"C'est arrive!" said the old porter to me at the door when I left the hotel before dawn. The great day had arrived!

Amiens was in darkness, with the lightnings of the guns which had never ceased their labors through the night flashing in the heavens their magnetic summons to battle. When a dip into a valley shut out their roar a divine hush lay over the world. On either side of the main road was the peace of the hour before the dawn which would send the peasants from their beds to the fields. There were no lights yet in the villages. It had not occurred to the inhabitants to try to see the battle. They knew that they would be in the way; sentries or gunners would halt them.

The traffic was light and all vehicles, except a flying staff officer's car, were going their methodical way. Vaguely, as an aviation station was passed, planes were visible being pushed out of their sheds; the hum of propellers being tried out was faintly heard. The birds of battle were testing their wings before flight and every one out of the hundreds which would take part that day had his task set, no less than had a corps, a regiment of artillery, or the bombers in a charge.

"This is the place," was the word to the chauffeur as we swept up a grade in the misty darkness.

Stretched from trunk to trunk of the trees beside the road were canvas screens to hide the transport from enemy observation. Passing between them had the effect of going through the curtains into a parterre box. Light was just breaking and we were in a field of young beets on the crest of a rise, with no higher ground beyond us all the way to Thiepval, which was in the day's objective, and to Pozieres, which was beyond it. Ordinarily, on a clear day we should have had from here a view over five or six miles of front and through our glasses the action should have been visible in detail.

This morning the sun was not showing his head and the early mist lay opaque over all the positions, holding in place the mighty volume of smoke from bursting shells. As it was not seven o'clock the sun might yet realize its duty in July and dissipate this shroud, which was so thick that it partially obscured the flashes of the guns and the shell-bursts.

Seven-ten came and seven-twenty and still no more light. It was too late now to seek another hill and, if we had sought one, we should have had no better view. At least, we were seeing as much as the Commander of the Fourth Army in his dugout near by. The artillery fire increased. Every gun was now firing, all stretching their powers to the maximum. The mist and smoke over the positions seemed to tremble with the blasts. Near-by shells, especially German, broke brilliantly against a background so thick that it swallowed up the flashes of more distant shells in its garishly illumined density. Thousands of officers were studying their wrist watches for the tick of "zero" as the minute-hands moved on with merciless fatalism; and hundreds of thousands of men who had come into position overnight were in line in the trenches looking to their officers for the word.

Our little group in the beet field was restless and silent; or if we spoke it was not of what was oppressing our minds and stilling our heartbeats. Our glasses gave no aid; they only made the fog thicker. Had we been in the first-line British trenches we could hardly have seen the men who left them through this wall of smoke and mist as they entered the German first line and the answering German "krumps" would have driven us to the dugouts and German curtains of fire held us prisoner.

One of us called attention to a lark that had risen and was singing with all the power in his little throat. Another mentioned a squadron of aeroplanes against the background of a soft and domeless sky, flying with the precision of wild geese. We knew that the German guns were responding now, for the final blasts of British concentration had been a sufficient signal of attack if some British prisoner taken in a trench raid had not revealed the hour.

Seven-twenty-five! someone said, but not one of us needed any reminder. Five minutes more and the great experiment would begin. Had Sir Douglas Haig made an army equal to the task? What would be the answer to skeptics who said that the London cockneys and the Manchester factory hands and all the others without military training could not be made into a force skilful enough to take those trenches? Was the feat of conquering those fortifications within the bounds of human courage, skill and resource?

Not what one saw but what one felt and knew counted. A crowd is spellbound in watching a steeplejack at work, or an aviator doing a "loop-the-loop," or an acrobat swinging from one bar to another above the sawdust ring, or the "leap of death" of the movies; and here we were in the presence of a multitude who were running a far greater risk in an untried effort, with their inspiration not a breathless audience but duty. For none wanted to die. All were human in this. None had any sense of the glorious sport of war, only that of grim routine.

Our group was not particularly religious, but I think that we were all uttering a prayer for England and France. At seven-thirty something seemed to crack in our brains. There was no visible sign that a wave of men twenty-five miles long, reaching from Gommecourt to Soyecourt, wherever the trenches ran across fields, through villages and along slopes to the banks of the Somme and beyond, had left their parapets. I knew the men who were going into that charge too well to have any apprehension that any battalion would falter. The thing was to be done and they were to do it. Now they were out in No Man's Land; now they were facing the reception prepared for them. Thousands might already be down. We could discern that the German guns, long waiting for their prey, were seeking it in eager ferocity as they laid their curtains of fire on the appointed places which they had registered. The hell of the poets and the priests must have some emotion, some temperamental variation. This was sheer mechanical hell, its pulse that of the dynamo and the engine.

Seven-forty-five! Helplessly we stared at the blanket. If the charge had gone home it was already in the German trenches. For all we knew it might have been repulsed and its remnants be struggling back through the curtains of artillery fire and the sweep of machine gun fire. As the sun came out without clearing away the mist and shell-smoke over the field we had glimpses of some reserves who had looked like a yellow patch behind a hill deploying to go forward, suggestive of yellow-backed beetles who were the organized servitors of a higher mind on some other planet.

This was all we saw; and to make more of it would not be fair to other occasions when views of attacks were more intimate. Yet I would not change the impression now. It has its place in the spectator's history of the battle.



VI

FIRST RESULTS OF THE SOMME

At the little schoolhouse—Twenty miles of German fortifications taken—Doubtful situation north of Thiepval—Prisoners and wounded—Defeat and victory—The topography of Thiepval—Sprays of bullets and blasts of artillery fire—"The day" of the New Army—The courage of civilized man—Fighting with a kind of divine stubbornness—Braver than the "Light Brigade"—Died fighting as final proof of the New Army's spirit—Crawling back through No Man's Land—Not beaten but roughly handled.

In the room at the head of the narrow stairs in the schoolhouse of the quiet headquarters town we should have the answer to the question, Has the British attack succeeded? which was throbbing in our pulsebeats. By the same map on the table in the center of the room showing the plan of attack with its lines indicating the objectives we should learn how many of them had been gained. The officer who had outlined the plan of battle with fine candor was equally candid about its results, so far as they were known. Not only did he avoid mincing words, but he avoided wasting them.

From Thiepval northward the situation was obscure. The German artillery response had been heavy and the action almost completely blanketed from observation. Some detachments must have reached their objective, as their signals had been seen. From La Boisselle southward the British had taken every objective. They were in Mametz and Montauban and around Fricourt. For the French it had been a clean sweep, without a single repulse. Twenty miles of those formidable German fortifications were in the possession of the Allies.

On the ledge of the schoolroom window, with the shrill voices of the children at recess playing in the yard below rising to my ears, I wrote my dispatch for the press at home, less conscious then than now of the wonder of the situation. Downstairs the cure of the church next door was standing on the steps, an expectant look in his eyes. When I told him the news his smile and the flash of his eye, which lacked the meekness usually associated with the Church, were good to see.

"And the French?" he asked.

"All of their objectives!"

"Ah!" He drew a deep breath and rubbed his hands together softly. "And prisoners?"

"A great many."

"Ah! And guns?"

"Yes."

Thus he ran up the scale of happiness. I left him on the steps of the church with a proud, glad, abstracted look.

Beyond the town peaceful fields stretched away to the battle area, where figures packed together inside the new prisoners' inclosures made a green blot. Litters were thick in the streets of the casualty clearing stations which had been empty yesterday. There were no idle ambulances now. They had passengers in green as well as in khaki. The first hospital trains were pulling out from the rail-head across from a clearing station. Thus promptly, as foreseen, the processes of battle had worked themselves out.

From "light" cases and from "bad" cases, from officers and men, you had the account of an individual's supreme experience, infinitesimal compared to the whole but when taken together making up the whole. The wounded in the Thiepval-Gommecourt sector spoke of having "crawled" back across No Man's Land. South of Thiepval they had "walked" back. This, too, told the story of the difference between repulse and victory.

As the fight went for each man in the fray, so the battle went to his conception. The spectator going here and there could hear accounts at one headquarters of battalions that were beyond the first-line trenches and at another of battalions whose survivors were back in their own trenches. He could hear one wounded man say: "It was too stiff, sir. There was no getting through their curtains of fire against their machine guns, sir;" and another: "We went into their first line without a break and right on, gathering in Boches on the way."

Victory is sweet. It writes itself. Perhaps because failure is harder to write, though in this case it is equally glorious, we shall have this first. To make the picture of that day clearer, imagine a movement of the whole arm, with the shoulder at Gommecourt and the fist swinging in at Montauban, crushing its way against those fortifications. It broke through for a distance of more than from the elbow to the fingers' ends twenty miles southward from Thiepval—a name to bear in mind. Men crossing the open under protecting waves of shell fire had proved that men in dugouts with machine guns were not invincible.

