FOOTNOTE:
[1] "And the Germans were actually in some parts within a few yards of our front line before any one knew of their approach."—Lloyd George.
Four Epic Weeks of Carnage
By Philip Gibbs
Special Correspondent with the British Armies
[Copyrighted in U. S. A.]
The first phase of the battle of Picardy, which began March 21, 1918, was a vain attempt of the German forces to drive a wedge between the French and British Armies at their point of juncture; the second was an equally unsuccessful attempt to wrest Arras and Vimy Ridge from the British; the third sought to annihilate the British armies in Flanders and break through to the English Channel. The last-named phase was still undecided when this magazine went to press, (April 19.) All three phases were vividly described from day to day by Philip Gibbs. The following narrative is compiled from his dispatches to The New York Times, which are available for Current History Magazine as an affiliated publication of the Times:
Thursday, March 21.—A German offensive against the British front has begun. At about 5 o'clock this morning the enemy began an intense bombardment of the lines and batteries on a very wide front—something like sixty miles, from the country south of the Scarpe and to the west of Bullecourt in the neighborhood of Croisilles, as far south as the positions between St. Quentin and the British right flank.
After several hours of this hurricane shelling, in which a great deal of gas was used, the German infantry advanced and developed attacks against a number of strategical points on a very wide front.
Among the places against which they have directed their chief efforts are Bullecourt, Lagnecourt, and Noreuil, both west of Cambrai, where they once before penetrated the British lines and were slaughtered in great numbers; the St. Quentin Ridge, which was on the right of the Cambrai fighting, and the villages of Roussoy and Hargicourt, south of the Cambrai salient.
Friday, March 22.—The enemy flung the full weight of his great army against the British yesterday. Nearly forty divisions are identified, and it is certain that as many as fifty must be engaged. In proportions of men, the British are much outnumbered, therefore the obstinacy of the resistance of the troops is wonderful. Nine German divisions were hurled against three British at one part of the line, and eight against two at another. All the storm troops, including the guards, were in brand-new uniforms. They advanced in dense masses, and never faltered until shattered by the machine-gun fire.
The enemy introduced no new frightfulness, no tanks and no specially invented gas, but relied on the power of his artillery and the weight of the infantry assault. The supporting waves advanced over the bodies of the dead and wounded. The German commanders were ruthless in the sacrifice of life, in the hope of overwhelming the defense by the sheer weight of numbers.
They had exceeding power in guns. Opposite three of the British divisions they had a thousand, and at most parts of the line one to every twelve or fifteen yards. They had brought a number of long-range guns, probably naval, and their shellfire was scattered as far back as twenty-eight miles behind the lines. During the last hour of the bombardment they poured out gas shells, and continued to send concentrated gas about the British batteries and reserve trenches. The atmosphere was filled with poisonous clouds.
Saturday, March 23.—The enemy has been continuing his attacks all day along the whole battlefront and has made further progress at various points in spite of the heroic resistance of the British troops, greatly outnumbered owing to the enormous concentration of the enemy divisions, which are constantly reinforced and passing through one another, so that fresh regiments may pursue the assaults.
ATTACK AT ST. QUENTIN
The St. Quentin attack began along the whole sweep of the front with six hours' bombardment and intense gas shelling of the British batteries, and afterward an attack was launched by overwhelming numbers of German storm troops. The British battleline was held by some three divisions, from a point south of Pontruet to Itancourt, south of the St. Quentin Canal. Along this sector the enemy line had been held before the attack by three divisions also, but the night before the battle they were reinforced until eight German divisions [upward of 100,000 men] were massed for assault on a front of some 2,000 yards. I believe this is a greater strength than has ever been brought into battle on such a narrow front during the whole of this war.
On this sector, the front north and south of St. Quentin, and opposite the British line further south, the enemy's intention, as is known from prisoners, was to reach the line of the St. Quentin Canal—or the Crozat Canal, as it is sometimes called—on the first day, and then advance in quick stages westward. The rate of progress was to be eight miles on the first day, twelve on the second, and twenty on the third.
In spite of their intense gunfire of massed batteries, supported by Austrian howitzers and large numbers of heavy trench mortars, the Germans' plans were thwarted so far as this rapidity of progress was concerned.
The heavy fog of the early morning on Thursday threw their assault troops at some points into wild confusion. The first line of assault, each division apparently advancing with two regiments in line, with two battalions in line, with the other strength of the divisions following in depth, with light machine-gun companies at intervals of 100 yards, and then heavy machine guns and field artillery, sometimes became hopelessly mixed up with the third and fourth lines, while right battalions were confused with left battalions.
