moment clasped my hands through
the window and could not speak for the tears which fell down his white
and withered cheeks. A few dead Germans lay about the streets, and in
Maubeuge on the day before the armistice I saw the last dead German of
the war in that part of the line. He lay stretched outside the railway
station into which many shells had crashed. It was as though he had
walked from his own comrades toward our line before a bullet caught
him.

Ludendorff writes of the broken morale of the German troops, and of
how his men surrendered to single troopers of ours, while whole
detachments gave themselves up to tanks. "Retiring troops," he wrote,
"greeted one particular division (the cavalry) that was going up fresh
and gallantly to the attack, with shouts of 'Blacklegs!' and 'War-
prolongers!"' That is true. When the Germans left Bohain they shouted
out to the French girls: "The English are coming. Bravo! The war will
soon be over!" On a day in September, when British troops broke the
Drocourt-Queant line, I saw the Second German Guards coming along in
batches, like companies, and after they had been put in barbed-wire
inclosures they laughed and clapped at the sight of other crowds of
comrades coming down as prisoners. I thought then, "Something has
broken in the German spirit." For the first time the end seemed very
near.

Yet the German rear-guards fought stubbornly in many places,
especially in the last battles round Cambrai, where, on the north, the
Canadian corps had to fight desperately, and suffered heavy and bitter
losses under machine-gun fire, while on the south our naval division
and others were badly cut up.

General Currie, whom I saw during those days, was anxious and
disheartened. He was losing more men in machine-gun actions round
Cambrai than in bigger battles. I watched those actions from Bourlon
Wood, saw the last German railway train steam out of the town, and
went into the city early on the morning of its capture, when there was
a roaring fire in the heart of it and the Canadians were routing out
the last Germans from their hiding-places.

The British army could not have gone on much farther after November
11th, when the armistice brought us to a halt. For three months our
troops had fought incessantly, storming many villages strongly
garrisoned with machine-gunners, crossing many canals under heavy
fire, and losing many comrades all along the way. The pace could not
have been kept up. There is a limit even to the valor of British
troops, and for a time we had reached that limit. There were not many
divisions who could have staggered on to new attacks without rest and
relief. But they had broken the German armies against them by a
succession of hammer-strokes astounding in their rapidity and in their
continuity, which I need not here describe in detail, because in my
despatches, now in book form, I have narrated that history as I was a
witness of it day by day.

Elsewhere the French and Americans had done their part with steady,
driving pressure. The illimitable reserves of Americans, and their
fighting quality, which triumphed over a faulty organization of
transport and supplies, left the German High Command without hope even
for a final gamble.

Before them the German troops were in revolt, at last, against the
bloody, futile sacrifice of their manhood and people. A blinding light
had come to them, revealing the criminality of their war lords in this
"Great Swindle" against their race. It was defeat and agony which
enlightened them, as most people--even ourselves--are enlightened only
by suffering and disillusionment, and never by successes.

X

After the armistice I went with our troops to the Rhine, and entered
Cologne with them. That was the most fantastic adventure of all in
four and a half years of strange and terrible adventures. To me there
was no wild exultation in the thought of being in Cologne with our
conquering army. The thought of all the losses on the way, and of all
the futility of this strife, smote at one's heart. What fools the
Germans had been, what tragic fools! What a mad villainy there had
been among rival dynasties and powers and politicians and peoples to
lead to this massacre! What had any one gained out of it all? Nothing
except ruin. Nothing except great death and poverty and remorse and
revolt.

The German people received us humbly. They were eager to show us
courtesy and submission. It was a chance for our young Junkers, for
the Prussian in the hearts of young pups of ours, who could play the
petty tyrant, shout at German waiters, refuse to pay their bills,
bully shopkeepers, insult unoffending citizens. A few young staff-
officers behaved like that, disgustingly. The officers of fighting
battalions and the men were very different. It was a strange study in
psychology to watch them. Here they were among the "Huns." The men
they passed in the streets and sat with in the restaurants had been in
German uniforms a few weeks before, or a few days. They were "the
enemy," the men they had tried to kill, the men who had tried to kill
them. They had actually fought against them in the same places. At the
Domhof Hotel I overheard a conversation between a young waiter and
three of our cavalry officers. They had been in the same fight in the
village of Noyelles, near Cambrai, a tiny place of ruin, where they
had crouched under machine-gun fire. The waiter drew a diagram on the
table-cloth. "I was just there." The three cavalry officers laughed.
"Extraordinary! We were a few yards away." They chatted with the
waiter as though he were an old acquaintance who had played against
them in a famous football-match. They did not try to kill him with a
table-knife. He did not put poison in the soup.

That young waiter had served in a hotel in Manchester, where he had
served a friend of mine, to whom he now expressed his opinion on the
folly of the war, and the criminality of his war lords, and things in
general. Among these last he uttered an epigram which I remember for
its brutal simplicity. It was when a staff-officer of ours, rather the
worse for wine, had been making a scene with the head waiter, bullying
him in a strident voice.

"Some English gentlemen are swine," said the young waiter. "But all
German gentlemen are swine."

Some of our officers and men billeted in houses outside Cologne or
across the Rhine endeavored to stand on distant terms with the "Huns."
But it was impossible to be discourteous when the old lady of the
house brought them an early cup of coffee before breakfast, warmed
their boots before the kitchen fire, said, "God be praised, the war is
over." For English soldiers, anything like hostility was ridiculous in
the presence of German boys and girls who swarmed round their horses
and guns, kissed their hands, brought them little pictures and gifts.

"Kids are kids," said a sergeant-major. "I don't want to cut their
throats! Queer, ain't it?"