From a certain artillery observation post in a tree you had a good view of Thiepval, already a blackened spot with the ruins of the chateau showing white in its midst and pricked by the toothpick-like trunks of trees denuded of their limbs, which were to become such a familiar sight on the battlefield. It was uphill all the way to Thiepval for the British. A river so-called, really a brook, the Ancre, runs at the foot of the slope and turns eastward beyond Thiepval, where a ridge called Crucifix Ridge north-east of the village takes its name from a Christ with outstretched arms visible for many miles around. Then on past the bend of the Ancre the British and the German positions continued to the Gommecourt salient.

Along these five miles the odds of terrain were all against the British. The high ground which they sought to gain was of supreme tactical value. Nature was an ally of soldierly industry in constructing defenses. The German staff expected the brunt of the offensive in this sector and every hour's delay in the attack was invaluable for their final preparations. Thiepval, Beaumont-Hamel and Gommecourt would not be yielded if there were any power of men or material at German command to keep them. Indeed, the Germans said that Thiepval was impregnable. Their boast was good on July 1st but not in the end, as we shall see, for, before the summer was over, Thiepval was to be taken with less loss to the British than to the defenders.

At Beaumont-Hamel and Thiepval, particularly, and in all villages house cellars had been enlarged and connected by new galleries, the debris from the buildings forming a thicker roof against penetration by shells. Where there had seemed no life in Beaumont-Hamel battalions were snug in their refuges as the earth around trembled from the explosions. Those shell-threshed parapets of the first-line German trenches which appeared to represent complete destruction had not filled in all the doorways of dugouts which big shells had failed to reach. The cut and twisted fragments of barbed wire which were the remains of the maze of entanglements fringing the parapets no longer protected them from a charge; but the garrisons depended upon another kind of defense which sent its deadly storms against the advancing infantry.

The British battalions that went over the parapet from Thiepval northward were of the same mettle as those that took Montauban and Mametz; their training and preparation the same. Where battalions to the southward swept forward according to plan and the guns' pioneering was successful, those on this front in many cases started from trenches already battered in by German shell fire. A few steps across that dead space and officers knew that the supporting artillery, working no less thoroughly in its preliminary bombardment here than elsewhere, had not the situation in hand.

All the guns which the Germans had brought up during the time that weather delayed the British attack added their weight to the artillery concentration. Down the valley of the Ancre at its bend they had more or less of an enfilade. Machine guns had survived in their positions in the debris of the trenches or had been mounted overnight and others appeared from manholes in front of the trenches. Sprays of bullets cut crosswise of the blasts of the German curtains of artillery fire. How any men could go the breadth of No Man's Land and survive would have been called miraculous in other days; in these days we know that it was due to the law of chance which will wound one man a dozen times and never bark the skin of another.

Any troops might have been warranted in giving up the task before they reached the first German trench. Veterans could have retired without criticism. This is the privilege of tried soldiers who have won victories and are secured by such an expression as, "If the Old Guard saw that it could not be done, why, then, it could not." But these were New Army men in their first offensive. Their victories were yet to be won. This was "the day."

Each officer and each man had given himself up as a hostage to death for his cause, his pride of battalion and his manhood when he went over the parapet. The business of the officers was to lead their men to certain goals; that of the men was to go with the officers. All very simple reasoning, this, yet hardly reason: the second nature of training and spirit. How officers had studied the details of their objectives on the map in order to recognize them when they were reached! How like drill it was the way that those human waves moved forward! But they were not waves for long in some instances, only survivors still advancing as if they were parts of a wave, unseen by their commanders in the shell-smoke, buffeted by bursts of high explosives, with every man simply keeping on toward the goal till he arrived or fell. Foolhardy, you say. Perhaps. It is an easy word to utter over a map after the event. You would think of finer words if you had been at the front.

Would England have wanted her New Army to act otherwise?—the first great army that she had put into the field on trial on the continent of Europe against an army which had, by virtue of its own experience, the right to consider the newcomers as amateurs? They became more skilful later; but in war all skill is based on such courage as these men showed that day. Those who sit in offices in times of peace and think otherwise had better be relieved. It is the precept that the German Army itself taught and practiced at Ypres and Verdun. On July 1st a question was answered for anyone who had been in the Manchurian war. He learned that those bred in sight of cathedrals in the civilization of the epic poem can surpass without any inspiration of oriental fatalism or religious fanaticism the courage of the land of Shintoism and Bushido.

In most places the charge reached the German trenches. There, frequently outnumbered by the garrison, the men stabbed and bombed, fought to put out machine guns that were turned on them and so stay the tide coming out of the mouths of dugouts—simply fought and kept on fighting with a kind of divine stubbornness.

Tennyson's "Light Brigade" seems bombast and gallery play after July 1st. In that case some men on horses who had received an order rode out and rode back, and verse made ever memorable this wild gallop of exhilaration with horses bearing the men. The battalions of July 1st went on their own feet driven by their own will toward their goals, without turning back. Surviving officers with objectives burned in their brains led the surviving men past the first-line trenches if the directions required this. "Theirs not to reason why—theirs but to do and die—cannon to right of them volleyed and thundered,"—old-fashioned, smoke-powder cannon firing round shot for the Light Brigade; for these later-day battalions every kind of modern shell and machine guns, showers of death and sheets of death!

The goal—the goal! Ten men out of a hundred reached it in a few cases and when they arrived they sent up rocket signals to say that they were there! there! there! Two or three battalions literally disappeared into the blue. I thought that the Germans might have taken a considerable number of prisoners, but not so. Those isolated lots who went on to their objectives regardless of every other thought died fighting, as final proof of the New Army's spirit, against the Germans enraged by their heavy losses from the preliminary British bombardment.

It was where gaps existed and gallantry went blindly forward, unable in the fog of shell-smoke to see whether the units on the right or the left were up, that these sacrifices of heroism were made; but where command was held over the line and the opposition was not of a variable kind counsel was taken of the impossible and retreat was ordered. That is, the units turned back toward their own trenches under direction. They had to pass through the same curtain of shell fire in returning as in charging, and ahead of them through the blasts they drove their prisoners.

"Never mind. It's from your own side!" said one Briton to a German who had been knocked over by a German "krump" when he picked himself up; and the German answered that this did not make him like it any better.

Scattered with British wounded taking cover in new and old shell-craters was No Man's Land as the living passed. A Briton and his prisoner would take cover together. An explosion and the prisoner might be blown to bits, or if the captor were, another Briton took charge of the prisoner. Persistently stubborn were the captors in holding on to prisoners who were trophies out of that inferno, and when a Briton was back in the first-line trench with his German his delight was greater in delivering his man alive than in his own safety. Out in No Man's Land the wounded hugged their shell-craters until the fire slackened or night fell, when they crawled back.

Where early in the morning it had appeared as if the attack were succeeding reserve battalions were sent in to the support of those in front, and as unhesitatingly and steadily as at drill they entered the blanket of shell-smoke with its vivid flashes and hissing of shrapnel bullets and shell-fragments. Commanders, I found, stood in awe of the steadfast courage of their troops. Whether officers or men, those who came out of hell were still true to their heritage of English phlegm.

Covered with chalk dust from crawling, their bandages blood-soaked, bespattered with the blood of comrades as they lay on litters or hobbled down a communication trench, they looked blank when they mentioned the scenes that they had witnessed; but they gave no impression of despair. It did not occur to them that they had been beaten; they had been roughly handled in one round of a many-round fight. Had a German counter-attack developed they would have settled down, rifle in hand, to stall through the next round. And that young officer barely twenty, smiling though weak from loss of blood from two wounds, refusing assistance as he pulled himself along among the "walking wounded," showed a bravery in his stoicism equal to any on the field when he said, "It did not go well this time," in a way that indicated that, of course, it would in the end.

It was over one of those large scale, raised maps showing in facsimile all the elevations that a certain corps commander told the story of the whole attack with a simplicity and frankness which was a victory of character even if he had not won a victory in battle. He rehearsed the details of preparation, which were the same in their elaborate care as those of corps which had succeeded; and he did not say that luck had been against him—indeed, he never once used the word—but merely that the German fortifications had been too strong and the gunfire too heavy. He bore himself in the same manner that he would in his house in England; but his eyes told of suffering and when he spoke of his men his voice quavered.

Where the young officer had said that it had not gone well this time and a private had said, "We must try again, sir!" the general had said that repulse was an incident of a prolonged operation in the initial stage, which sounded more professional but was no more illuminating. All spoke of lessons learned for the future. Thus they had stood the supreme test which repulse alone can give.