This fog and the British machine-gun fire, which caught the German waves, checked the pace of their onslaught and caused heavy losses.
The German high command relied entirely on weight of guns and man power to break the British resistance, and the driving power of the whole monstrous machine was set in movement. The British line was not strong enough to hold all the old positions against such a tide of brute force. The men served their guns and rifles, but as attack followed attack and column followed column, and their own losses increased as the hours passed, they were ordered at certain points to give ground and fall back, fighting heroic rearguard actions from one position to another.
BRITISH LINE BENDS
The main attack, just south of St. Quentin, was directed against Urvillers and Essigny, and the enemy forced his way through these places by great drives. The British garrison there was partly destroyed by his stupendous gunfire. He gained possession of Essigny before midday, March 21, and captured Contescourt, on the edge of the canal. This gave him important high ground, of which he made full use.
He succeeded by this movement in bending in the British line at the right flank of the Ulster division, north of the canal, which he crossed hereabout, and by advancing his field artillery was able to bombard the line to which the main body of the British troops had been withdrawn. Down from Maissemy and Holnon Wood to Savy and Roupy he pressed forward against this line.
The enemy was so densely massed that there was a division on about a kilometer of front. None of them spread out on more than two kilometers for a division, with a battalion for every 500 yards.
German storm troops were able to force their way to Vendeuil, Lyfontaine, and Benay, south of Essigny, and to strike against Jussy and Tergnier, on the St. Quentin Canal, on the evening of the first day.
They brought up two more divisions, and that night, owing to the pressure of their attacks, it was decided that the British withdraw to a prepared line further west, which was the best defense. This was done during the darkness, the retirement being covered by gallant rearguards.
This morning the Germans followed up our withdrawal by clearing up all the ground in the bend formed by the acute angle of the St. Quentin Canal, which has its apex at Ugny, six kilometers east of Ham, and it was reported that their patrols had entered the town of Ham itself.
CROSSING THE SOMME
Monday, March 25.—The enemy fought fiercely yesterday to gain a crossing over the Somme south of Péronne. He flung across a pontoon bridge and rafts, and his men tried to cross, but the British field artillery, firing at short range, smashed up many of these bridges and killed his engineers and infantry. Gallant counterattacks by some of the British flung him back across the river at several points, but elsewhere he held his crossing long enough to put over some of his forces.
All the fighting in this part of the country since March 21 has been a continuous battle, in which the British divisions holding the front line below Gouzeaucourt to Maissemy have shown magnificent powers of endurance, as indeed have all the others engaged, and have only yielded ground under pressure of overwhelming numbers and great gunfire.
There was a bloody struggle in some old chalk quarries, where many German dead now lie, and after the enemy had come some way forward ten British tanks drove into him and shattered some of his battalions with their machine-gun fire, dispersing groups of his advancing units. The tanks manoeuvred about, firing continually on each flank and causing terror among the enemy's foremost assault troops. The British fought a number of rearguard actions and made many counterattacks in the neighborhood of Roisel, and fell back to the line of the Somme only when new masses of Germans passed through those battalions which they had met and beaten.
SLAUGHTER OF GERMANS
The British gunners were firing hour after hour at large bodies of Germans moving so close to them that the guns were laid directly on to their targets, and caused deadly losses in these ranks of field-gray men who never ceased to come forward in a living tide at whatever cost of life and bore down on the defensive lines. Under this ceaseless tide some of the British guns had to be abandoned, but many of them were withdrawn to the other side of the Somme, and the gunners were wonderful in the skill and courage with which they made this passage, took up new positions, and went into action again like exhibition batteries at Earls Court.
By Saturday morning the German troops were exhausted and spent, and in some parts of the line made no further effort for a time, but halted to gain some sleep and await fresh rations. On Saturday and Sunday the British, who had had no rest from fighting, were reinforced and given some relief, though many of them were again engaged, and, weary as they were, put up gallant fights against the enemy, who also had been reinforced by great numbers and came on again in an unending onslaught.
FIGHTING AGAINST ODDS
Tuesday, March 26.—Since yesterday morning the enemy has continued his violent thrusts against the British line westward from Bapaume and Péronne, and his massed troops, mostly Brandenburgers and picked troops, are now advancing in the direction of Roye and Nesle, where French troops are heavily engaged.
At the same time he is passing on over the old Somme battlefields down from Delville Wood, High Wood, and Maurepas toward the old lines the British held before the beginning of the Somme battles in 1916.
