This medley of British and Germans in a world of personal combat shared shell fire, heat and misery. The British sent their rocket signals up to say that they had arrived. In two or three other instances the signals had meant that a dozen men only had reached their objective, a force unable to hold until reinforcements could come. Not so this time. The little group held; they held even when the Germans got some fresh men and attempted a counter-attack; they held until assistance came. For two sleepless days and nights under continual fire they remained in their dearly won position until, under cover of darkness, they were relieved.

In the most tranquil of villages the survivors looking in shop windows and trying out their French might wonder how it was that they were alive, though they were certain that their brigadier thought well of them. Ask them or their officers what they thought of their brigadier and they were equally certain of that, too. Theirs was the best brigadier in the army. Think what this kind of confidence means to men in such an action when their lives are the pawns of his direction!

I felt a kind of awe in the presence of one of the battalions in billet in a warehouse, more than in the presence of prime ministers or potentates. Most of them were blinking and mind-stiff after having slept the clock around. They were Yorkshiremen, chiefly workers in worsted mills and a stubborn lot.

"What did you most want to do when you got out of the fight?" I asked.

They spoke with one voice which left no question of their desires in a one-two-three order. They wanted a wash, a shave, a good meal, and then sleep. And personal experiences? Tom called on Jim and Jim had bayoneted two Germans, he said; then Jim called on Bill, who had had a wonderful experience according to Jim, though all that Bill made of it was that he got there first with his bombs. Told among themselves the stories might have been thrilling. Before a stranger they were mere official reports. It had been quick work, too quick for anything but to dodge for cover and act promptly in your effort to get the other fellow before he got you.

Generically, they had a job to do and they did it just as they would have done one in the factories at home. They were not so interested in any exhibition of courage as in an encounter which had the element of sport. Each narrator invariably returned to the subject of soda water. The outstanding novelty of the charge to these men was the quantity of soda water in bottles which they had found in the German dugouts. They went on to their second objective with bottles of soda water in their pockets and German light cigars in the corners of their mouths and stopped to drink soda water between bombing rushes after they had arrived. It was a hot, thirsty day.

Through the curtains of artillery fire which were continually maintained back of their new positions supplies could not be brought up, but Boche provisions saved the day. In fact, I think this was one of the reasons why they felt almost kindly toward the Germans. They found the canned meat excellent, but did not care for the "K.K." bread.

Thus in the dim light of the warehouse they talked on, making their task appear as a half-holiday of sport. It seemed to me that this was in keeping with their training; the fashionable attitude of the British soldier toward a horrible business. If this helps him to endure what these men had endured without flinching, with comrades being blown to bits around them by shell-bursts, why, then, it is the attitude best suited to develop the fighting quality of the British. They had it from their officers who, in turn, perhaps, had it in part from such British regulars as the brigadier, though mostly I think that it was inborn racial phlegm.

I met the five officers who were the survivors of the twenty in one battalion, the five who had "carried through." One was a barrister, another just out of Oxford, a third, as I remember, a real estate broker in a small town. They told their stories without a gesture, quite as if they were giving an account of a game of golf. It might have seemed callous, but you knew better.

You knew when they said that it was "a bit stiff," or "a bit thick," or "it looked as if they had us," what inexpressible emotion lay behind the accepted army phrases. The truth was they would not permit themselves to think of the void in their lines made by the death of their comrades. They had drawn the curtain on all incidents which had not the appeal of action and finality as a part of the business of "going through." One officer with a twitch of the lips remarked almost casually that new officers and drafts were arriving and that it would seem strange to see so many new faces in the mess.

Those of their old comrades who were not dead were already in hospital in England. When an officer who had been absent joined the group he brought the news that one of their number who had been badly hit would live. The others' quiet ejaculation of "Good!" had a thrill back of it which communicated its joy to me. Eight of the wounded had not been seriously hit, which meant that these would return and that, after all, only four were dead. This was the first intimate indication I had of how the offensive exposing the whole bodies of men in a charge against the low-velocity shrapnel bullets and high-velocity bullets from rifles and machine guns must result in the old ratio of only one mortal wound for every five men hit.

There was consolation in that fact. It was another advantage of the war of movement as compared with the war of shambles in trenches. And none, from the general down to the privates, had really any idea of how glorious a part they had played. They had merely "done their bit" and taken what came their way—and they had "gone through."



XII

THE STORMING OF CONTALMAISON

The mighty animal of war makes ready for another effort—New charts at headquarters—The battle of the Somme the battle of woods and villages—A terrible school of war in session—Mametz—A wood not "thinned"—The Quadrangle—Marooned Scots—"Softening" a village—Light German cigars—Going after Contalmaison—Aeroplanes in the blue sky—Midsummer fruitfulness and war's destruction—Making chaos of a village—Attack under cover of a wall of smoke—A melodrama under the passing shells.

If the British and the French could have gone on day after day as they had on July 1st they would have put the Germans out of France and Belgium by autumn. Arrival at the banks of the Rhine and even the taking of Essen would have been only a matter of calculation by a schedule of time and distance. After the shock of the first great drive in which the mighty animal of war lunged forward, it had to stretch out its steel claws to gain further foothold and draw its bulky body into position for another huge effort. Wherever the claws moved there were Germans, who were too wise soldiers to fall back supinely on new lines of fortifications and await the next general attack. They would parry every attempt at footholds of approach for launching it; pound the claws as if they were the hands of an invader grasping at a window ledge.

At headquarters there was a new chart with different colored patches numbered by the days of the month beginning July 1st, each patch indicating the ground that had been won on that day. Compare their order with a relief map and in one-two-three fashion you were able to grasp the natural tactical sequence; how one position was taken in order to command another. Sometimes, though, they represented the lines of least resistance. Often the real generals were the battalions on the battle front who found the weak points and asked permission to press on. The principle was the same as water finding its level as it spreads from a reservoir.

I have often thought that a better name for the battle of the Somme would be the battle of woods and villages. Their importance never really dawned on the observer until after July 1st. Or, it might be called the battle of the spade. Give a man an hour with a spade in that chalky subsoil and a few sandbags and he will make a fortress for himself which only a direct hit by a shell can destroy. He ducks under the sweep of bullets when he is not firing and with his steel helmet is fairly safe from shrapnel while he waits in his lair until the other fellow comes.

Thus the German depended on the machine gun and the rifle to stop any charge which was not supported by artillery fire sufficient to crush in the trenches and silence his armament. When it was, he had his own artillery to turn a curtain of fire onto the charge in progress and to hammer the enemy if he got possession. This was obviously the right system—in theory. But the theory did not always work out, as we shall see. Its development through the four months that I watched the Somme battle was only less interesting than the development of offensive tactics by the British and the French. Every day this terrible school of war was in session, with a British battalion more skilful and cunning every time that it went into the firing-line.

Rising out of the slopes toward the Ridge in green patches were three large woods, not to mention small ones, under a canopy of shell-smoke, Mametz, Bernafay and Trones, with their orgies of combat hidden under their screens of foliage. They recall the Wilderness—a Wilderness lasting for days, with only one feature of the Wilderness lacking which was a conflagration, but with lachrymatory and gas shells and a few other features that were lacking in Virginia. In the next war we may have still more innovations. Ours is the ingenious human race.

It is Mametz with an area of something over two hundred acres that concerns us now. The Germans thought highly of Mametz. They were willing to lose thousands of lives in order to keep it in their possession. For two years it had not been thinned according to French custom; now shells and bullets were to undertake the task which had been neglected. So thick was the undergrowth that a man had to squeeze his way through and an enemy was as well ambushed as a field mouse in high grass.

The Germans had run barriers of barbed wire through the undergrowth. They had their artillery registered to fringe the woods with curtains of fire and machine guns nestling in unseen barricades and trenches. Through the heart of it they had a light railway for bringing up supplies. All these details had been arranged in odd hours when they were not working on the main first- and second-line fortifications during their twenty months of preparation. I think they must have become weary at times of so much "choring," judging by a German general's order after his inspection of the second line, in which he said that the battalions in occupation were a lazy lot who were a disgrace to the Fatherland. After the battle began they could add to the defenses improvements adapted to the needs of the moment. Of course, large numbers of Germans were killed and wounded by British shell fire in the process of "thinning" out the woods; but that was to be expected, as the Germans learned during the battle of the Somme.

How the British ever took Mametz Wood I do not understand; or how they took Trones Wood later, for that matter. A visit to the woods only heightened perplexity. I have seen men walk over broken bottles with bare feet, swallow swords and eat fire and knew that there was some trick about it, as there was about the taking of Mametz.