What could an observer say or do that was not banal in the eyes of men who had been through such experiences? Only listen and look on with the awe of one who feels that he is in the presence of immortal heroism. And an hour's motor ride away were troops in the glow of that success which is without comparison in its physical elation—the success of arms.



VII

OUT OF THE HOPPER OF BATTLE

An army of movement—Taking over the captured space—At Minden Post, a crossroads of battle—German prisoners—Their desire to live—Their variety—The ambulance line—The refuse from the hopper of battle—Resting in the battle line—Reminiscences of the fighters—A mighty crater—The dugouts around Fricourt—Method of taking a dugout—The litter over the field.

When I went southward through that world of triumph back of Mametz and Montauban I kept thinking of a strong man who had broken free of his bonds and was taking a deep breath before another effort. Where from Thiepval to Gommecourt the men who had expected to be organizing new trenches were back in their old ones and the gunners who had hoped to move their guns forward were in the same positions and all the plans for supplying an army in advance were still on paper, to the southward anticipation had become realization and the system devised to carry on after success was being applied.

A mighty, eager industry pervaded the rear. Here, at last, was an army of movement. New roads must be made in order that the transport could move farther forward; medical corps men were establishing more advanced clearing stations; new ammunition dumps were being located; military police were adapting traffic regulations to the new situation. Old trenches had been filled up to give trucks and guns passageway. In every face was the shining desire which overcomes fatigue. An army long trench-tied was stretching its limbs as it found itself in the open. At corps headquarters lines were drawn on the maps of positions gained and beyond them the lines of new objectives.

Could it be possible that our car was running along that road back of the first-line trenches where it would have been death to show your head two days ago? And could battalions in reserve be lying in the open on fields where forty-eight hours previously a company would have drawn the fire of half a dozen German batteries? Was it dream or reality that you were walking about in the first-line German trenches? So long had you been used to stationary warfare, with your side and the other side always in the same places hedged in by walls of shell fire, that the transformation seemed as amazing as if by some magic overnight lower Broadway with all its high buildings had been moved across the North River.

Among certain scenes which memory still holds dissociated from others by their outstanding characterization, that of Minden Post remains vivid as illustrating the crossroads man-traffic of battle. A series of big dugouts, of houses and caves with walls of sandbags, back of the first British line near Carnoy was a focus of communication trenches and the magnet to the men hastening from bullet-swept, shell-swept spaces to security. The hot breath of the firing-line had scorched them and cast them out and they came together in congestion at this clearing station like a crowd at a gate. Eyes were bloodshot and set in deep hollows from fatigue, those of the British having the gleam of triumph and those of the Germans a dazed inquiry as they awaited directions.

Only a half-hour before, perhaps, the Germans had been fighting with the ferocity of racial hate and the method of iron discipline. Now they were simply helpless, disheveled human beings, their short boots and green uniforms whitened by chalk dust. Hunger had weakened the stamina of many of them in the days when the preliminary British bombardment had shut them off from supplies; but none looked as if he were really underfed. I never saw a German prisoner who was except for the intervals when battle kept the food waiting at the rear away from his mouth, though some who were under-sized and ill-proportioned looked incapable of absorbing nutrition.

In order to make them fight better they had been told that the British gave no quarter. Out of hell, with shells no longer bursting overhead or bullets whimpering and hissing past, they were conscious only that they were alive, and being alive, though they had risked life as if death were an incident, now freed of discipline and of the exhilaration of battle, their desire to live was very human in the way that hands shot up if a sharp word were spoken to them by an officer. They were wholly lacking in military dignity as they filed by; but it returned as by a magic touch when a non-commissioned officer was bidden to take charge of a batch and march them to an inclosure. Then, in answer to the command shoulders squared, heels rapped together, and the instinct of long training put a ramrod to their backbones which stiffened mere tired human beings into soldiers. Distinct gratitude was evident when their papers were taken for examination over the return of their identification books, which left them still docketed and numbered members of "system" and not mere lost souls as they would otherwise have considered themselves.

"All kinds of Boches in our exhibit!" said a British soldier.

As there were, in truth: big, hulking, awkward fellows, beardless youths, men of forty with stoops formed in civil life, professional men with spectacles fastened to their ears by cords and fat men with the cranial formation and physiognomy in keeping with French comic pictures of the "type Boche."

Mixed with the British wounded they came, tall and short, thin and portly, the whole a motley procession of friend and foe in a strange companionship which was singularly without rancor. I saw only one incident of any harshness of captor to prisoner. A big German ran against the wounded arm of a Briton, who winced with pain and turned and gave the German a punch in very human fashion with his free arm. Another German with his slit trousers' leg flapping around a bandage was leaning on the arm of a Briton whose other arm was in a sling. A giant Prussian bore a spectacled comrade pickaback. Germans impressed as litter-bearers brought in still forms in khaki. Water and tobacco, these are the bounties which no man refuses to another at such a time as this. The gurgle of a canteen at a parched mouth on that warm July day was the first gift to wounded Briton or German and the next a cigarette.

Every returning Briton was wounded, of course, but many of the Germans were unwounded. Long rows of litters awaited the busy doctors' visit for further examination. First dressings put on by the man himself or by a comrade in the firing-line were removed and fresh dressings substituted. Ambulance after ambulance ran up, the litters of those who were "next" were slipped in behind the green curtains, and on soft springs over spinning rubber tires the burdens were sped on their way to England.

Officers were bringing order out of the tide which flowed in across the fields and the communication trenches as if they were used to such situations, with the firing-line only two thousand yards away. The seriously wounded were separated from the lightly wounded, who must not expect to ride but must go farther on foot. The shell-mauled German borne pickaback by a comrade found himself in an ambulance across from a Briton and his bearer was to know sleep after a square meal in the prisoners' inclosure.

And all this was the refuse from the hopper of battle, which has no service for prisoners unless to carry litters and no use at all for wounded; and it was only a by-product of the proof of success compared to a trip over the field itself—a field still fresh.

Artillery caissons and ambulances and signal wire carts and other specially favored transport—favored by risk of being in range of hundreds of guns—now ran along the road in the former No Man's Land which for nearly two years had had no life except the patrols at night. The bodies of those who fell on such nocturnal scouting expeditions could not be recovered and their bones lay there in the midst of rotting green and khaki in the company of the fresh dead of the charge who were yet to be buried.

There was the battalion which took the trenches resting yonder on a hillside, while another battalion took its place in the firing-line. The men had stripped off their coats; they were washing and making tea and sprawling in the sunshine, these victors, looking across at curtains of fire where the battle was raging. Thus reserves might have waited at Gettysburg or at Waterloo.

"They may put some shells into you," I suggested to their colonel.

"Perhaps," he said. The prospect did not seem to disturb him or the men. It was a possibility hazy to minds which asked only sleep or relaxation after two sleepless nights under fire. "The Germans haven't any aeroplanes up to enable them to see us and no sausage balloons, either. Since our planes brought down those six in flames the day before the attack the others have been very coy."

His young officers were all New Army products; he, the commander, being the only regular. There were still enough regulars left to provide one for each of the New Army battalions, in some cases even two.

"The men were splendid," he said, "just as good as regulars. They went in without any faltering and we had a stiffish bit of trench in front of us, you know. It's jolly out here, isn't it?"

He was tired and perhaps he would be killed to-morrow, but nothing could prevent him from going some distance to show us the way to the trenches that his men had taken. They were heroes to him and he was one to them; and they had won. That was the thing, victory, though they regarded it as a matter of course, which gave them a glow warmer than the sunlight as they lay at ease on the grass. They had "been in;" they had seen the day for which they had long waited. A quality of mastery was in their bearing, but their elation was tempered by the thought of the missing comrades, the dead.

"I wish as long as Bill had to go that he hadn't fallen before we got to the trench," said one soldier. "He had set his heart on seeing what a Boche dugout was like."

"George was beside me when a Boche got him with a bomb. I did for the Boche with a bayonet," said another.

"When the machine gun began I thought that it would get us all, but we had to go on."

They were matter-of-fact, dwelling on the simple essentials. Men had died; men had been wounded; men had survived. This was all according to expectation. Mostly, they did not rehearse their experiences. Their brains had had emotion enough; their bodies asked for rest. They lay silently enjoying the fact of life and sunlight. Details which were lost in the haze of action would develop in the memory in later years like the fine points of a photographic plate.