The enemy has paused since he began the great offensive, on Thursday last, only to bring up new divisions and pass them through and beyond those divisions exhausted by attack or shattered under the British fire while they reform and rest and then come on again, relieved once more by reserves and continually crowding over the captured ground. By this means, and owing to the enormous forces at the disposal of the German command, they are able to pursue any advantage gained with fresh troops against the hard-pressed British, who have been fighting without respite since the beginning of the battle, six days ago, except where on the right some of them have now been replaced in the front line by French battalions.
In spite of the gravity of these hours and the progress made by the enemy, there never has been a more glorious spirit shown by British troops throughout history, and when one day all the details of this battle may be written it will be an epic of heroism more wonderful than the world now realizes, for the British troops and their officers have withstood an onslaught of enormous forces which have never been less than two to one, and in most parts of the line have been four to one and six to one and eight to one, nine divisions against three around Croisilles, eight divisions against two from the Cambrai sector westward, and in many places one division against one battalion.
WEARIED BY ENDLESS BATTLE
Our men have been fighting for six days and nights like this, after the first storm of shells and gas, until their beards have grown long and their faces haggard and worn for lack of sleep, and their clothes have become torn on wire and covered with dust of mud and chalk. I saw a small party of them today so weary with this endless battle they could hardly walk, and they were holding hands like tired children and leaning against each other like drunken men, but for the most part they hold their heads up gamely, because so far luck has been against them.
The whole movement of the army under the necessity of withdrawal from fixed positions is as orderly as though on manoeuvres in England. I can say honestly I have seen no officer show sign of being flurried.
It is all an amazing drama, because this open warfare is a new thing to the army, and the menace of the enemy is strong and serious, and retirement under the terrific pressure of the human avalanche now hurled against the defenders is by no means pleasant. But in the inevitable turmoil of this situation, in roads crowded with traffic of men and guns, in villages seething with troops rushed up toward the battle line, on the field of battle itself, the British Army retains its self-control, its will power, and its supreme, inspired courage.
THE ATTACK AT ALBERT
Wednesday, March 27.—The enemy has not made further advances on a big scale between the Arras-Bapaume road on the left of the battlefront and the village of Bray, on the Somme, but has paused in his massed attacks in order to reorganize his line and bring up artillery.
There are heavy concentrations of German storm troops behind Maurepas, Ginchy, and Beugnatre, and the roads around Bapaume have been crowded with men and guns and transport passing down through Le Sars, with German cavalry along the Bapaume-Gudecourt road and a steady drift downward to the town of Albert.
That poor, stricken city of the golden Virgin, head downward, with her babe in her outstretched arms, which I described so often in accounts of the battles of the Somme in 1916, when that falling statue was lit up by shellfire, was yesterday in the centre of the fighting north of the Somme. [The golden Virgin and tower were destroyed later.] The night before their assault yesterday they bombed it heavily from the air, using the brilliant moonlight, which lay white over all the battlefields and these roofs, to fly low and pick their targets wherever they saw men moving or horses tethered.
In several cases it was not men they hit, but women and children who, when the war seemed to have passed from this place a year ago, crept back to their homes and built little wooden booths in which they sold papers and picture postcards to the troops. Now suddenly the war has flamed over them again and they were caught, before they could escape, by thunderbolts out of the shining moonlight, terribly clear and revealing dead horses about the ruined streets.
TRYING TO TAKE ARRAS
Friday, March 29.—The enemy's pressure has for the time being relaxed a little across the Somme, east of Corbie, and whatever effort he has made during the last day and night has been repulsed with the most heavy losses.
Yesterday the most exciting situation and the fiercest struggle was on the left of the British battleline, from Gavrelle southward to below the Scarpe. It was a deliberate, resolute effort by the enemy to capture Arras. Three divisions of special storm troops, the 184th, 12th, and 27th Reserve, had been brought up for this purpose, though one of them had been engaged before and roughly handled. They were ordered to take Arras yesterday at all costs, and before their advance very heavy bombardment was flung over the British lines from about 5 o'clock in the morning for several hours.
Their main thrust was toward Roeux, that frightful little village, with its chemical works, which I used to write about so much in April and May last. Once again yesterday it became a shambles. The British had machine guns well placed with a wide field of fire, and as the Germans came down the slopes they were swept with streams of bullets, which cut swaths in their formations, but once again, as on March 21, the enemy was reckless of life, theirs as well as the British, and always his tide of men flowed forward, passing over dead and wounded, and creeping forward like flowing water. The British field guns raked them while the heavies pulled further back to avoid being blown up or captured.