The German had not enough barbed wire to go all the way around the woods, or, at least, British artillery would not let him string any more and he thought that the British would attack where they ought to according to rule; that is, by the south. Instead, they went in by the west, where the machine guns were not waiting and the heavy guns were not registered, as I understand it. A piece of strategy of that kind might have won a decisive battle in an old-time war, but I confess that it did not occur to me to ask who planned it when I heard the story. Strategists became so common on the Somme that everybody took them as much for granted as that every battalion had a commander.

Mametz was not taken with the first attack. The British were in the woods once and had to come out; but they had learned that before they could get a proper point d'appui they must methodically "clean up" a small grove, a neighboring cemetery, an intricate maze of trenches called the Quadrangle, and a few other outlying obstacles. In the first rush a lot of Tyneside Scots were marooned from joining in the retreat. They fortified themselves in German dugouts and waited in siege, these dour men of the North. When the British returned eighty of the Scots were still full of fight if short of food and "verra well" otherwise, thank you. At times they had been under blasts of shells from both sides, and again they had been in an oasis of peace, with neither British nor German gunners certain whether they would kill friend or foe.

Going in from the west while the Germans had their curtains of fire registered elsewhere, the British grubbed their way in one charge through most of Mametz and when night fell in the midst of the undergrowth, with a Briton not knowing whether it was Briton or German lying on the other side of a tree-trunk, they had the satisfaction of possessing four big guns which the Germans had been unable to withdraw, and had ascertained also that the Germans had a strong position protected by barbed wire at the northern end of the woods.

"This will require a little thinking," as one English officer said, "but of course we shall take it."

The purchase on Mametz and the occupation of Bailiff's Wood, the Quadrangle, La Boisselle and Ovillers-la-Boisselle brought the circle of advancing British nearer to Contalmaison, which sat up on the hills in a sea of chalk seams. Contalmaison was being gradually "softened" by the artillery. The chateau was not yet all down, but after each bite by a big shell less of the white walls was visible when the clouds of smoke from the explosion lifted. Bit by bit the guns would get the chateau, just as bit by bit a stonemason chips a block down to the proper dimensions to fit it into place in a foundation.

A visit to La Boisselle on the way to Contalmaison justified the expectation as to what was in store for Contalmaison. I saw the blackened and shell-whittled trunks of two trees standing in La Boisselle. Once with many others they had given shade in the gardens of houses; but there were no traces of houses now except as they were mixed with the earth. The village had been hammered into dust. Yet some dugouts still survived. Keeping at it, the British working around these had eventually forced the surrender of the garrison, who could not raise their heads to fire without being met by a bullet or a bomb-burst from the watchful besiegers.

"Slow work, but they had to come out," was the graphic phrase of one of the captors, "and they looked fed up, too. They had even run out of cigars"—which settled it.

Oh, those light German cigars! Sometimes I believe that they were the real mainstay of the German organization. Cigars gone, spirit gone! I have seen an utterly weary German prisoner as he delivered his papers to his captor bring out his last cigar and thrust it into his mouth to forestall its being taken as tribute, with his captor saying with characteristic British cheerfulness, "Keep it, Bochy! It smells too much like a disinfectant for me, but let's have your steel helmet"—the invariable prize demanded by the victor.

The British had already been in Contalmaison, but did not stay. "Too many German machine guns and too much artillery fire and not enough men," to put it with colloquial army brevity. It often happened that a village was entered and parts of it held during a day, then evacuated at night, leaving the British guns full play for the final "softening." These initial efforts had the result of reconnaissances in force. They permitted a thorough look around the enemy's machine gun positions so as to know how to avoid their fire and "do them in," revealed the cover that would be available for the next advance, and brought invaluable information to the gunners for the accurate distribution of their fire. Always some points important for future operations were held.

"We are going after Contalmaison this afternoon," said a staff officer at headquarters, "and if you hurry you may see it."

As a result, I witnessed the most brilliant scene of battle of any on the Somme, unless it was the taking of Combles. There was bright sunshine, with the air luminously clear and no heat waves. From my vantage point I could see clear to the neighborhood of Peronne. The French also were attacking; the drumhead fire of their soixante-quinze made a continuous roll, and the puffs of shrapnel smoke hung in a long, gossamery cloud fringing the horizon and the canopy of the green ridges.

Every aeroplane of the Allies seemed to be aloft, each one distinct against the blue with shimmering wings and the soft, burnished aureole of the propellers. They were flying at all heights. Some seemed almost motionless two or three miles above the earth, while others shot up from their aerodromes.

Planes circling, planes climbing, planes slipping down aerial toboggan slides with propellers still, planes going as straight as crows toward the German line to be lost to sight in space while others developed out of space as swift messengers bound for home with news of observations, planes touring a sector of the front, swooping low over a corps headquarters to drop a message and returning to their duty; planes of all types, from the monsters with vast stretch of wing and crews of three or more men, stately as swans, to those gulls, the saucy little Nieuports, shooting up and down and turning with incredible swiftness, their tails in the air; planes and planes in a fantastic aerial minuet, flitting around the great sausage balloons stationary in the still air.

With ripening grain and sweet-smelling harvests of clover and hay in the background and weeds and wild grass in the foreground, the area of vegetation in the opulence of midsummer was demarked from the area of shell-craters, trenches and explosions. You had the majesty of battle and the desolation of war; nature's eternal seeding and fruiting alongside the most ruthless forms of destruction. In the clear air the black bursts of the German high explosives hammering Mametz Wood, as if in revenge for its loss, seemed uglier and more murderous than usual; the light smoke of shrapnel had a softer, more lingering quality; soldiers were visible distinctly at a great distance in their comings and goings; the water carts carrying water up to the first line were a kind of pilgrim circuit riders of that thirsty world of deadly strife; a file of infantry winding up the slope at regular intervals were silhouettes as like as beads on a string. The whole suggested a hill of ants which had turned their habits of industry against an invader of their homes in the earth, and the columns of motor trucks and caissons ever flowing from all directions were as a tide, which halted at the foot of the slope and then flowed back.

There were shell-bursts wherever you looked, with your attention drawn to Contalmaison as it would be to a gathering crowd in the thick of city traffic. All the steel throats in clumps of woods, under cover of road embankments, in gullies and on the reverse side of slopes, were speaking. The guns were giving to Contalmaison all they had to give and the remaining walls of the chateau disappeared in a fog like a fishing smack off the Grand Banks. Super-refined, man-directed hell was making sportive chaos in the village which it hid with its steaming breath cut by columns of black smoke from the H.E.'s and crowned with flashes of shrapnel; and under the sun's rays the gases from the powder made prismatic splendor in flurries and billows shot with the tints of the rainbow.

Submerging a simple farming hamlet in this kind of a tempest was only part of the plan of the gunners, who cut a pattern of fire elsewhere in keeping with the patterns of the German trenches, placing a curtain of fire behind the town and another on the edge, and at other points not a curtain but steady hose-streams of fire. Answering German shells revealed which of the chalky scars on the slope was the British first-line trench, and from this, as steam from a locomotive runs in a flying plume along the crest of a railway cutting, rose a billowing wall of smoke which was harmless, not even asphyxiating, its only purpose being to screen the infantry attack, with a gentle breeze sweeping it on into the mantle over Contalmaison as the wind carries the smoke of a prairie fire. Lookout Mountain was known as the battle in the clouds, where generals could not see what their troops were doing. Now all battles are in a cloud.

From the first-line British trench the first wave of the British attack moved under cover of the smoke-screen and directly you saw that the shells had ceased to fall in Contalmaison. Its smoke mantle slowly lifting revealed fragmentary walls of that sturdy, defiant chateau still standing. Another wave of British infantry was on its way. Four waves in all were to go in, each succeeding one with its set part in supporting the one in front and in mastering the dugouts and machine gun positions that might have survived.

With no shells falling in Contalmaison, the bomb and the bayonet had the stage to themselves, a stage more or less hemmed in by explosions and with a sweep of projectiles from both sides passing over the heads of the cast in a melodrama which had "blessed little comedy relief," as one soldier put it. The Germans were already shelling the former British first line and their supports, while the British maintained a curtain of fire on the far side of the village to protect their infantry as it worked its way through the debris, and any fire which they had to spare after lifting it from Contalmaison they were distributing on different strong points, not in curtains but in a repetition of punches. It was the best artillery work that I had seen and its purpose seemed that of a man with a stick knocking in any head that appeared from any hole.

Act III. now. The British curtain of fire was lifted from the far edge of the village, which meant that the infantry according to schedule should be in possession of all of the village. But they might not stay. They might be forced out soon after they sent up their signals. When the Germans turned on a curtain of fire succeeding the British fire this was further evidence of British success sufficient to convince any skeptic. The British curtain was placed beyond it to hold off any counter-attack and prevent sniping till the new occupants of the premises had "dug themselves in."