The former German trench on a commanding knoll had little resemblance to a trench. Here artillerists had fulfilled infantry requirements to the letter. Areas of shell-craters lay on either side of the tumbled walls and dugout entrances were nearly all closed. The infantry which took the position met no fire in front, but had an enfilade at one point from a machine gun. Where the dead lay told exactly the breadth of its sweep through which the charge had unfalteringly passed; and this was only a first objective. As you could see, the charge had gone on to its second with slight loss. A young officer after being wounded had crawled into a shell-crater, drawn his rubber sheet over him and so had died peacefully, the clot of his life's blood on the earth beside him.

In the field of ruins around Fricourt a mighty crater of one of the mines exploded on July 1st at the hour of attack was large enough to hold a battalion. Germans had gone aloft in a spatter with its vast plume of smoke and dust scooped from the bowels of the earth. Famous since to sightseers of war were the dugouts around Fricourt which were the last word in German provision against attack. The making of dugouts is standardized like everything else in this war. There is the same angle of entrance, the same flight of steps to that underground refuge, in keeping with the established pattern. Depth, capacity and comfort are the result of local initiative and industry. There may be beds and tables and tiers of bunks. Many such chambers were as undisturbed as if never a shell had burst in the neighborhood. The Germans in occupation had been told to hold on; a counter-attack would relieve them. The faith of some of them endured so well that they had to be blasted out by explosives before they would surrender.

There was reassurance in the proximity of such good dugouts when habitable to a correspondent if shells began to fall, as well as protection for the British in reserve. Some whence came foul odors were closed by the British as the simplest form of burial for the dead within who had waited for bombs to be thrown before surrendering. For the method of taking a dugout had long since become as standardized as its construction. The men inside could have their choice from the Briton at the entrance.

"Either file out or take what we send," as a soldier put it. "We can't leave you there to come out and fire into our backs, as the Kaiser told you to do, when we've started on ahead."

You could follow for miles the ruins of the first line, picking your way among German dead in all attitudes, while a hand or a head or a foot stuck out of the shell-hammered chalk mixed with flesh and fragments of clothing, the thing growing nauseatingly horrible and your wonder increasing as to how gunfire had accomplished the destruction and how men had been able to conquer the remains that the shells had left. It was a prodigious feat, emphasizing again the importance of the months of preparation.

And the litter over the whole field! This, in turn, expressed how varied and immense is the material required for such operations. One had in mind the cleaning up after some ghastly debauch. Shell-fragments were mixed with the earth; piles of cartridge cases lay beside pools of blood. Trench mortars poked their half-filled muzzles out of the toppled trench walls. Bundles of rocket flares, empty ammunition boxes, steel helmets crushed in by shell-fragments, gasbags, eye-protectors against lachrymatory shells, spades, water bottles, unused rifle grenades, egg bombs, long stick-handled German bombs, map cases, bits of German "K.K." bread, rifles, the steel jackets of shells and unexploded shells of all calibers were scattered about the field between the irregular welts of chalky soil where shell fire had threshed them to bits.

The rifles and accoutrements of the fallen were being gathered in piles, this being, too, a part of a prearranged system, as was the gathering of the wounded and later of the dead who had worn them. Big, barelegged forms of the sturdy Highland regiment which would not halt for a machine gun were being brought in and laid in a German communication trench which had only to be closed to make a common grave, each identification disk being kept as a record of where the body lay. Another communication trench near by was reserved for German dead who were being gathered at the same time as the British. In life the foes had faced each other across No Man's Land. In death they were also separated.

Up to the first-line German trenches, of course, there were only British dead, those who had fallen in the charge. It was this that made it seem as if the losses had been all on one side. In the German trenches the entries on the other side of the ledger appeared; and on the fields and in the communication trenches lay green figures. Over that open space they were scattered green dots; again, where they had run for cover to a wood's edge, they lay thick as they had dropped under the fire of a machine gun which the British had brought into action. A fierce game of hare and hounds had been played. Both German and British dead lay facing in the same direction when they were in the open, the Germans in retreat, the British in pursuit. An officer called attention to this grim proof that the initiative was with the British.

By the number of British dead lying in No Man's Land or by the blood clots when the bodies had been removed, it was possible to tell what price battalions had paid for success. Nothing could bring back the lives of comrades who had fallen in front of Thiepval to the survivors of that action; but could they have seen the broad belts of No Man's Land with only an occasional prostrate figure it would have had the reassurance that another time they might have easier going. Wherever the Germans had brought a machine gun into action the results of its work lay a stark warning of the necessity of silencing these automatic killers before a charge. Yet from Mametz to Montauban the losses had been light, leaving no doubt that the Germans, convinced that the weight of the attack would be to the north, had been caught napping.

The Allies could not conceal the fact and general location of their offensive, but they did conceal its plan as a whole. The small number of shell-craters attested that no such artillery curtains of fire had been concentrated here as from Thiepval to Gommecourt. Probably the Germans had not the artillery to spare or had drawn it off to the north.

All branches of the winning army making themselves at home in the conquered area among the dead and the litter behind the old German first line—this was the fringe of the action. Beyond was the battle itself, with the firing-line still advancing under curtains of shell-bursts.



VIII

FORWARD THE GUNS!

An audacious battery—"An unusual occasion"—Guns to the front at night—Close to the firing-line—Not so dangerous for observers—The German lines near by—Advantages of even a gentle slope—Skilfully chosen German positions—A game of hide and seek with death—Business-like progress—Haze, shell-smoke and moving figures—Each figure part of the "system."

Hadn't that battery commander mistaken his directions when he emplaced his howitzers behind a bluff in the old No Man's Land? Didn't he know that the German infantry was only the other side of the knoll and that two or three score German batteries were in range? I looked for a tornado to descend forthwith upon the gunners' heads. I liked their audacity, but did not court their company when I could not break a habit of mind bred in the rules of trench-tied warfare where the other fellow was on the lookout for just such fair targets as they.

For the moment these "hows" were not firing and the gunners were in a little circumscribed world of their own, dissociated from the movement around them as they busily dug pits for their ammunition. In due course someone might tell them to begin registering on a certain point or to turn loose on one which they had already registered. Meanwhile, very workmanlike in their shirt-sleeves, they had no concern with the traffic in the rear, except as it related to their own supply of shells, or with the litter of the field, or the dead, or the burial parties and the scattered wounded passing back from the firing-line. Their business relations were exclusively with the battle area hidden by the bluff. I thought that they were "rather fond of themselves" (as the British say) that morning, though not so much so, perhaps, as the crew of the eighteen pounders still farther forward within about a thousand yards of the Germans whom they were pelting with shrapnel.

Ordinarily, the eighteen pounders were expected to keep a distance of four or five thousand yards; but this was "rather an unusual occasion" as an officer explained. It would never do for the eighteen pounders to be wall-flowers; they must be on the ballroom floor. Had these men who were mechanically slipping shells into the gun-breeches slept last night or the previous night? Oh, yes, for two or three hours when they were not firing.

What did fatigue matter to an eighteen-pounder spirit released from the eternal grind of trench warfare and pushing across the open in the way that eighteen pounders were meant to do? Weren't they horse artillery? What use had they had for their horses in the immovable Ypres salient except when they drew back their guns to the billets after their tour of duty?—they who had drilled and drilled in evolutions in England under the impression that field guns were a mobile arm!

When orders came on the afternoon of July 1st to go ahead "right into it" it was like a summons to a holiday for a desk-ridden man brought up in the Rockies. Out into the night with creaking wheels and caissons following with sharp words of urging from the sergeant, "Now, wheelers, as I taught you at Aldershot," as they went across old trenches or up a stiff slope and into the darkness, with transport giving them the right of way, and on to a front that was in motion, with officers studying their maps and directions by the pocket flashlight—this was something like. And a young lieutenant hurried forward to where the rifles were talking to signal back the results of the guns firing from the midst of the battle. Something like, indeed! The fellows training their pieces in keeping with his instructions might be in for a sudden concentration of blasts from the enemy, of course. Wasn't that part of the experience? Wasn't it their place to take their share of the pounding, and didn't they belong to the guns?

These were examples close at hand, but sprinkled about the well-won area I saw the puffs from other British batteries which, after a nocturnal journey, morning found close to the firing-line. While I was moving about in the neighborhood I cast glances in the direction of that particular battery of eighteen pounders which was still serenely firing without being disturbed by the German guns. There was something unreal about it after nearly two years of the Ypres salient.

But the worst shock to a trench-tied habit of mind was when I stood upon the parapet of a German trench and saw ahead the British firing-line and the German, too. I ducked as instinctively, according to past training, as if I had seen a large, black, murderous thing coming straight for my head. In the stalemate days a dozen sharpshooters waiting for such opportunities would have had a try at you; a machine gun might have loosened up, and even batteries of artillery in their search for game to show itself from cover did not hesitate to snipe with shells at an individual.