FIGHT FOR ORANGE HILL
On and about Orange Hill and Telegraph Hill British battalions who know this ground of old fought tenaciously under murderous machine-gun fire, the enemy's screen of infantry covering machine-gun batteries which were rushed forward very quickly and took up positions in shell holes and behind bits of broken wall and any kind of cover, in ditches and sunken roads.
A footing gained by the enemy on part of Orange Hill and Infantry Hill rendered it necessary to fall back yesterday toward the old German support lines before that battle in April, 1917. The British fought like tigers, and would not retire until the pressure on them made it impossible to resist the continual thrust of new attacks by fresh troops. There were heroic actions by small groups of men struggling to hold up the front line, and some of them stayed so long after the enemy had broken beyond them that they were cut off.
Frightful fighting was happening not far from Neuville, Vitasse, and Mercatel and in this neighborhood the British held out with wonderful determination until exhausted by battle and until only a poor remnant of men had strength to stand against these massed attacks.
By the end of the day the enemy's assaults weakened, and then died out because his losses were enormous and the spirit of his attack was broken by such stubborn resistance.
ENEMY FAILS AT ARRAS
Sunday, March 31.—We now have knowledge that the attack on Arras was prepared on a scale of enormous strength by divisions arranged in depth, preceded by a bombardment as great as that which fell upon any part of the British line on the morning of March 21, and that the enemy had determined to capture not only Arras itself but Vimy Ridge.
It was the heroic resistance of the British troops that defeated this furious onslaught and destroyed by enormous losses to the German troops this dark scheme of their high command. Seven German divisions were in position north of the Scarpe and twelve south, in an arc around the defenses of Arras.
The brunt of this attack, preceded by colossal gunfire, fell upon London troops, and against these the German tides dashed and broke. By artillery fire, machine-gun fire, and rifle fire, the enemy's advancing waves of men were swept to pieces, and though they came on again and again this massacre continued until at last it must have sickened even the high German officers directing the operations from behind. The attacks died out and the night was quiet around Arras while the enemy collected his wounded. It was an utter defeat which will at least check German efforts around Arras.
On this Easter Sunday, under bright sunshine which is breaking through the storm clouds, the fields of France are strewn with death. A year ago it was the same around the old City of Artois, for it was on Easter Sunday, April 2, that we began the battle of Arras and fought over that ground which is again our battlefield, and it was a great anthem of gunfire which rose up to the sky on Easter morn.
Apart from all regrets at having had to fall back at all and at having suffered losses for which there is mourning in our hearts, because so many splendid men have fallen on the field of honor—that terrible field of honor which will be watered with tears for all time—we may at least rejoice that by the skill of our fighting officers and the steady courage of our men our line was brought back unbroken.
Heroic Cavalry Charge
Monday, April 1.—The battle of which I have been trying to give a daily narrative has been on so vast a scale, filled with so many episodes of terrific adventure and with so many hundreds of thousands of men moving along its lines of fire that I find it impossible to give a picture of the emotion and spirit of it. We out here, who knew this thing was coming upon us, creeping nearer every day with its monstrous menace, held our breath and waited. When at last the thing broke it was more frightful in its loosing of overwhelming powers than even we had guessed. Since then all our armies have lived with an intense understanding of the greatness of these days, of their meaning to the destiny of the world, and every private soldier, or transport driver, or linesman, or laborer, has been exalted by an emotion stronger than the effect of drugs.
In the wood of Moreuil this morning British cavalry performed a feat as fine as the Balaklava charge, and this also should be made into a ballad and learned by heart.
Twelve hundred men who had been riding through the night went forward in three waves and charged that dark wood next morning at a hard gallop. The first wave rode to the edge of the wood, and the second to the centre, and the third wave went right through to the other side, riding through the enemy and over his machine guns and in the face of a hail of bullets from hidden machines. They cleared the wood of Moreuil and brought back prisoners and thirteen machine guns, but there were many empty saddles, and many men and horses fell.
That was the finest exploit of the British 'Cavalry, but elsewhere it did splendid work, and everywhere the men were gallant and cool, as when some of the dragoons came under a heavy shrapnel fire near Gentille, and many men had to shoot their wounded horses to put them out of their agony.
Dashing Canadians
Away from Arras and down on the south of the line a certain body of Canadians have been having some of the most astounding adventures in all this battle, and fighting with valor and heroic audacity. They are officers and men of a machine gun detachment organized in the early days of the war by a French Canadian officer.