The Germans had not forgotten that it was their turn now to hammer Contalmaison, through which they thought that British reserves and fresh supplies of bombs must come; and I saw one of the first "krumps" of this concentration take another bite out of the walls of the chateau.

By watching the switching of the curtains of fire I had learned that this time Contalmaison was definitely held; and though they say that I don't know anything about news, I beat the communique on the fact as the result of my observation, which ought at least to classify me as a "cub" reporter.



XIII

A GREAT NIGHT ATTACK

Following hard blows with blows—Trones Woods—Attack and counter-attack—A heavy price to pay—"The spirit that quickeneth" knew no faltering—Second-line German fortifications—A daringly planned attack—"Up and at them!"—An attack not according to the scientific factory system—The splendid and terrible hazard—Gun flashes in the dark numerous as fireflies—Majestic, diabolical, beautiful—A planet bombarding with aerolites—Signal flares in the distance—How far had the British gone?—Sunrise on the attack—Good news that day.

Of all the wonderful nights at the front that of July 13th-14th was distinctive for its incomparable suspense. A great experiment was to be tried; at least, so it seemed to the observer, though the staff did not take that attitude. It never does once it has decided upon any daring enterprise. When you send fifty thousand men into a charge that may fail with a loss of half of their number or may brilliantly succeed with a loss of only five per cent., none from the corps commanders and division commanders, who await results after the plans are made, down to the privates must have any thought except that the plan is right and that it will go through.

There is no older military maxim than to follow up any hard blow with other blows, in order that the enemy may have no time to recuperate; but in moving against a frontal line under modern conditions the congestion of transport and ammunition which must wait on new roads and the filling in of captured trenches makes a difficult problem in organization. Never had there been and never were there necessary such numbers of men and such quantities of material as on the Somme front.

The twelve days succeeding July 1st had seen the taking of minor position after position by local concentrations of troops and artillery fire, while the army as a whole had been preparing for another big attack at the propitious moment when these preliminary gains should justify it.

Half a tactical eye could see that the woods of Mametz, Bernafay and Trones must be held in order to allow of elbow room for a mass movement over a broad front. The German realized this and after he had lost Mametz and Bernafay he held all the more desperately to Trones, which, for the time being, was the superlative horror in woods fighting, though we were yet to know that it could be surpassed by Delville and High Woods.

In Trones the Germans met attack with counter-attack again and again. The British got through to the east side of the woods, and in reply the Germans sent in a wave forcing the British back to the west, but no farther. Then the British, reinforced again, reached the east side. Showers of leaves and splinters descended from shell-bursts and machine guns were always rattling. The artillery of both sides hammered the approaches of the woods to prevent reinforcements from coming up.

In the cellars of Guillemont village beyond Trones the Germans had refuges for concentrating their reserves to feed in more troops, whose orders, as all the prisoners taken said, were to hold to the last man. Trones Wood was never to be yielded to the British. Its importance was too vital. Grim national and racial pride and battalion pride and soldierly pride grappled in unyielding effort and enmity. The middle of the woods became a neutral ground where the wounded of the different sallies lay groaning from pain and thirst. Small groups of British had dug themselves in among the Germans and, waterless, foodless, held out, conserving their ammunition or, when it was gone, waiting for the last effort with the bayonet.

For several days the spare British artillery had been cutting the barbed wire of the second line and smashing in the trenches; and the big guns which had been advanced since July 1st were sending their shells far beyond the Ridge into villages and crossroads and other vital points, in order to interfere with German communications.

The Thiepval-Gommecourt line where the British had been repulsed on July 1st had reverted to something approaching stalemate conditions, with the usual exchange of artillery fire, and it was along the broader front where the old German first line had been broken through that the main concentrations of men and guns were being made in order to continue the advance for the present through the opening won on July 1st. The price paid for the taking of the woods and for repeated attacks where initial attacks had failed might seem to the observer—unless he knew that the German losses had been equally heavy if not heavier since July 1st—disproportionate not only to the ground gained but also to general results up to this time which, and this was most important, had demonstrated, as a promise for the future, that the British New Army could attack unremittingly and successfully against seasoned German troops in positions which the Germans had considered impregnable.

"The spirit that quickeneth" knew no faltering. Battle police were without occupation. There were no stragglers. With methodical, phlegmatic steadiness the infantry moved up to the firing-line when its turn came.

The second-line German fortifications, if not as elaborate, were even better situated than the first; not on the crest of the Ridge, of course, where they would be easily swept by artillery blasts, but where the latest experience demonstrated that they could make the most of the commanding high ground with the least exposure. Looking through my glasses I could see the portion of the open knoll stretching from Longueval to High Wood which was to be the object of the most extensive effort since July 1st.

As yet, except in trench raids over narrow fronts, there had been no attempt to rush a long line under cover of darkness because of the difficulty of the different groups keeping touch and identifying their objectives.

The charge of July 1st had been at seven-thirty in the morning. Contalmaison had been stormed in the afternoon. Fricourt was taken at midday. When the bold suggestion was made that over a three-mile front the infantry should rush the second-line trenches in the darkness, hoping to take the enemy by surprise, it was as daring a conception considering the ground and the circumstances as ever came to the mind of a British commander and might be said to be characteristic of the dash and so-called "foolhardiness" of the British soldier, accustomed to "looking smart" and rushing his enemy from colonial experiences. Nelson had the "spirit that quickeneth" when he turned his blind eye to the enemy. The French, too, are for the attack. It won Marengo and Austerlitz. No general ever dared more than Frederick the Great, not even Caesar. Thus the great races of history have won military dominion.

"Up and at them!" is still the shibboleth in which the British believe, no less than our pioneers and Grant and Stonewall Jackson believed in it, and nothing throughout the Somme battle was so characteristically British as not only the stubbornness of their defense when small parties were surrounded, but the way in which they would keep on attacking and the difficulty which generals had not in encouraging initiative but in keeping battalions and brigades from putting into practice their conviction that they could take a position on their own account if they could have a chance instead of waiting on a systematic advance.

Thus, an attack on that second line on the Ridge after the Germans had had two weeks of further preparation was an adventure of an order, in the days of mechanical transport, aeroplanes and indirect artillery fire when all military science is supposed to be reduced to a factory system, worthy of the days of the sea-rovers and of Clive, of Washington's crossing of the Delaware or of the storming of Quebec, when a bold confidence made gamble for a mighty stake.

So, at least, it seemed to the observer, though, as I said, the staff insisted that it was a perfectly normal operation. The Japanese had made many successful night attacks early in the Russo-Japanese war, but these had been against positions undefended by machine gun fire and curtains of artillery fire. When the Japanese reached their objective they were not in danger of being blasted out by high explosives and incidentally they were not fighting what has been called the most highly trained army on earth on the most concentrated front that has ever been known in military history.

But "Up and at them!" Sir Douglas Haig, who had "all his nerve with him," said to go ahead. At three-thirty a.m., a good hour before dawn, that wave of men three miles long was to rush into the night toward an invisible objective, with the darkness so thick that they could hardly recognize a figure ten yards away. Yet as one English soldier said, "You could see the German as soon as he saw you and you ought to be able to throw a bomb as quickly as he and a bayonet would have just as much penetration at three-thirty in the morning as at midday."

When I saw the battalions who were to take part in the attack marching up I realized, as they did not, the splendid and terrible hazard of success or failure, of life or death, which was to be theirs. Along the new roads they passed and then across the conquered ground, its uneven slopes made more uneven by continued digging and shell fire, and disappeared, and Night dropped her curtain on the field with no one knowing what morning would reveal.

The troops were in position; all was ready; all the lessons learned from the attack of July 1st were to be applied. At midnight there was no movement except of artillery caissons; gunners whose pieces two hours later were to speak with a fury of blasts were sound asleep beside their ammunition. The absolute order in this amazing network of all kinds of supplies and transport contributed to the suspense. Night bombardments we had already seen, and I would not dwell on this except that it had the same splendor by night that the storming of Contalmaison had by day.

The artillery observer for a fifteen-inch gun was a good-humored host. He was putting his "bit," as the British say, into Bazentin-le-Petit village and the only way we knew where Bazentin was in the darkness was through great flashes of light which announced the bursting of a fifteen-hundred-pound shell that had gone hurtling through the air with its hoarse, ponderous scream. All the slope up to the Ridge was merged in the blanket of night. Out of it came the regular flashes of guns for a while as the prelude to the unloosing of the tornado before the attack.