I must be dead; at least, I ought to be according to previous formulae; but realizing that I was still alive and that nothing had cracked or whistled overhead, I took another look and then remained standing. I had been considering myself altogether too important a mortal. German guns and snipers were not going to waste ammunition on a non-combatant on the skyline when they had an overwhelming number of belligerent targets. A few shrapnel breaking remotely were all that we had to bother us, and these were sparingly sent with the palpable message, "We'll let you fellows in the rear know what we would do to you if we were not so preoccupied with other business."

I was near enough to see the operations; to have gone nearer would have been to face in the open the sweep of bullets over the heads of the British front line hugging the earth, which is not wise in these days of the machine gun. A correspondent likes to see without being shot at and his lot is sometimes to be shot at without being able to see anything except the entrance of a dugout, which on some occasions is more inviting than the portals of a palace.

In the distance was the main German second trench line on the crest of Longueval and High Wood Ridge, which the British were later to win after a struggle which left nothing of woods or villages or ridges except shell-craters. Naturally, the Germans had not restricted their original defenses to the ridge itself, any more than the French had theirs to the hills immediately in front of Verdun. They had placed their original first-line trenches along the series of advantageous positions on the slope and turned every bit of woods and every eminence into a strong point on the way back to the second line, whose barbed-wire entanglements rusted by long exposure were distinct under the glasses. A German officer stood on the parapet looking out in our direction, probably trying to locate the British infantry advance which was hugging a fold in the ground and resting there for the time being. I imagined how beaver-like were the Germans in the second line strengthening their defenses. I scanned all the slopes facing us in the hope of seeing a German battery. There must be one under those balls of black smoke from high explosives from British guns and another a half mile away under the same kind of shower.

"They withdrew most of their guns behind the ridge overnight," said an officer, "in order to avoid capture in case we made another rush."

On the other side of this natural wall they would be safe from any except aerial observation, and the advanced British batteries, though all in the open, were in folds in the ground, or behind bluffs, or just below the skyline of a rise where they had found their assigned position by the map. How much a few feet of depression in a field, a slightly sunken road, the grade of a gentle slope, which hid man or gun from view counted for I did not realize that day as I was to realize in the fierce fight for position which was to come in succeeding weeks.

It was easy to understand why the Germans had made a strong point in the first line where I was standing, for it was a position which, in relation to both the British and the German trenches, would instantly appeal to the tactical eye. Here they had emplaced machine guns manned by chosen desperate men which had given the British charge its worst experience over a mile front. I could see all the movement over a broad area to the rear which, however, the rise under my feet hid from the ridge where the German officer stood. The advantage which the Germans had after their retreat from the Marne was brought home afresh once you were on conquered ground. A mile more or less of depth had no sentimental interest to them, for they were on foreign soil. They had chosen their positions by armies, by corps, by battalions, by hundreds of miles and tens of miles and tens of yards with the view to a command of observation and ground. This was a simple application of the formula as old as man; but it was their numbers and preparedness that permitted its application and wherever the Allies were to undertake the offensive they must face this military fact, which made the test of their skill against frontal positions all the stiffer and added tribute to success.

The scene in front reminded one of a great carpet which did not lie flat on the floor but was in undulations, with the whole on an incline toward Longueval and High Wood Ridge. The Ridge I shall call it after this, for so it was in capital letters to millions of French, British and German soldiers in the summer of 1916. And this carpet was peopled with men in a game of hide and seek with death among its folds.

No vehicle, no horse was anywhere visible. Yet it was a poignantly live world where the old trench lines had been a dead world—a world alive in the dots of men strung along the crest, in others digging new trenches, in messengers and officers on the move, in clumps of reserves behind a hillock or in a valley. Though bursting shrapnel jackets whipped out the same kind of puffs as always from a flashing center which spread into nimbus radiant in the sunlight and the high explosives sent up the same spouts of black smoke as if a stick of dynamite had burst in a coal box, the shell fire seemed different; it had a quality of action and adventure in comparison with the monotonous exhibition which we had watched in stalemate warfare. Death now had some element of glory and sport. It was less like set fate in a stationary shambles.

Directly ahead was a bare sweep of field of waste wild grass between the German communication trenches where wheat had grown before the war, and the British firing-line seemed like heads fastened to a greenish blanket. Holding the ground that they had gained, they were waiting on something to happen elsewhere. Others must advance before they could go farther.

The battle was not general; it raged at certain points where the Germans had anchored themselves after some recovery from the staggering blow of the first day. Beyond Fricourt the British artillery was making a crushing concentration on a clump of woods. This seemed to be the hottest place of all. I would watch it. Nothing except the blanket of shell-smoke hanging over the trees was visible for a time, unless you counted figures some distance away moving about in a sort of detached pantomime.

Then a line of British infantry seemed to rise out of the pile of the carpet and I could see them moving with a drill-ground steadiness toward the edge of the woods, only to be lost to the eye in a fold of the carpet or in a changed background. There had been something workmanlike and bold about their rigid, matter-of-fact progress, reflective of man-power in battle as seen very distinctly for a space in that field of baffling and shimmering haze. I thought that I had glimpses of some of them just before they entered the woods and that they were mixing with figures coming out of the woods. At any rate, what was undoubtedly a half company of German prisoners were soon coming down the slope in a body, only to disappear as if they, too, were playing their part in the hide and seek of that irregular landscape with its variation from white chalk to dark green foliage.

Khaki figures stood out against the chalk and melted into the fields or the undergrowth, or came up to the skyline only to be swallowed into the earth probably by the German trench which they were entering. I wondered if one group had been killed, or knocked over, or had merely taken cover in a shell-crater when a German "krump" seemed to burst right among them, though at a distance of even a few hundred yards nothing is so deceiving as the location of a shell-burst in relation to objects in line with it. The black cloud drew a curtain over them. When it lifted they were not on the stage. This was all that one could tell.

What seemed only a platoon became a company for an instant under favorable light refraction. The object of British khaki, French blue and German green is invisibility, but nothing can be designed that will not be visible under certain conditions. A motley such as the "tanks" were painted would be best, but the most utilitarian of generals has not yet dared to suggest motley as a uniform for an army. It occurred to me how distinct the action would have been if the participants had worn the blue coats and red trousers in which the French fought their early battles of the war.

All was confused in that mixture of haze and shell-smoke and maze of trenches, with the appearing and disappearing soldiers living patterns of the carpet which at times itself seemed to move to one's tiring, intensified gaze. Each one was working out his part of a plan; each was a responsive unit of the system of training for such affairs.

The whole would have seemed fantastic if it had not been for the sound of the machine guns and the rifles and the deeper-throated chorus of the heavy guns, which proved that this was no mesmeric, fantastic spectacle but a game with death, precise and ordered, with nothing that could be rehearsed left to chance any more than there was in the regulation of the traffic which was pressing forward, column after column, to supply the food which fed the artillery-power and man-power that should crush through frontal positions.



IX

WHEN THE FRENCH WON

A big man's small quarters—General Foch—French capacity for enjoying a victory—Winning quality of French as victors—When the heart of France stood still—The bravery of the race—Germany's mistaken estimate of France—Why the French will fight this war to a finish—French and Germans as different breeds as ever lived neighbor—The democracy of the French—Elan—"War of movement."

The farther south the better the news. There was another world of victory on the other side of a certain dividing road where French and British transport mingled. That world I was to see next on a day of days—a holiday of elation.

A brief note, with its permission to "circulate within the lines," written in a bold hand in the chateau where General Foch directed the Northern Group of French Armies, placed no limitation on freedom of movement for my French friend and myself.

Of course, General Foch's chateau was small. All chateaux occupied by big commanders are small, and as a matter of method I am inclined to think. If they have limited quarters there is no room for the intrusion of anyone except their personal staff and they can live with the simplicity which is a soldier's barrack training.

Joffre, Castelnau and Foch were the three great names in the French Army which the public knew after the Marne, and of the three Foch has, perhaps, more of the dash which the world associates with the French military type. He simplified victory, which was the result of the same arduous preparation as on the British side, with a single gesture as he swept his pencil across the map from Dompierre to Flaucourt. Thus his army had gone forward and that was all there was to it, which was enough for the French and also for the Germans on this particular front.

"It went well! It goes well!" he said, with dramatic brevity. He had made the plans which were so definite in the bold outline to which he held all subordinates in a cooerdinated execution; and I should meet the men who had carried out his plans, from artillerists who had blazed the way to infantry who had stormed the enemy trenches. There was no mistaking his happiness. It was not that of a general, but the common happiness of all France.