For ten days these Canadians have fought running fights with the German artillery, have engaged German cavalry and smashed them, have checked enemy columns crossing bridges and pouring onward, have scattered large bodies of men surrounding British troops, and in ten days of crowded life have destroyed many German storm troops and helped to hold up the tide of their advance. Their own losses have not been light, for these Canadians have been filled with a grim passion of determination, and when the supreme test came they fought and died.
Sometimes they fought in long gray open cars, and sometimes they fought dismounted, with machine guns on the ground; but always they fought through the ten days and nights, with less than twenty hours' sleep all that time. These cars near Maricourt gathered together 150 men who had been cut off and held the enemy at bay, covering the withdrawal of some of the British heavy guns and tanks. At that time they fought dismounted, with Vickers guns, in front of the barbed wire. The Canadians had many casualties, and a Captain's arm was torn away by an explosive bullet, and at last only a Sergeant and two men of the battery were left unwounded. One of them mounted a motor cycle and brought back cars and took back the wounded. Two cars found the enemy massing up a road, and their machine guns enfiladed the field-gray men and killed them in large numbers.
Near La Motte they fought heavy bodies of German cavalry, killed a number, and put the rest to flight. They have not been seen since. At Cerisy a battalion of Germans, 600 strong, was encountered at a crossroads by one car, which brought them to a standstill and dispersed them with heavy losses. Everywhere they have been these Canadian armored cars have helped to steady the line and give confidence to the infantry.
British Airmen at Work
Thursday, April 4.—It has been raining hard these two nights past and this morning. For the German gunners trying to drag up field artillery or long-range guns there is now sticky bog and slime to come through. It is hard work for the German field companies, pressed furiously, to lay narrow-gauge lines over these deserts. All that spells delay in their plans and loss of life.
There is terror for the enemy over these fields in daylight and darkness, for the British flying men have gone out in squadrons to scatter death and destruction among them. This work has reached fantastic heights of horror for the German troops under the menace of it. There have been times when, I believe, the British have had as many as 300 airplanes up at one time. One squadron alone on one night dropped six tons of bombs over enemy concentrations, and each man went out six times. Another squadron went out four times in one night, and was bombing for eleven hours.
When the enemy was advancing in masses the British flying men flew as low as 100 feet, dropping bombs among them and firing into them with machine guns. They attacked German patrols of cavalry and scattered them and machine-gunned trenches full of men, batteries in action and transport crowding down narrow roads. They fought German scouts and crushed them, and there are several cases in which they fought German airplanes at night, so that it was like a fight between vampire bats up there where the clouds were touched by moonlight.
North of the Somme
Friday, April 5.—Heavy attacks by the enemy are in progress north of the Somme, from Albert to Aveluy Wood. Further north there is separate fighting in progress round about the village of Ayette—such a wretched little place of brickdust and broken walls when I saw it last on the way from Arras to Bapaume—and the enemy is trying to recapture this, his fire reaching to villages several thousand yards behind the British front.
The British troops in this district are defending their positions resolutely, and the first reports indicate that the German storm troops are suffering under their machine-gun fire, after being shelled in their assembly places by heavy and field artillery.
A Valley of Death
Sunday, April 7.—Since the heavy fights on Friday, when the enemy made a series of vain attacks against the British north of Albert, there has been no battle. The Germans are still struggling hard to get their guns, especially the heavy guns, further forward and to reorganize their divisions.
They have no peace or quiet, for they are under a harassing fire, and along the valley of the Ancre, above Albert, in that stinking ditch between Bouzeincourt and Aveluy and Mesnil and Thiepval, where foul water lies stagnant below rows of dead, lopped trees and frightful smells arise from the relics of battles two weeks ago, their men are very wretched. Here in this valley of death, for it was that, and behind in the old fields of the Somme, the German troops have no cover from storms or shellfire.
Battle of Armentières
Tuesday, April 9.—A heavy and determined attack was begun against us this morning a considerable distance north of our recent battles on about eleven miles of front between Armentières and La Bassée Canal. This new attack was preceded by a long, concentrated bombardment, which had gradually been increasing during the last day or two, until it reached great heights of fury last night and early this morning. The enemy used poison gas in immense quantities; during the night he flung over 60,000 gas shells in order to create a wide zone of this evil vapor and stupefy the gunners, transport, and infantry.