Now that we saw them all firing, for the first time we had some idea of the number that had been advanced into the conquered territory since July 1st. The ruins and the sticks of trees of Fricourt and Mametz with their few remaining walls stood out spectral in the flashes of batteries that had found nesting places among the debris. The whole slope had become a volcanic uproar. One might as well have tried to count the number of fireflies over a swamp as the flashes. The limitation of reckoning had been reached. Guns ahead of us and around us and behind us as usual, in a battle of competitive crashes among themselves, and near by we saw the figures of the gunners outlined in instants of weird lightning glow, which might include the horses of a caisson in a flicker of distinct silhouette flashed out of the night and then lost in the night, with the riders sitting as straight as if at drill. Every voice had one message, "This for the Ridge!" which was crowned by hell's tempest of shell-bursts to prepare the way for the rush by the infantry at "zero."

The thing was majestic, diabolical, beautiful, absurd—anything you wished to call it. Look away from the near-by guns where the faces of the gunners were illumined and you could not conceive of the scene as being of human origin; but mixing awed humility with colossal egoism in varying compounds of imagination and fact, you might think of your little group of observers as occupying a point of view in space where one planet hidden in darkness was throwing aerolites at another hidden in darkness striking it with mighty explosions, and the crashes and screams were the sound of the missiles on their unlighted way.

It was still dark when three-thirty came and pyrotechnics were added to the display, which I could not think of as being in any sense pyrotechnical, when out of the blanket as signals from the planet's surface in the direction of some new manoeuver appeared showers of glowing red sparks, which rose to a height of a hundred feet with a breadth of thirty or forty feet, it seemed at that distance. One shower was in the neighborhood of Ovillers, one at La Boisselle and one this side of Longueval. Then in the distance beyond Longueval the sky was illumined by a great conflagration not on the fireworks program, which must have been a German ammunition dump exploded by British shells.

It was our planet, now, and a particular portion of it in Picardy. No imaginative translation to space could hold any longer. With the charge going in, the intimate human element was supreme. The thought of those advancing waves of men in the darkness made the fiery display a dissociated objective spectacle. On the Ridge more signal flares rose and those illumining the dark masses of foliage must be Bazentin Wood gained, and those beyond must be in the Bazentin villages, Little Bazentin and Big Bazentin, though neither of them, like most of the villages, numbering a dozen to fifty houses could be much smaller and be called villages.

This was all the objective. Yes, but though the British had arrived, as the signals showed, could they remain? It seemed almost too good to be true. And that hateful Trones Wood? Had we taken that, too, as a part of the tidal wave of a broad attack instead of trying to take it piecemeal?

Our suspense was intensified by the thought that this action might be the turning-point in the first stage of the great Somme battle. We strained our eyes into the darkness studying, as a mariner studies the sky, the signs with which we had grown familiar as indicative of results. There was a good augury in the comparatively slight German shell fire in response, though we were reminded that it might at any minute develop with sudden ferocity.

Now the flashes of the guns grew dim. A transformation more wonderful than artillery could produce, that of night into day, was in process. Not a curtain but the sun's ball of fire, undisturbed by any efforts of the human beings on a few square miles of earth, was holding to his schedule in as kindly a fashion as ever toward planets which kept at a respectful distance from his molten artillery concentration.

Out of the blanket which hid the field appeared the great welts of chalk of the main line trenches, then the lesser connecting ones; the woods became black patches and the remaining tree-trunks gaunt, still and dismal sentinels of the gray ruins of the villages, until finally all the conformations of the scarred and tortured slope were distinct in the first fresh light of a brilliant summer's day. Where the blazes had been was the burst of black smoke from shells and we saw that it was still German fire along the visible line of the British objective, assuring us that the British had won the ground which they had set out to take and were holding it.

"Up and at them!" had done the trick this time, and trick it was; a trick or stratagem, to use the higher sounding word; a trick in not waiting on the general attack for the taking of Trones according to obvious tactics, but including Trones in the sweep; a trick in the daring way that the infantry was sent in ahead of the answering German curtain of fire.

All the news was good that day. The British had swept through Bazentin Wood and taken the Bazentin villages. They held Trones Wood and were in Delville and High Woods. A footing was established on the Ridge where the British could fight for final mastery on even terms with the enemy. "Slight losses" came the reports from corps and divisions and confirmation of official reports was seen in the paucity of the wounded arriving at the casualty clearing stations and in the faces of officers and men everywhere. Even British phlegm yielded to exhilaration.



XIV

THE CAVALRY GOES IN

The "dodo" band—Cavalry a luxury—Cavalry, however, may not be discarded—What ten thousand horse might do—A taste of action for the cavalry—An "incident"—Horses that had the luck to "go in"—Cavalrymen who showed signs of action—The novelty of a cavalry action—A camp group—Germans caught unawares—Horsemen and an aeroplane—Retiring in good order—Just enough casualties to give the fillip of danger to recollection.

Sometimes a squadron of cavalry, British or Indian, survivors of the ardent past, intruded in a mechanical world of motor trucks and tractors drawing guns. With outward pride these lean riders of burnished, sleek horses, whose broad backs bore gallantly the heavy equipment, concealed their irritation at idleness while others fought. They brought picturesqueness and warm-blooded life to the scene. Such a merciless war of steel contrivances needed some ornament. An old sergeant one day, when the cavalry halted beside his battalion which was resting, in an exhibit of affectionate recollection exclaimed:

"It's good to stroke a horse's muzzle again! I was in the Dragoon Guards once, myself."

Sometimes the cavalry facetiously referred to itself as the "Dodo" band, with a galling sense of helplessness under its humor; and others had thought of it as being like the bison preserved in the Yellowstone Park lest the species die out.

A cynical general said that a small force of cavalry was a luxury which such a vast army of infantry and guns might afford. In his opinion, even if we went to the Rhine, the cavalry would melt in its first charge under the curtains of fire and machine gun sprays of the rearguard actions of the retreating enemy. He had never been in the cavalry, and any squadron knew well what he and all of those who shared his views were thinking whenever it passed over the brow of a hill that afforded a view of the welter of shell fire over a field cut with shell-craters and trenches which are pitfalls for horses. Yet it returned gamely and with fastidious application to its practice in crossing such obstacles in case the command to "go in" should ever come. Such preparations were suggestive to extreme skeptics of the purchase of robes and the selection of a suitable hilltop of a religious cult which has appointed the day for ascension.

Excepting a dash in Champagne, not since trench warfare began had the cavalry had any chance. The thought of action was an hypothesis developed from memory of charges in the past. Aeroplanes took the cavalry's place as scouts, machine guns and rifles emplaced behind a first-line trench which had succumbed to an attack took its place as rearguard, and aeroplane patrols its place as screen.

Yet any army, be it British, French, or German, which expected to carry through an offensive would not turn all its cavalry into infantry. This was parting with one of the old three branches of horse, foot and gun and closing the door to a possible opportunity. If the Japanese had had cavalry ready at the critical moment after Mukden, its mobility would have hampered the Russian retreat, if not turned it into a rout. When you need cavalry you need it "badly," as the cowboy said about his six-shooter.

Should the German line ever be broken and all that earth-tied, enormous, complicated organization, with guns emplaced and its array of congested ammunition dumps and supply depots, try to move on sudden demand, what added confusion ten thousand cavalry would bring! What rich prizes would await it as it galloped through the breach and in units, separating each to its objective according to evolutions suited to the new conditions, dismounted machine guns to cover roads and from chosen points sweep their bullets into wholesale targets! The prospect of those few wild hours, when any price in casualties might be paid for results, was the inspiration of dreams when hoofs stamped in camps at night or bits champed as lances glistened in line above khaki-colored steel helmets on morning parade.

A taste, just a taste, of action the cavalry was to have, owing to the success of the attack of July 14th, which manifestly took the Germans by surprise between High and Delville Woods and left them staggering with second-line trenches lost and confusion ensuing, while guns and scattered battalions were being hurried up by train in an indiscriminate haste wholly out of keeping with German methods of prevision and precision. The breach was narrow, the field of action for horses limited; but word came back that over the plateau which looked away to Bapaume between Delville and High Woods there were few shell-craters and no German trenches or many Germans in sight as day dawned.

Gunners rubbed their eyes at the vision as they saw the horsemen pass and infantry stood amazed to see them crossing trenches, Briton and Indian on their way up the slope to the Ridge. How they passed the crest without being decimated by a curtain of fire would be a mystery if there were any mysteries in this war, where everything seems to be worked out like geometry or chemical formulae. The German artillery being busy withdrawing heavy guns and the other guns preoccupied after the startling results of an attack not down on the calendar for that day did not have time to "get on" the cavalry when they were registered on different targets—which is suggestive of what might come if the line were cleft over a broad front. A steel band is strong until it breaks, which may be in many pieces.