Victory in France for France could never mean to an Englishman what it meant to a Frenchman. The Englishman would have to be on his own soil before he could understand what was in the heart of the French after their drive on the Somme. I imagined that day that I was a Frenchman. By proxy I shared their joy of winning, which in a way seemed to be taking an unfair advantage of my position, considering that I had not been fighting.

There is no race, it seems to me, who know quite so well how to enjoy victory as the French. They make it glow with a rare quality which absorbs you into their own exhilaration. I had the feeling that the pulse of every citizen in France had quickened a few beats. All the peasant women as they walked along the road stood a little straighter and the old men and old women were renewing their youth in quiet triumph; for now they had learned the first result of the offensive and might permit themselves to exult.

Once before in this war at the Marne I had followed the French legions in an advance. Then victory meant that France was safe. The people had found salvation through their sacrifice, and their relief was so profound that to the outsider they seemed hardly like the French in their stoic gratitude. This time they were articulate, more like the French of our conception. They could fondle victory and take it apart and play with it and make the most of it.

If I had no more interest in the success of one European people than another, then as a spectator I should choose that it should be to the French, provided that I was permitted to be present. They make victory no raucous-voiced, fleshy woman, shrilly gloating, no superwoman, cold and efficient, who considers it her right as a superior being, but a gracious person, smiling, laughing, singing in a human fashion, whether she is greeting winning generals or privates or is looking in at the door of a chateau or a peasant's cottage.

An old race, the French, tried out through many victories and defeats until a vital, indescribable quality which may be called the art of living governs all emotions. Victory to the Germans could not mean half what it would to the French. The Germans had expected victory and had organized for it for years as a definite goal in their ambitions. To the French it was a visitation, a reward of courage and kindly fortune and the right to be the French in their own world and in their own way, which to man or to State is the most justifiable of all rights.

Twice the heart of France had stood still in suspense, first on the Marne and then at the opening onslaught on Verdun; and between the Marne and Verdun had been sixteen months when, on the soil of their France and looking out on the ruins of their villages, they had striven to hold what remained to them. They had been the great martial people of Europe and because Napoleon III. tripped them by the fetish of the Bonaparte name in '70, people thought that they were no longer martial. This puts the world in the wrong, as it implies that success in war is the test of greatness. When the world expressed its surprise and admiration at French courage France smiled politely, which is the way of France, and in the midst of the shambles, as she strained every nerve, was a little amused, not to say irritated, to think that Frenchmen had to prove again to the world that they were brave.

Whether the son came from the little shops of Paris, from stubborn Brittany, the valley of the Meuse, or the vineyards, war made him the same kind of Frenchman that he was in the time of Louis XIV. and Napoleon, fighting now for France rather than for glory as he did in Napoleon's time; a man cured of the idea of conquest, advanced a step farther than the stage of the conqueror, and his courage, though slower to respond to wrath, the finer. He had proven that the more highly civilized a people, the more content and the more they had to lose by war, the less likely they were to be drawn into war, the more resourceful and the more stubborn in defense they might become—especially that younger generation of Frenchmen with their exemplary habits and their fondness for the open air.

If France had been beaten at the Marne, notice would have been served on humanity that thrift and refinement mean enervation. We should have believed in the alarmists who talk of oriental hordes and of the vigor of primitive manhood overcoming art and education.

The Germans could not give up their idea that both the French and the English must be dying races. The German staff had been well enough informed to realize that they must first destroy the French Army as the continental army most worthy of their steel and, at the same time, they could not convince themselves that France was other than weak. She loved her flesh-pots too well; her families would yield and pay rather than sacrifice only sons.

At any time since October, 1914, the French could have had a separate peace; but the answer of the Frenchman, aside from his bounden faith to the other Allies, was that he would have no peace that was given—only a peace that was yielded. France would win by the strength of her manhood or she would die. When the war was over a Frenchman could look a German in the face and say, "I have won this peace by the force of my blows;" or else the war would go on to extermination.

At intervals in the long, long months of sacrifice France was very depressed; for the French are more inclined than the English to be up and down in their emotions. They have their bad and their good days. Yet, when they were bluest over reports of the retreat from the Marne or losses at Verdun they had no thought of making terms. Depression merely meant that they would all have to succumb without winning. Thus, after the weary stalling and resistance of the blows at Verdun, never making any real progress in driving the enemy out of France, ever dreaming of the day when they should see the Germans' backs, France had waited for the movement that came on the Somme.

The people were always talking of this offensive. They had heard that it was under way. Yet, how were they to know the truth? The newspapers gave vague hints; gossip carried others, more concrete, sometimes correct but usually incorrect; and all that the women and the old men and the children at home could do was to keep on with the work. And this they did; it is instinct. Then one morning news was flashed over France that the British and the French had taken over twenty thousand prisoners. The tables were turned at last! France was on the march!

"Do you see why we love France?" said my friend T——, who was with me that day, as with a turn of the road we had a glimpse of the valley of the Somme. He swung his hand toward the waving fields of grain, the villages and plots of woods, as the train flew along the metals between rows of stately shade trees. "It is France. It is bred in our bones. We are fighting for that—just what you see!"

"But wouldn't you take some of Germany if you could?" I asked.

"No. We want none of Germany and we want no Germans. Let them do as they please with what is their own. They are brave; they fight well; but we will not let them stay in France."

Look into the faces of the French soldiers and look into the faces of Germans and you have two breeds as different as ever lived neighbor in the world. It would seem impossible that there could be anything but a truce between them and either preserve its own characteristics of civilization. The privilege of each to survive through all the centuries has been by force of arms and, after the Marne and Verdun, the Somme put the seal on the French privilege to survive. If there be any hope of true internationalism among the continental peoples I think that it can rely on the Frenchman, who only wants to make the most of his own without encroaching on anybody's else property and is disinterested in human incubation for the purpose of overwhelming his neighbors. True internationalism will spring from the provincialism that holds fast to its own home and does not interfere with the worship by other countries of their gods.

All this may seem rambling, but to a spectator of war indulging in a little philosophy it goes to the kernel of the meaning of victory to the French and to my own happiness in seeing the French win. Sometimes the Frenchman seems the most soldierly of men; again, a superficial observer might wonder if the French Army had any real discipline. And there, again, you have French temperament; the old civilization that has defined itself in democracy. For the French are the most democratic of all peoples, not excluding ourselves. That is not saying that they are the freest of all peoples, because no people on earth are freer than the English or the American.

An Englishman is always on the lookout lest someone should interfere with his individual rights as he conceives them. He is the least gregarious of all Europeans in one sense and the French the most gregarious, which is a factor contributing to French democracy. It is his gregariousness that makes the Frenchman polite and his politeness which permits of democracy. An officer may talk with a private soldier and the private may talk back because of French politeness and equality, which yield fellowship at one moment and the next slip back into the bonds of discipline which, by consent of public opinion, have tightened until they are as strict as in Napoleon's day. Gregariousness was supreme on this day of victory; democracy triumphant. Democracy had proved itself again as had English freedom against Prussian system. Vitality is another French possession and this means industry. The German also is industrious, but more from discipline and training than from a philosophy of life. French vitality is inborn, electrically installed by the sunshine of France.

When a battery of French artillery moves along the road it is democratic, but when it swings its guns into action it is military. Then its vitality is something that is not the product of training, something that training cannot produce. A French battalion moving up to the trenches seems not to have any particular order, but when it goes over the parapet in an attack it has the essence of military spirit which is cooerdination of action. No two French soldiers seem quite alike on the march or when moving about a village on leave. Each seems three beings: one a Frenchman, one a soldier, a third himself. German psychology left out the result of the combination, just as it never considered that the British could in two years submerge their individualism sufficiently to become a military nation.

There is a French word, elan, which has been much overworked in describing French character. Other nations have no equivalent word; other races lack the quality which it expresses, a quality which you get in the wave of a hand from a peasant girl to a passing car, in the woman who keeps a shop, in French art, habits, literature. To-day old Monsieur Elan was director-general of the pageant.

This people of apt phrases have one for the operations before the trench system was established; it is the "war of movement." That was the word, movement, for the blue river of men and transport along the roads to the front. We were back to the "war of movement" for the time being, at any rate; for the French had broken through the German fortifications for a depth of four to five miles in a single day.



X

ALONG THE ROAD TO VICTORY

A thrifty victory—Seventeen-inch guns asleep—A procession of guns that gorged the roads—French rules of the road—Absence of system conceals an excellent system—Spoils of war—The Colonial Corps—The "chocolates"—"Boches"—Dramatic victors—The German line in front of the French attack—Galloping soixante-quinzes.