Many of the "kids" looked half starved. Our men gave them bread and
biscuit and bully beef. In Cologne the people seemed pleased to see
British soldiers. There was no sense of humiliation. No agony of grief
at this foreign occupation. Was it lack of pride, cringing--or a
profound relief that the river of blood had ceased to flow and even a
sense of protection against the revolutionary mob which had looted
their houses before our entry? Almost every family had lost one son.
Some of them two, three, even five sons, in that orgy of slaughter.
They had paid a dreadful price for pride. Their ambition had been
drowned in blood.

In the restaurants orchestras played gay music. Once I heard them
playing old English melodies, and I sickened a little at that. That
was going too far! I looked round the Cafe Bauer--a strange scene
after four and a half years Hun-hating. English soldiers were chatting
with Germans, clinking beer mugs with them. The Germans lifted their
hats to English "Tommies"; our men, Canadian and English, said
"Cheerio!" to German soldiers in uniforms without shoulder-straps or
buttons. English people still talking of Huns, demanding vengeance,
the maintenance of the blockade, would have become hysterical if they
had come suddenly to this German cafe before the signing of peace.

Long before peace was signed at Versailles it had been made on the
Rhine. Stronger than the hate of war was human nature. Face to face,
British soldiers found that every German had two eyes, a nose, and a
mouth, in spite of being a "Hun." As ecclesiastics would say when not
roused to patriotic fury, they had been made "in the image of God."
There were pleasant-spoken women in the shops and in the farmhouses.
Blue-eyed girls with flaxen pigtails courtesied very prettily to
English officers. They were clean. Their houses were clean, more
spotless even than English homes. When soldiers turned on a tap they
found water came out of it. Wonderful! The sanitary arrangements were
good. Servants were hard--working and dutiful. There was something,
after all, in German Kultur. At night the children said their prayer
to the Christian God. Most of them were Catholics, and very pious.

"They seem good people," said English soldiers.

At night, in the streets of Cologne, were women not so good. Shameless
women, though daintily dressed and comely. British soldiers--English,
Scottish, and Canadian--grinned back at their laughing eyes, entered
into converse with them, found they could all speak English, went down
side-streets with them to narrow-fronted houses. There were squalid
scenes when the A.P.M. raided these houses and broke up an entente
cordiale that was flagrant and scandalous.

Astonishing climax to the drama of war! No general orders could stop
fraternization before peace was signed. Human nature asserted itself
against all artificial restrictions and false passion. Friends of mine
who had been violent in their hatred of all Germans became thoughtful,
and said: "Of course there are exceptions," and, "The innocent must
not suffer for the guilty," and, "We can afford to be a little
generous now."

But the innocent were made to suffer for the guilty and we were not
generous. We maintained the blockade, and German children starved, and
German mothers weakened, and German girls swooned in the tram-cars,
and German babies died. Ludendorff did not starve or die. Neither did
Hindenburg, nor any German war lord, nor any profiteer. Down the
streets of Cologne came people of the rich middle classes, who gorged
themselves on buns and cakes for afternoon tea. They were cakes of
ersatz flour with ersatz cream, and not very healthy or nutritious,
though very expensive. But in the side-streets, among the working--
women, there was, as I found, the wolf of hunger standing with open
jaws by every doorway. It was not actual starvation, but what the
Germans call unternahrung (under-nourishment), producing rickety
children, consumptive girls, and men out of whom vitality had gone
They stinted and scraped on miserable substitutes, and never had
enough to eat. Yet they were the people who for two years at least had
denounced the war, had sent up petitions for peace, and had written to
their men in the trenches about the Great Swindle and the Gilded Ones.
They were powerless, as some of them told me, because of the secret
police and martial law. What could they do against the government,
with all their men away at the front? They were treated like pigs,
like dirt. They could only suffer and pray. They had a little hope
that in the future, if France and England were not too hard, they
might pay back for the guilt of their war lords and see a new Germany
arise out of its ruin, freed from militarism and with greater
liberties. So humble people talked to us when I went among them with a
friend who spoke good German, better than my elementary knowledge. I
believed in their sincerity, which had come through suffering, though
I believed that newspaper editors, many people in the official
classes, and the old military caste were still implacable in hatred
and unrepentant.

The German people deserved punishment for their share in the guilt of
war. They had been punished by frightful losses of life, by a
multitude of cripples, by the ruin of their Empire. When they told me
of their hunger I could not forget the hungry wives and children of
France and Belgium, who had been captives in their own land behind
German lines, nor our prisoners who had been starved, until many of
them died. When I walked through German villages and pitied the women
who yearned for their men, still prisoners in our hands, nearly a year
after the armistice, and long after peace (a cruelty which shamed us,
I think), I remembered hundreds of French villages broken into dust by
German gun-fire, burned by incendiary shells, and that vast desert of
the battlefields in France and Belgium which never in our time will
regain its life as a place of human habitation. When Germans said,
"Our industry is ruined," "Our trade is killed," I thought of the
factories in Lille and many towns from which all machinery had been
taken or in which all machinery had been broken. I thought of the
thousand crimes of their war, the agony of millions of people upon
whose liberties they had trampled and upon whose necks they had
imposed a brutal yoke. Yet even with all those memories of tragic
scenes which in this book are but lightly sketched, I hoped that the
peace we should impose would not be one of vengeance, by which the
innocent would pay for the sins of the guilty, the children for their
fathers' lust, the women for their war lords, the soldiers who hated
war for those who drove them to the shambles; but that this peace
should in justice and mercy lead the working-people of Europe out of
the misery in which all were plunged, and by a policy no higher than
common sense, but as high as that, establish a new phase of
civilization in which military force would be reduced to the limits of
safety for European peoples eager to end the folly of war and get back
to work.