"Did you see the charge?" you ask. No, nor even the ride up the slope, being busy elsewhere and not knowing that the charge was going to take place. I could only seek out the two squadrons who participated in the "incident," as the staff called it, after it was over. Incident is the right word for a military sense of proportion. When the public in England and abroad heard that the cavalry were "in" they might expect to hear next day that the Anglo-French Armies were in full pursuit of the broken German Armies to the Rhine, when no such outcome could be in the immediate program unless German numbers were cut in two or the Prussian turned Quaker.

An incident! Yes, but something to give a gallop to the pen of the writer after the monotony of gunfire and bombing. I was never more eager to hear an account of any action than of this charge—a cavalry charge, a charge of cavalry, if you please, on the Western front in July, 1916.

In one of the valleys back of the front out of sight of the battle there were tired, tethered horses with a knowing look in their eyes, it seemed to me, and a kind of superior manner toward the sleek, fresh horses which had not had the luck to "go in"; and cavalrymen were lying under their shelters fast asleep, their clothing and accoutrements showing the unmistakable signs of action. We heard from their officers the story of both the Dragoon Guards and the Deccan Horse (Indian) who had known what it was to ride down a German in the open.

The shade of Phil Sheridan might ponder on what the world was coming to that we make much of such a small affair; but he would have felt all the glowing satisfaction of these men if he had waited as long as they for any kind of a cavalry action. The accounts of the two squadrons may go together. Officers were shaving and aiming for enough water to serve as a substitute for a bath. The commander with his map could give you every detail with a fond, lingering emphasis on each one, as a battalion commander might of a first experience in a trench raid when later the same battalion would make an account of a charge in battle which was rich with incidents of hand-to-hand encounters and prisoners breached from dugouts into an "I-came-I-saw" narrative, and not understand why further interest should be shown by the inquirer in what was the everyday routine of the business of war. For the trite saying that everything is relative does not forfeit any truth by repetition.

The cavalry had done everything quite according to tactics, which would only confuse the layman. The wonder was that any of it had come back alive. On that narrow front it had ridden out toward the Germany Army with nothing between the cavalry and the artillery and machine guns which had men on horses for targets. In respect to days when to show a head above a trench meant death the thing was stupefying, incredible. These narrators forming a camp group, with lean, black-bearded, olive-skinned Indians in attendance bringing water in horse-buckets for the baths, and the sight of kindly horses' faces smiling at you, and the officers themselves horsewise and with the talk and manner of horsemen—only they made it credible. How real it was to them! How real it became to me!

There had been some Germans in hiding in the grass who were taken unawares by this rush of gallopers with lances. Every participant agreed as to the complete astonishment of the enemy. It was equivalent to a football player coming into the field in ancient armor and the more of a surprise considering that those Germans had been sent out after a morning full of surprises to make contact with the British and reestablish the broken line.

Not dummies of straw this time for the lance's sharp point, but startled men in green uniform—the vision which had been in mind when every thrust was made at the dummies! This was what cavalry was for, the object of all the training. It rode through quite as it would have ridden fifty or a hundred years ago. A man on the ground, a man on a horse! This feature had not changed.

"You actually got some?"

"Oh, yes!"

"On the lances?"

"Yes."

From the distance came the infernal sound of guns in their threshing contest of explosions which made this incident more impressive than any account of a man buried by shells, of isolated groups holding out in dugouts, or of venturesome soldiers catching and tossing back German bombs at the man who threw them, because it was unique on the Somme. Both British and Indians had had the same kind of an opportunity. After riding through they wheeled and rode back in the accepted fashion of cavalry.

By this time some of the systematic Germans had recollected that a part of their drill was how to receive a cavalry charge, and when those who had not run or been impaled began firing and others stood ready with their bayonets but with something of the manner of men who were not certain whether they were in a trance or not, according to the account, a German machine gun began its wicked staccato as another feature of German awakening to the situation.

This brings us to the most picturesque incident of the "incident." Most envied of all observers of the tournament was an aviator who looked down on a show bizarre even in the annals of aviation. The German planes had been driven to cover, which gave the Briton a fair field. A knightly admiration, perhaps a sense of fellowship not to say sympathy with the old arm of scouting from the new, possessed him; or let it be that he could not resist a part in such a rare spectacle which was so tempting to sporting instinct. He swooped toward that miserable, earth-tied turtle of a machine gun and emptied his drum into it. He was not over three hundred feet, all agree, above the earth, when not less than ten thousand feet was the rule.

"It was jolly fine of him!" as the cavalry put it. To have a charge and then to have that happen—well, it was not so bad to be in the cavalry. The plane drew fire by setting all the Germans to firing at it without hitting it, and the machine gun, whether silenced or not, ceased to bother the cavalry, which brought back prisoners to complete a well-rounded adventure before withdrawing lest the German guns, also entering into the spirit of the situation, should blow men and horses off the Ridge instead of leaving them to retire in good order.

Casualties: about the same number of horses as men. Riders who had lost their horses mounted riderless horses. A percentage of one in six or seven had been hit, which was the most amazing part of it; indeed, the most joyful part, completing the likeness to the days when war still had the element of sport. There had been killed and wounded or it would not have been a battle, but not enough to cast a spell of gloom; just enough to be a part of the gambling hazard of war and give the fillip of danger to recollection.



XV

ENTER THE ANZACS

Newfoundland sets the pace—Australia and New Zealand lands that breed men—Australians "very proud, individual men"—Geographical isolation a cause of independence—The "Anzacs'" idea of fighting—Sir Charles Birdwood—How he taught his troops discipline—Bean and Ross—Difference between Australians and New Zealanders—The Australian uniform and physique—A dollar and a half a day—General Birdwood and his men—Australian humor.

It was British troops exclusively which started the Grand Offensive if we except the Newfoundland battalion which alone had the honor of representing the heroism of North America on July 1st; for people in passing the Grand Banks which makes them think of Newfoundland are wont to regard it as a part of Canada, when it is a separate colony whose fishermen and frontiersmen were attached to a British division that went to Gallipoli with a British brigade and later shared the fate of British battalions in the attack on the Thiepval-Gommecourt sector.

On that famous day in Picardy the Newfoundlanders advanced into the smoke of the curtains of fire unflinchingly and kept on charging the machine guns. Survivors and the wounded who crept back at night across No Man's Land had no need to trumpet their heroism. All the army knew it. Newfoundland had set the pace for the other clans from oversea.

It was British troops, too, which took Contalmaison and Mametz, Bernafay and Trones Woods and who carried out all the attack of July 15th, with the exception of the South African brigade which stormed Delville Wood with the tearing enthusiasm of a rush for a new diamond mine.

Whenever the troops from oversea are not mentioned you may be sure that it is the British, the home troops, who are doing the fighting, their number being about ten to one of the others with the one out of ten representing double the number of those who fought on either side in any great pitched battle in our Civil War. After the Newfoundlanders and South Africans, who were few but precious, the Australians, an army of themselves, came to take their part in the Somme battle.

I have never been in Australia or New Zealand, but this I know that when the war is over I am going. I want to see the land that breeds such men. They are free men if ever there were such; free whether they come from town or from bush. I had heard of their commonwealth ideas, their State-owned utilities, their socialistic inclinations, which might incline you to think that they were all of the same State-cut pattern of manhood; but I had heard, too, how they had restricted immigration of Orientals and limited other immigration by method if not by law, which was suggestive of a tendency to keep the breed to itself, as I understood from my reading.

Whenever I saw an Australian I thought: "Here is a very proud, individual man," but also an Australian, particularly an Australian. Some people thought that there was a touch of insolence in his bearing when he looked you straight in the eye as much as to say: "The best thing in the world is to be an upstanding member of the human race who is ready to prove that he is as good as any other. If you don't think so, well—" There was no doubt about the Australian being brave. This was as self-evident as that the pine is straight and the beech is hard wood.

The Australians came from a great distance. This you knew without geographical reference. Far away in their island continent they have been working out their own destiny, not caring for interference from the outside. To put it in strong language, there is a touch of the "I don't care a rap for anybody who does not care a rap for me" in their extreme moments of independence. It is refreshing that a whole population may have an island continent to themselves and carry on in this fashion.

They had had an introduction to universal service which was also characteristic of their democracy and helpful in time of war. The "Anzac" had caught the sense of its idea (before other English-speaking people) not to let others do your fighting for you but all "join in the scrum." Orientals might crave the broad spaces of a new land, in which event if they ever took Australia and New Zealand they would not be bothered by many survivors of the white population, because most of the Anzacs would be dead—this being particularly the kind of people the Anzacs are as I knew them in France, which was not a poor trial ground of their quality.