Anyone with experience of armies cannot be deceived about losses when he is close to the front. Even if he does not go over the field while the dead of both sides are still lying there, infallible signs without a word being spoken reflect the truth. It was shining in panoplies of smiles with the French after the attack of July 1st. Victory was sweet because it came at slight cost. Staff officers could congratulate themselves on having driven a thrifty bargain. Casualty clearing stations were doing a small business; prisoners' inclosures a driving one.

"We've nothing to fire at," said an officer of heavy artillery. "Our targets are out of reach. The Germans went too fast for us; they left us without occupation."

Where with the British I had watched the preparations for the offensive develop, the curtain was now raised on the French preparations, which were equally elaborate, after the offensive had gone home. General Joffre had spared more guns from Verdun for the Somme than optimism had supposed possible. Those immense fellows of caliber from twelve to seventeen-inch, mounted on railway trucks, were lions asleep under their covers on the sidings which had been built for them. Their tracks would have to be carried farther forward before they roared at the Germans again.

Five miles are not far for a battalion to march, though an immense distance to a modern army with its extensive and complicated plant. Even the aviators wanted to be nearer the enemy and were looking for a new park. Sheds where artillery horses had been sheltered for more than a year were empty; camps were being vacated; vast piles of shells must follow the guns which the tractors were taking forward. The nests of spacious dugouts in a hillside nicely walled in by sandbags had served their purpose. They were beyond the range of any German guns.

For the first time you realized what the procession which gorged the roads would be like if the Western front were actually broken. Guns of every caliber from the 75's to the 120's and 240's, ammunition pack trains, ambulances horse-drawn and motor-drawn, big and little motor trucks, staff officers' cars, cycle riders and motor cycle riders, small two-wheeled carts, all were mixed with the flow of infantry going and coming and crowding the road-menders off the road.

There was none of the stateliness of the columns of British motor trucks and none of the rigidity of British marching. It all seemed a great family affair. When one wondered what part any item of the variegated transport played it was always promptly explained.

Officers and men exchanged calls of greeting as they passed. Eyes were flashing to the accompaniment of gestures. There were arguments about right of way in which the fellow with the two-wheeled cart held his own with the chauffeur of the three-ton motor truck. But the argument was accompanied by action. In some cases it was over, a decision made and the block of traffic broken before a phlegmatic man could have had discussion fairly under way. For Frenchmen are nothing if not quick of mind and body and whether a Frenchman is pulling or pushing or driving he likes to express the emotions of the moment. If a piece of transport were stalled there would be a chorus of exclamations and running disputes as to the method of getting it out of the rut, with the result that at the juncture when an outsider might think that utter confusion was to ensue, every Frenchman in sight had swarmed to the task under the direction of somebody who seemed to have made the suggestion which won the favor of the majority.

Much has been written about the grimness of the French in this war. Naturally they were grim in the early days; but what impresses me most about the French Army whenever I see it is that it is entirely French. Some people had the idea that when the French went to war they would lose their heads, run to and fro and dance about and shout. They have not acted so in this war and they never have acted so in any other war. They still talk with eyes, hands and shoulders and fight with them, too.

The tide never halted for long. It flowed on with marvelous alacrity and a seeming absence of system which soon convinced you as concealing a very excellent system. Every man really knew where he was going; he could think for himself, French fashion. Near the front I witnessed a typical scene when an officer ran out and halted a soldier who was walking across the fields by himself and demanded to know who he was and what he was doing there.

"I am wounded, sir," was the reply, as he opened his coat and showed a bandage. "I am going to the casualty clearing station and this is the shortest way"—not to mention that it was a much easier way than to hug the edge of the road in the midst of the traffic.

The battalions and transport which made up this tide of an army's rear trying to catch up with its extreme front had a view, as the road dipped into a valley, of the trophies which are the proof of victory. Here were both guns and prisoners. Among the guns nicely parked you might have your choice between the latest 77's out of Krupps' and pieces of the vintage of the '80's. One 77 had not a blemish; another had its muzzle broken off by the burst of a shell, its spokes slashed by shell-fragments, and its armored shield, opened by a jagged hole, was as crumpled as if made of tin.

Four of the old fortress type had a history. They bore the mark of their French maker. They had fired at the Germans from Maubeuge and after having been taken by the Germans were set to fire at the French. One could imagine how the German staff had scattered such pieces along the line when in stalemate warfare any kind of gun that had a barrel and could discharge a shell would add to the volume of gunfire.

Such a ponderous piece with its heavy, old-fashioned trail and no recoil cylinder was never meant to play any part in an army of movement. You could picture how it had been dragged up into position back of the German trenches and how a crew of old Landsturm gunners had been allowed a certain number of shells a day and told off to fire them at certain villages and crossroads, with that systematic regularity of the German artillery system which often defeats its own purpose, as we on the Allies' side well know.

Very likely, as often happened, the crew fired six rounds before breakfast and eight at four o'clock in the afternoon, and the rest of the time they might sit about playing cards. Of course, retreat was out of the question with a gun of this sort. Yet through the twenty months that the opposing armies had sniped at each other from the same positions the relic had done faithful auxiliary service. The French could move it on to some other part of the line now where no offensive was expected and some old territorials could use it as the old Landsturmers had used it.

All the guns in this park had been taken by the Colonial Corps, which thinks itself a little better than the Nancy (or Iron) Corps, a view with which the Iron Corps entirely disagreed. Scattered among the Colonial Corps, whether on the march or in billets, were the black men. There is no prejudice against the "chocolates," as they are called, who provide variation and amusement, not to mention color. Most adaptable of human beings is the negro, whom you find in all lands and engaged in all kinds of pursuits, reflecting always the character of his surroundings. If his French comrades charged he would charge and just as far; if they fell back he would fall back and just as far. No Frenchman could approach the pride of the blacks over those captured guns, which brought grins that left only half of their ebony countenances as a background for the whites of their eyes and teeth.

The tide of infantry, vehicles and horses flowing past must have been a strange world to the German prisoners brought past it to the inclosures, when they had not yet recovered from their astonishment at the suddenness of the French whirlwind attack. The day was warm and the ground dry, and those prisoners who were not munching French bread were lying sardine fashion pillowing their heads on one another, a confused mass of arms and legs, dead to the world in sleep—a green patch of humanity with all the fight out of them, without weapons or power of resistance, guarded by a single French soldier, while the belligerent energy of war was on that road a hundred yards away.

"They are good Boches, now," said the French sentry; "we sha'n't have to take that lot again."

Boches! They are rarely called anything else at the front. With both French and English this has become the universal word for the Germans which will last as long as the men who fought in this war survive. Though the Germans dislike it that makes no difference. They will have to accept it even when peace comes, for it is established. One day they may come to take a certain pride in it as a distinction which stands for German military efficiency and racial isolation. The professional soldier expressing his admiration of the way the German charges, handles his artillery, or the desperate courage of his machine gun crews may speak of him as "Brother Boche" or the "old Boche" in a sort of amiable recognition of the fact of how worthy he is of an enemy's steel if only he would refrain from certain unsportsmanlike habits.

At length the blue river on the way to the front divided at a crossroad and we were out on the plain which swept away to the bend of the Somme in front of Peronne. Officers returning from the front when asked how the battle was going were never too preoccupied to reply. It was anybody's privilege to ask a question and everybody seemed to delight to answer it. I talked with a group of men who were washing down their bread with draughts of red wine, their first meal after they had been through two lines of trenches. Their brigade had taken more prisoners than it had had casualties. Their dead were few and less mourned because they had fallen in such a glorious victory. Rattling talk gave gusto to every mouthful.

Unlike the English, these victors were articulate; they rejoiced in their experiences and were glad to tell about them. If one had fought it out at close quarters with a German and got his man, he made the incident into a dramatic episode for your edification. It was war; he had been in a charge; he had escaped alive; he had won. He liked the thrill of his exploit and enjoyed the telling, not allowing it to drag, perhaps, for want of a leg. Every Frenchman is more or less of a general, as Napoleon said, and every one knew the meaning of this victory. He liked to make the most of it and relive it.

After having seen the trenches that the British had taken on the high ground around Fricourt, I was the more interested to see those that the French had taken on July 1st. The British had charged uphill against the strongest fortifications that the Germans could devise in that chalky subsoil so admirably suited for the purpose. Those before the French were not so strong and were in alluvial soil on the plain. Many of the German dugouts in front of Dompierre were in relatively as good condition as those at Fricourt, though not so numerous or so strong; which meant that the artillery of neither army had been able completely to destroy them. The ground on the plain permitted of no such advantageous tactical points for machine guns as those which had confronted the British, in front of whom the Germans had massed immense reserves of artillery, particularly in the Thiepval-Gommecourt sector where the British attack had failed, besides having the valuable ridge of Bapaume at their backs. In front of the French the Germans had smaller forces of artillery on the plain where the bend of the Somme was at their backs.