When they went to Gallipoli it was said that they had no discipline; and certainly at first discipline did irritate them as a snaffle bit irritates a high-spirited horse. "Little Kitch," as the stalwart Anzacs called the New Army Englishman, thought that they broke all the military commandments of the drill-grounds in a way that would be their undoing. I rather think that it might have been the undoing of Little Kitch, with his stubborn, methodical, phlegmatic, "stick-it" courage; but after the Australians had fought the Turk a while it was evident that they knew how to fight, and their general, Sir Charles Birdwood, supplied the discipline which is necessary if fighting power is not to be wasted in misplaced emotion.

Lucky Birdwood to command the Australians and lucky Australians to have him as commander! It was he who in choosing a telegraph code word made up "Anzac" for the Australian-New Zealand corps, which at once became the collective term for the combination. What a test he put them to and they put him to! He had to prove himself to them before he could develop the Anzacs into a war unit worthy of their fighting quality. Such is democracy where man judges man by standards, set, in this case, by Australian customs.

When he understood them he knew why he was fortunate. He was one of them and at the same time a stiff disciplinarian. They objected to saluting, but he taught them to salute in a way that did not make saluting seem the whole thing—this was what they resented—but a part of the routine. It was said that he knew every man in the corps by name, which shows how stories will grow around a commander who rises at five and retires at midnight and has a dynamic ubiquity in keeping in touch with his men. Such a force included some "rough customers" who might mistake war for a brawler's opportunity; but Sir Charles had a way with them that worked out for their good and the good of the corps.

Though they were of a free type of democracy, the Australian government, either from inherent sense or as the result of distance, as critics might say, or owing to General Birdwood's gift of having his way, did not handicap the Australians as heavily as they might have been handicapped under the circumstances by officers who were skilful in politics without being skilful in war.

As publicist the Australians had Bean, a trained journalist, a red-headed blade of a man who was an officer among officers and a man among men and held the respect of all by Australian qualities. If there could be only one chronicler allowed, then Bean's choice had the applause of a corps, though Bean says that Australia is full of just as good journalists who did not have his luck. The New Zealanders had Ross to play the same part for them with equal loyalty and he was as much of a New Zealander as Bean was an Australian.

For, make no mistake, though the Australians and the New Zealanders might seem alike to the observer as they marched along a road, they are not, as you will find if you talk with them. The New Zealanders have islands of their own, not to mention that the Tasmanians have one, too. Besides, the New Zealanders include a Maori battalion and of all aborigines of lands where the white races have settled in permanence to build new nations, the Maoris have best accustomed themselves to civilization and are the highest type—a fact which every New Zealander takes as another contributing factor to New Zealand's excellence. Quiet men the New Zealanders, bearing themselves with the pride of Guardsmen whose privates all belong to superior old families, and New Zealanders every minute of every hour of the day, though you might think that civil war was imminent if you started them on a discussion about home politics.

Give any unit of an army some particular, readily distinguishable symbol, be it only a feather in the cap or a different headgear, and that lot becomes set apart from the others in a fashion that gives them esprit de corps. With the Scots it is the kilt and the different plaids. All the varied uniforms of regiments of the armies of olden days had this object. Modern war requires neutral tones and its necessary machinelike homogeneity may look askance at too much rivalry among units as tending toward each one acting by itself rather than in co-operation with the rest.

All the forces at the front except the Anzacs were in khaki and wore caps when not wearing steel helmets in the trenches or on the firing-line. The Australians were in slate-colored uniform and they wore looped-up soft hats. The hats accentuated the manner, the height and the sturdiness of the men whose physique was unsurpassed at the British front, and practically all were smooth-shaven. For generations they had had adequate nutrition and they had the capacity to absorb it, which generations from the slums may lack even if the food is forthcoming.

There was no reason why every man in Australia should not have enough to eat and, whether bush or city dweller, he was fond of the open air where he might exercise the year around. He had blown his lungs; he had fed well and came of a daring pioneer stock. When an Anzac battalion under those hats went swinging along the road it seemed as if the men were taking the road along with them, such was their vigorous tread. On leave in London they were equally conspicuous. Sometimes they used a little vermilion with the generosity of men who received a dollar and a half a day as their wage. It was the first time, in many instances, that they had seen the "old town" and they had come far and to-morrow might go back to France for the last time.

My first view of them in the trenches after they came from Gallipoli was in the flat country near Ypres whose mushiness is so detested by all soldiers. They had been used to digging trenches in dry hillsides, where they might excavate caves with solid walls. Here they had to fill sandbags with mud and make breastworks, which were frequently breached by shell fire. At first, they had been poor diggers; but when democracy learns its lesson by individual experience it is incorporated in every man and no longer is a question of orders. Now they were deepening communication trenches and thickening parapet walls and were mud-plastered by their labor.

Having risen at General Birdwood's hour of five to go with him on inspection I might watch his methods, and it means something to men to have their corps commander thus early among them when a drizzly rain is softening the morass under foot. He stopped and asked the privates how they were in a friendly way and they answered with straight-away candor. Then he gave some directions about improvements with a we-are-all-working-together suggestiveness, but all the time he was the general. These privates were not without their Australian sense of humor, which is dry; and in answer to the inquiry about how he was one said:

"All right, except we'd like a little rum, sir."

In cold weather the distribution of a rum ration was at the disposition of a commander, who in most instances did not give it. This stalwart Australian evidently had not been a teetotaler.

"We'll give you some rum when you have made a trench raid and taken some prisoners," the general replied.

"It might be an incentive, sir!" said the soldier very respectfully.

"No Australian should need such an incentive!" answered the general, and passed on.

"Yes, sir!" was the answer of another soldier to the question if he had been in Gallipoli.

"Wounded?"

"Yes, sir."

"How?"

"I was examining a bomb, sir, to find out how it was made and it went off to my surprise, sir!"

There was not even a twinkle of the eye accompanying the response, yet I was not certain that this big fellow from the bush had been wounded in that way. I suspected him of a quiet joke.

"Throw them at the Germans next time," said the general.

"Yes, sir. It's safer!"

Returning after that long morning of characteristic routine, as we passed through a village where Australians were billeted one soldier failed to salute. When the general stopped him his hand shot up in approved fashion as he recognized his commander and he said contritely, with the touch of respect of a man to the leader in whom he believes:

"I did not see that it was you, sir!"

The general had on a mackintosh with the collar turned up, which concealed his rank.

"But you might see that it was an officer."

"Yes, sir."

"And you salute officers."

"Yes, sir."

Which he would hereafter now that it was General Birdwood's order, though this everlasting raising of your hand, as one Australian said, made you into a kind of human windmill when the world was so full of officers. Gradually all came to salute, and when an Australian salutes he does it in a way that is a credit to Australia.

After a period of fighting a tired division retired from the battle front and a fresh one took the place. Thus, following the custom of the circulation of troops by the armies of both sides, whether at Verdun or on the Somme, the day arrived when along the road toward the front came the Australian battalions, hardened and disciplined by trench warfare, keen-edged in spirit, and ready for the bold task which awaited them at Pozieres. This time the New Zealanders were not along.



XVI

THE AUSTRALIANS AND A WINDMILL

The windmill upon the hill—Pozieres—Its topography—Warlike intensity of the Australians—A "stiff job"—An Australian chronicler—Incentives to Australian efficiency—German complaint that the Australians came too fast—Clockwork efficiency—Man-to-man business—Sunburned, gaunt battalions from the vortex—The fighting on the Ridge—Mouquet Farm—A contest of individuality against discipline—"Advance, Australia!"—New Zealanders—South Africans.

When I think of the Australians in France I always think of a windmill. This is not implying that they were in any sense Quixotic or that they tilted at a windmill, there being nothing left of the windmill to tilt at when their capture of its ruins became the crowning labor of their first tour on the Somme front.

In their progress up that sector of the Ridge the windmill came after Pozieres, as the ascent of the bare mountain peak comes after the reaches below the timber line. Pozieres was beyond La Boisselle and Ovillers-la-Boisselle, from which the battle movement swung forward at the hinge of the point where the old first-line German fortifications had been broken on July 1st.

To think of Pozieres will be to think of the Australians as long as the history of the Somme battle endures. I read an interview in a New York paper with the Chief of Staff of the German Army opposite the British in which he must have been correctly quoted, as his remarks passed the censorship. He said that the loss of Pozieres was a blunder. I liked his frankness in laying the blame on a subordinate who, if he also had spoken, might have mentioned the presence of the Australians as an excuse, which, personally, I think is an excellent one.

Difficult as it now becomes to keep any sequence in the operations when, at best, chronology ceases to be illuminative of phases, it is well here to explain that the attack of July 15th had not gained the whole Ridge on the front ahead of the broad stretch of ruptured first line. Besides, the Ridge is not like the roof of a house, but a most illusive series of irregular knolls with small plateaus or valleys between, a sort of miniature broken tableland. The foothold gained on July 15th meant no broad command of vision down the slope to the main valley on the other side. Even a shoulder five or ten feet higher than the neighboring ground meant a barrier to artillery observation which shells would not blast away; and the struggle for such positions was to go on for weeks.

Pozieres, then, was on the way to the Ridge and its possession would put the formidable defenses of Thiepval in a salient, thus enabling the British to strike it from the side as well as in front, which is the aim of all strategy whether it works in mobile divisions in an open field or is biting and tearing its way against field fortifications. Therefore, the Germans had good reason to hold Pozieres, which protected first-line trenches that had required twenty months of preparation. Wherever they could keep the Briton or the Frenchman from forcing the fight into the open which made the contest an even one in digging, they were saving life and ammunition by nests of redoubts and dugouts.

The reason that the Australians wanted to take Pozieres was not so tactical as human in their minds. It was the village assigned to them and they wished to investigate it immediately and get established in the property that was to be theirs, once they took it, to hold in trust for the inhabitants. I had a fondness for watching them as they marched up to the front looking unreal in their steel helmets which they wore in place of the broad-brimmed hats. There was a sort of warlike intensity about them which may come from the sunlight of an island continent reflecting the histrionic adaptability of appearances to the task in hand.

Their first objective was to be the main street. They had a "stiff job" ahead, as everybody agreed, and so had the British troops operating on their right.

"This objective business has a highly educated sound, which might limit martial enthusiasm," said one Australian. "As I understand it, that's the line where we stop no matter how good the going and which we must reach no matter how hard the going."

Precisely. An Australian battalion needed a warning in the first instance lest it might keep on advancing, which meant that commanders would not know where it was in the shell-smoke and it might get "squeezed" for want of support on the right and left, as I have explained elsewhere. Certainly, warning was unnecessary in the second instance about the hard going.

Bean has all the details of the taking of Pozieres; he knows what every battalion did, and I was going to say what every soldier did. When the Australians were in he was in making notes and when they were out he was out writing up his notes. His was intimate war correspondence about the fellows who came from all the districts of his continent, his home folks. I am only expressing the impressions of one who had glimpses of the Australians while the battle was raging elsewhere.

Of course, skeptics had said that Gallipoli was one thing and the Somme another and the Australian man-to-man method might receive a shock from Prussian system; but, then, skeptics had said that the British could not make an army in two years. The Australians knew what was in the skeptics' minds, which was further incentive. They had a general whom they believed in and they did not admit that any man on earth was a better man than an Australian. And their staff? Of course, when it takes forty years to make a staff how could the Australians have one that could hold its own with the Germans? And this was what the Australians had to do, staff and man: beat the Germans.

When with clockwork promptness came the report that they had taken all of their objectives it showed that they were up to the standard of their looks and their staff signals were working well. They had a lot of prisoners, too, who complained that the Australians came on too fast. Meanwhile, they were on one side of the street and the Germans on the other, hugging debris and sniping at one another. Now the man-to-man business began to count. The Australian got across the street; he went after the other fellow; he made a still hunt of it. This battle had become a personal matter which pleased their sense of individualism; for it is not bred into Australians to be afraid if they are out alone after dark.

Having worked beyond their first objective, when they were given as their second the rest of the village they took it; and they were not "biffed" out of it, either. What was the use of yielding ground when you would have to make another charge in order to regain what had been lost? They were not that kind of arithmeticians, they said. They believed in addition not subtraction in an offensive campaign.

So they stuck, though the Germans made repeated daring counter-attacks and poured in shell fire from the guns up Thiepval way and off Bapaume way with hellish prodigality. For the German staff was evidently much out of temper about the "blunder" and for many weeks to come were to continue pounding Pozieres. If they could not shake the Australian out of the village they meant to make him pay heavy taxes and to try to kill his reliefs and stop his supplies. How the Australians managed to get food and men up through the communication trenches under the unceasing inferno over that bare slope is tribute to their skill in slipping out and in between its blasts.

Not only were they able to hold, but they kept on attacking. Every day we heard that they had taken more ground and whenever we went out to have a look the German lines were always a little farther back. One day we were asking if the Australians were in the cemetery yet; the next day they were and the next they had more of it as they worked their way uphill, fighting from grave to grave; and the next day they had mastered all of it, thanks to a grim persistence which some had said would not comport with their highstrung temperament.

The windmill was a landmark crowning the Ridge; as fair a target as ever artillery ranged on—a gunner's delight. After having been knocked into splinters the splinters were spread about by high explosives which reduced the stone base to fragments.

Sunburned, gaunt battalions came out of the vortex for a turn of rest. With helmets battered by shrapnel bullets, after nights in the rain and broiling hot days, their faces grimy and unshaven, their clothes torn and spotted, they were still Australians who looked you in the eye with a sense of having proved their birthright as free men. Sometimes the old spirit incited by the situation got out of bonds. One night when a company rose up to the charge the company next in line called out, "Where are you going?" and on the reply, "We've orders to take that trench in front," the company that had no orders to advance exclaimed, "Here, we're going to join in the scrum!" and they did, taking more trench than the plan required.

The fierce period of the battle was approaching when fighting on the Ridge was to be a bloody, wrestling series of clinches. Now trenches could not be dug on that bold, treeless summit. As soon as an aeroplane spotted a line developing out of the field of shell-craters the guns filled the trench and then proceeded to pound it into the fashionable style for farming land on the Ridge.

Trenches out of the question, it became a war among shell-craters. Here a soldier ensconced himself with rifle and bombs or a machine gunner deepened the hole with his spade for the gun. This was "scrapping" to the Australians' taste. It called for individual nerve and daring on that shell-swept, pestled earth, creeping up to new positions or back for water and food by night, lying "doggo" by day and waiting for a counter-attack by the Germans, who were always the losers in this grim, stealthy advance.

In Mouquet Farm the Germans had dugouts whose elaborateness was realized only after they were taken. A battalion could find absolute security in them. Long galleries ran back to entrances in areas safe from shell fire. Overhead no semblance of farm buildings was left by British and Australian guns. When I visited the ruins later I could not tell how many buildings there had been; and Mouquet Farm was not the only strong point that the Germans had to fall back on, let it be said. In the underground tunnels and chambers the Germans gathered for their counter-attacks, which they attempted with something of their old precision and courage.

This was the opportunity of the machine gunners in shell-craters and the snipers and the curtain of artillery fire. Sometimes the Australians allowed the attack to get good headway. They even left gaps in their lines for the game to enter the net before they began firing; and again, when a broken German charge sought flight its remnants faced an impassable curtain of fire which fenced them in and they dropped into shell-craters and held up their hands, which was the only thing to do.

Soon the Germans learned, too, how to make the most of shell-craters. The harder the Australians fought the greater the spur to German pride not to be beaten by these supposedly undisciplined, untrained men. The Germans called for more guns and got them. Mouquet Farm became a fortress of machine guns. It was not taken by the Australians—their successors took what was left of it. The nearer they came to the crest which was their supreme goal the ghastlier and more concentrated grew the shell fire, as the German guns had only to range on the skyline. But this equally applied to Australian gunners as the Germans were crowded toward the summit where the debris of the windmill remained, till finally they had to fall back to the other side.

Then they tried sweeping over the Ridge from the cover of the reverse slope in counter-attacks, only to be whipped by machine gun fire, lashed by shrapnel and crushed by high explosives—themselves mixed with the ruins of the windmill. At last they gave up the effort. It was not in German discipline to make any more attempts.

The Australians had the windmill as much as anyone had it as, for a time, it was in No Man's Land where blasts of shells would permit of no occupation. But the symbol for which it stood was there in readiness as a jumping-off place for the sweep-down into the valley later on when the Canadians should take the place of the Australians; and before they retired they could look in triumph across at Thiepval and down on Courcelette and Martinpuich and past the valley to Bapaume.

The development of the campaign had given the Australians work suited to their bent when this war of machinery, attaining its supreme complexity on the Somme, left the human machine between walls of shell fire to fight it out individually against the human machine, in a contest of will, courage, audacity, alertness and resource, man to man. "Advance, Australia!" is the Australian motto; and the Australians advanced.

The New Zealanders had their part elsewhere and played it in the New Zealand way.

"They have never failed to take an objective set them," said a general after the taking of Flers, "and they have always gained their positions with slight losses."

Could there be higher praise? Success and thrift, courage and skill in taking cover! For the business of a soldier is to do his enemy the maximum of damage with the minimum to himself, as anyone may go on repeating. Probably the remark of the New Zealanders in answer to the commander's praise would be, "Thank you. Why not?" as if this were what the New Zealanders expected of themselves. They take much for granted about New Zealand, without being boastful.