This is not detracting from the French success, which was complete and masterful. The cooerdination of artillery and infantry must have been perfect, as you could see when you went over the field where there were surprisingly few French dead and the German dead, though more plentiful than the French, were not very numerous. It seemed that the French artillery had absolutely pinioned the Germans to their trenches and communication trenches in the Dompierre sector and the French appearing close under their own shells in a swift and eager wave gathered in all the German garrison as prisoners. The ruins of the villages might have been made either by French, British or German artillery. There is true internationalism in artillery destruction.

It was something to see the way that French transport and reserves were going right across the plain in splendid disregard of any German artillery concentration. But, as usual, they knew what they were doing. No shells fell among them while I was at the front, and out on the plain where the battle still raged the soixante-quinze batteries were as busy as knitting-machines working some kind of magic which protected that column from tornadoes of the same kind that they themselves were sending. The German artillery, indeed, seemed a little demoralized. Krump-krump-krump, they put a number of shells into a group of trees beside the road where they mistakenly thought that there was a battery. Swish-swish-swish came another salvo which I thought was meant for us, but it passed by and struck where there was no target.

I have had glimpses of nearly every feature of war, but there was one in this advance which was not included in my experiences. The French infantry was hardly in the first-line German trench when the ditch had been filled in and the way was open for the soixante-quinze to go forward. For the guns galloped into action just as they might have done at manoeuvers. Some dead artillery horses near the old trench line told the story of how a German shell must have stopped one of the guns, which was small price to pay for so great a privilege as—let us repeat—galloping the guns into action across the trenches in broad daylight and keeping close to the infantry as it advanced from position to position on the plain.

Here was a surviving bit of the glory and the sport of war, whose passing may be one of the great influences in preventing future wars; but there being war and the French having to win that war, why, the spectacle of this marvelous field gun, so beloved of its alert and skilful gunners, playing the part that was intended for it on the heels of the enemy made a thrilling incident in the history of modern France. The French had shown on that day that they had lost none of their initiative of Napoleon's time, just as the British had shown that they could be as stubborn and determined as in Wellington's.



XI

THE BRIGADE THAT WENT THROUGH

A young brigadier—A regular soldier—No heroics—How his brigade charged—Systematically cleaning up the dugouts—"It was orders. We did it."—The second advance—Holding on for two sleepless days and nights—Soda water and cigars—Yorkshiremen, and a stubborn lot—British phlegm—Five officers out of twenty who had "gone through"—Stereotyped phrases and inexpressible emotions.

No sound of the guns was audible in this quiet French village where a brigade out of the battle line was in rest. The few soldiers moving about were looking in the shop windows, trying their French with the inhabitants, or standing in small groups. Their faces were tired and drawn as the only visible sign of the torment of fire that they had undergone. They had met everything the German had to offer in the way of projectiles and explosives; but before we have their story we shall have that of the young brigadier-general who had his headquarters in one of the houses. His was the brigade that went "through," and he was the kind of brigadier who would send a brigade "through."

With its position in the attack of July 1st in the joint, as it were, between the northern sector where the German line was not broken and the southern where it was, this brigade had suffered what the charges which failed had suffered and it had known the triumph of those which had succeeded, at a cost in keeping with the experience.

The brigadier was a regular soldier and nothing but a soldier from head to foot, in thought, in manner and in his decisive phrases. Nowadays, when we seem to be drawing further and further away from versatility, perhaps more than ever we like the soldier to be a soldier, the poet to be a poet, the surgeon to be a surgeon; and I can even imagine this brigadier preferring that if another man was to be a pacifist he should be a real out and out pacifist. You knew at a glance without asking that he had been in India and South Africa, that he was fond of sport and probably fond of fighting. He had rubbed up against all kinds of men, as the British officer who has the inclination may do in the course of his career, and his straight eye—an eye which you would say had never been accustomed to indefiniteness about anything—must have impressed the men under his command with the confidence that he knew his business and that they must follow him. Yet it could twinkle on occasion with a pungent humor as he told his story, which did not take him long but left you long a-thinking. A writer who was as good a writer as he was a soldier if he had had the same experience could have made a book out of it; but then he could not have been a man of action at the same time.

He made it clear at once that he had not led his brigade in person over the parapet, or helped in person to bomb the enemy's dugouts, or indulged in any other kind of gallery play. I do not think that all the drawing-rooms in London or all the reception committees which receive gallant sons in their home towns could betray him into the faintest simulation of the pose of a hero. He was not a hero and he did not believe in heroics. His occupation was commanding men and taking trenches.

Not once did he utter anything approaching a boast over a feat which his friends and superiors had expected of him. This would be "swank," as they call it, only he would characterize it by even a stronger word. He is the kind of officer, the working, clear-thinking type, who would earn promotion by success at arms in a long war, while the gallery-play crowd whose promotion and favors come by political gift and academic reports in time of peace would be swept into the dustbin. He was simply a capable fighter; and war is fighting.

His men had gone over the "lid" in excellent fashion, quite on time. He had seen at once what they were in for, but he had no doubt that they would keep on, for he had warned them to expect machine gun fire and told them what to do in case it came. They applied the system in which he had trained them with a coolness that won his approbation as a directing expert—his matter-of-fact approbation in the searching analysis of every detail, with no ecstasies about their unparalleled gallantry. He expected them to be gallant. However, I could imagine that if you said a word against them his eyes would flash indignation. They were his men and he might criticize them, but no one else might except a superior officer. The first wave reached the first-line German trench on time, that is, half of them did; the rest, including more than half of the officers, were down, dead or wounded, in No Man's Land in the swift crossing of two hundred yards of open space.

He had watched their advance from the first-line British trench. Later, when the situation demanded it, I learned that he went up to the captured German line and on to the final objective, but this fact was drawn out of him. It might lead to a misunderstanding; you might think that he had been taking as much risk as his officers and men, and risk of any kind for him was an incident of the business of managing a brigade.

"How about the dugouts?" I asked.

This was an obvious question. The trouble on July 1st had been, as we know, that the Germans hiding in their dugouts had rushed forth as soon as the British curtain of fire lifted and sometimes fought the British in the trench traverses with numbers superior. Again, they had surrendered, only to overpower their guards, pick up rifles and man their machine guns after the first wave had passed on, instead of filing back across No Man's Land in the regular fashion of prisoners.

"I was looking out for that," said the brigadier, like a lawyer who has stated his opponent's case; but other commanders had taken the same precautions with less fortunate results. When he said that he was "looking out for that" it meant, in his case, that he had so thoroughly organized his men—and he was not the only brigadier who had, he was a type—in view of every emergency in "cleaning up" that the Germans did not outwit them. The half which reached the German trench had the situation fully in hand and details for the dugouts assigned before they went on. And they did go on. This was the wonderful thing.

"With your numbers so depleted, wasn't it a question whether or not it was wise for you to attempt to carry out the full plan?"

He gave me a short look of surprise. I realized that if I had been one of the colonels and made such a suggestion I should have drawn a curtain of fire upon myself.

"It was orders," he said, and added: "We did it."

Yes, they did it—when commanding officers, majors and senior captains were down, when companies without any officers were led by sergeants and even by corporals who knew what to do, thanks to their training.

In order to reach the final objective the survivors of the first charge which had gone two hundred yards to the first line must cover another thousand, which must have seemed a thousand miles; but that was not for them to consider. The spirit of the resolute man who had drilled them, if not his presence, was urging them forward. They reached the point where the landmarks compared with their map indicated their stopping place—about one-quarter of the number that had left the British trench.

They had enough military sense to realize that if they tried to go back over the same ground which they had crossed there might be less than one-quarter of the fourth remaining. They preferred to die with their faces rather than their backs to the enemy. No, they did not mean to die. They meant to hold on and "beat the Boche," according to their teaching.

As things had been going none too well with the brigade on their left their flank was exposed. They met this condition by fortifying themselves against enfilade in an old German communication trench and rushing other points of advantage to secure their position. When a German machine gun was able to sweep them, a corporal slipped up another communication trench and bombed it out of business. Running out of bombs of their own, they began gathering German bombs which were lying about plentifully and threw these at the Germans. Short of rifle ammunition they found that there was ammunition for the German rifles which had been captured. They were not choice about their methods and neither were the Germans in that cheek-by-jowl affair with both sides so exhausted that a little more grit on one side struck the balance in its favor.