"A blooming quiet lot that keeps to themselves," said a British soldier, "but likable when you get to know them."

You might depend upon the average New Zealand private for an interesting talk about social organization, municipal improvements, and human welfare under government direction. The standard of individual intelligence and education was high and it seemed to make good fighting men.

The Australians had had to grub their way foot by foot, and the South Africans on July 15th with veldt gallantry had swept into Delville Wood, which was to be a shambles for two months, and stood off with a thin line the immense forces of hastily gathered reserves which the Germans threw at this vital point which had been lost in a surprise attack.

All this on the way up to the Ridge. The New Zealanders were to play a part in the same movement as the Canadians after the Ridge was taken. They were in the big sweep down from the Ridge over a broad front. Across the open for about two miles they had to go, fair targets for shell fire; and they went, keeping their order as if on parade, working out each evolution with soldierly precision including cooeperation with the "tanks." They were at their final objective on schedule time, accomplishing the task with amazingly few casualties and so little fuss that it seemed a kind of skilful field-day manoeuver. All that they took they held and still held it when the mists of autumn obscured artillery observation and they were relieved from the quagmire for their turn of rest.



XVII

THE HATEFUL RIDGE

Grinding of courage of three powerful races—A ridge that will be famous—Germans on the defensive—Efforts to maintain their morale—Gas shells—Summer heat, dust and fatigue—Prussian hatred of the British—Dead bodies strapped to guns—Guillemont a granulation of bricks and mortar and earth—"We've only to keep at them, sir"—Stalking machine guns—Machine guns in craters—British cheerfulness—The war will be over when it is won—Soldiers talk shop—An incident of brutal militarism—Simple rules for surviving shell fire—A "happy home" with a shell arriving every minute—Business-like monotony of the battle—Insignificance of one man among millions—A victory of position, of will, of morale!

Sometimes it occurred to one to consider what history might say about the Ridge and also to wonder how much history, which pretends to know all, would really know. Thus, one sought perspective of the colossal significance of the uninterrupted battle whose processes numbed the mind and to distinguish the meaning of different stages of the struggle. Nothing had so well reflected the character of the war or of its protagonists, French, British and German, as this grinding of resources, of courage, and of will of three powerful races.

We are always talking of phases as the result of natural human speculation and tendency to set events in groups. Observers also may gratify this inclination as well as the contemporaneous military expert writing from his maps. It is historically accepted, I think, that the first decisive phase was the battle of the Marne when Paris was saved. The second was Verdun, when the Germans again sought a decision on the Western front by an offensive of sledgehammer blows against frontal positions; and, perhaps, the third came when on the Ridge the British and the French kept up their grim, insistent, piecemeal attacks, holding the enemy week in and week out on the defensive, aiming at mastery as the scales trembled in the new turn of the balance and initiative passed from one side to the other in the beginning of that new era.

This scarred slope with its gentle ascent, this section of farming land with its woods growing more ragged every day from shell fire, with its daily and nightly thunders, its trickling procession of wounded and prisoners down the communication trenches speaking the last word in human bravery, industry, determination and endurance—this might one day be not only the monument to the positions of all the battalions that had fought, its copses, its villages, its knolls famous to future generations as is Little Round Top with us, but in its monstrous realism be an immortal expression, unrealized by those who fought, of a commander's iron will and foresight in gaining that supremacy in arms, men and material which was the genesis of the great decision.

The German had not yielded his offensive at Verdun after the attack of July 1st. At least, he still showed the face of initiative there while he rested content that at the same time he could maintain his front intact on the Somme. The succeeding attack of July 15th broke his confidence with its suggestion that the confusion in his lines would be too dangerous if it happened over a broader front for him to consider anything but the defensive. Thus, the Allied offensive had broken his offensive.

Now he began drawing away his divisions from the Verdun sector, bringing guns to answer the British and French fire and men whose prodigal use alone could enforce his determination to maintain morale and prevent any further bold strokes such as that of July 15th.

His sausage balloons began to reappear in the sky as the summer wore on; he increased the number of his aeroplanes; more of his five-point-nine howitzers were sending their compliments; he stretched out his shell fire over communication trenches and strong points; mustered great quantities of lachrymatory shells and for the first time used gas shells with a generosity which spoke his faith in their efficacy. The lachrymatory shell makes your eyes smart, and the Germans apparently considered this a great auxiliary to high explosives and shrapnel. Was it because of the success of the first gas attack at Ypres that they now placed such reliance in gas shells? The shell when it lands seems a "dud," which is a shell that has failed to explode; then it blows out a volume of gas.

"If one hit right under your nose," said a soldier, "and you hadn't your gas mask on, it might kill you. But when you see one fall you don't run to get a sniff in order to accommodate the Boche by asphyxiating yourself."

Another soldier suggested that the Germans had a big supply on hand and were working off the stock for want of other kinds. The British who by this time were settled in the offensive joked about the deluge of gas shells with a gallant, amazing humor. Going up to the Ridge was going to their regular duty. They did not shirk it or hail it with delight. They simply went, that was all, when it was a battalion's turn to go.

July heat became August heat as the grinding proceeded. The gunners worked in their shirts or stripped to the waist. Sweat streaks mapped the faces of the men who came out of the trenches. Stifling clouds of dust hung over the roads, with the trucks phantom-like as they emerged from the gritty mist and their drivers' eyes peered out of masks of gray which clung to their faces. A fall of rain came as a blessing to Briton and German alike. German prisoners worn with exhaustion had complexions the tint of their uniforms. If the British seemed weary sometimes, one had only to see the prisoners to realize that the defensive was suffering more than the offensive. The fatigue of some of the men was of the kind that one week's sleep or a month's rest will not cure; something fixed in their beings.

It was a new kind of fighting for the Germans. They smarted under it, they who had been used to the upper hand. In the early stages of the war their artillery had covered their well-ordered charges; they had been killing the enemy with gunfire. Now the Allies were returning the compliment; the shoe was on the other foot. A striking change, indeed, from "On to Paris!" the old battle-cry of leaders who had now come to urge these men to the utmost of endurance and sacrifice by telling them that if they did not hold against the relentless hammering of British and French guns what had been done to French villages would be done to their own.

Prisoners spoke of peace as having been promised as close at hand by their officers. In July the date had been set as Sept. 1st. Later, it was set as Nov. 1st. The German was as a swimmer trying to reach shore, in this case peace, with the assurance of those who urged him on that a few more strokes would bring him there. Thus have armies been urged on for years.

Those fighting did not have, as had the prisoners, their eyes opened to the vast preparations behind the British lines to carry on the offensive. Mostly the prisoners were amiable, peculiarly unlike the proud men taken in the early days of the war when confidence in their "system" as infallible was at its height. Yet there were exceptions. I saw an officer marching at the head of the survivors of his battalion along the road from Montauban one day with his head up, a cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth at an aggressive angle, his unshaven chin and dusty clothes heightening his attitude of "You go to ——, you English!"

The hatred of the British was a strengthening factor in the defense. Should they, the Prussians, be beaten by New Army men? No! Die first! said Prussian officers. The German staff might be as good as ever, but among the mixed troops—the old and the young, the hollow-chested and the square-shouldered, mouth-breathers with spectacles and bent fathers of families, vigorous boys in their late 'teens with the down still on their cheeks and hardened veterans survivors of many battles east and west—they were reverting appreciably to natural human tendencies despite the iron discipline.

It was Skobeloff, if I recollect rightly, who said that out of every hundred men twenty were natural fighters, sixty were average men who would fight under impulse or when well led, and twenty were timid; and armies were organized on the basis of the sixty average to make them into a whole of even efficiency in action. The German staff had supplied supreme finesse to this end. They had an army that was a machine; yet its units were flesh and blood and the pounding of shell fire and the dogged fighting on the Ridge must have an effect.

It became apparent through those two months of piecemeal advance that the sixty average men were not as good as they had been. The twenty "funk-sticks," in army phrase, were given to yielding themselves if they were without an officer, but the twenty natural fighters—well, human psychology does not change. They were the type that made the professional armies of other days, the brigands, too, and also those of every class of society to whom patriotic duty had become an exaltation approaching fanaticism. More fighting made them fight harder.

Such became members of the machine gun corps, which took an oath never to surrender, and led bombing parties and posted themselves in shell-craters to face the charges while shells fell thick around them, or remained up in the trench taking their chances against curtains of fire that covered an infantry charge, in the hope of being able to turn on their own bullet spray for a moment before being killed. Sometimes their dead bodies were found strapped to their guns, more often probably by their own request, as an insurance against deserting their posts, than by command.