His gunfire reached out to many towns and villages behind the allied lines, like Béthune and Armentières, Vermelles and Philosophe, Merville and Estaires, and this did not cease around Armentières until 11:30 this morning, though further south from Fleurbaix his infantry attack was in progress at an early hour, certainly by 8 o'clock, and his barrage lifted in order to let his troops advance.
Part of the line was held by Portuguese troops, who for a long time have been between Laventie and Neuve Chapelle, holding positions which were subject to severe raids from time to time. They are now in the thick of this battle, most fiercely beset and fighting gallantly.
Formidable New Offensive
Wednesday, April 10.—It is now clear that the attack between Armentières and Givenchy is a new and formidable offensive. It also is made certain by this new thrust that the German high command have decided to throw the full weight of their armies against the British in an endeavor to destroy their forces in Northern France instead of dividing their efforts by striking also at the French. It is a menace which calls for a supreme effort of the armies of Great Britain and her allies.
Yesterday the enemy struck north on the British left, beginning in the flat grounds opposite Neuve Chapelle as the centre of the thrust, with Fleurbaix to the north and Givenchy to the south, and extending this morning further north still above Armentières, and including the ridge of Messines.
An enormous gunfire was directed against the British positions along all this line last night again after yesterday morning's bombardment, and continued without pause through a very unquiet night, when all through the hours this tumult of great guns beat upon one's ears with continued drumfire, and all the sky was full of flame and light.
This morning again when I went up into French Flanders and through the villages which the enemy had been shelling regardless of the women and children there, this frightful, unceasing thunder was as loud as ever and told one without further news that the battle was still going on and that the Germans were extending its zone.
Portuguese Are Hard Hit
It was a tragedy for the Portuguese that the heaviest bombardment in the storm of gunfire, as terrible in its fury as anything of the kind since March 21, was directed against the centre, which they held. It was annihilating to their outposts and smashed their front-line defenses, which were stoutly held. It beat backward and forward in waves of high explosives from the trench line opposite Neuve Chapelle to the second line, opposite Fauquissart and Richebourg St. Vaast. Large numbers of heavy guns also searched behind these defense systems for crossroads, ammunition dumps, railways, villages, and headquarters or units, while the Portuguese batteries were assailed with gas shells and flying steel.
The Portuguese front line was overwhelmed by the intensity of the bombardment, and, although some of their outposts held on, fighting gallantly to the last man, their line had to fall back to the second system. This was attacked by enemy assault troops and between 6 and 7 in the morning they had reached Fauquissart. The barrage lifted at 7 o'clock for a general attack on the second line. Here the strongest body of Portuguese troops fought stubbornly, but by 11 o'clock the Germans forced their way through to Laventie and the position round Fleurbaix was threatened.
The Portuguese field artillery served their guns as long as possible and destroyed the breechblocks whenever it became inevitable that they would have to leave a gun behind. The Portuguese gunners were attached to the British heavy batteries and behaved with special courage.
Bloody Valley of the Lys
Thursday, April 11.—Yesterday afternoon and today the enemy exerted all his strength in men and guns in the battle now raging from the River Lys to Wytschaete. Once again the British are outnumbered, and it is only by the courage and stubborn will of battalions weakened by losses and of individual soldiers animating their comrades by acts of brave example that the enemy has been unable to make rapid progress and, as at Wytschaete and Messines, has been flung back with most bloody losses.
The British had to give ground along the Lys Canal south of Armentières, blowing bridges behind them and the railway bridge at Armentières, and the enemy is now trying to thrust forward south of Merville by bending back the British line from Lestrem and getting his guns across the Lys.
This morning there was a ceaseless tumult of gunfire, loud and terrible, over all this countryside. There were strange and terrible scenes on all the roads leading to the battle zone where British infantry and gunners were going forward to stem the tide. Masses of transport moved and civilians passed them in retreat to villages outside the wide area of shell range, and wounded men came staggering down afoot, if they could walk, or were brought down by ambulances, threading their way through all this surge and swell of war.
Here and there stretcher bearers waited with their burdens on the roadsides. Among them were men of the Black Watch, with the red hackle in their bonnets, calm and grave like statues beside their wounded comrades lying there with white, upturned faces and never a murmur or groan. They were the heroes who yesterday, with gallant hearts, came up at a great pace when the enemy was in Wytschaete and Messines, and in a fierce counterattack drove him off the crest of the ridge and dealt him a deadly blow there on that high ground, which was won in the battle of last June, when English, Irish, and New Zealand troops stormed the ridge and captured thousands of prisoners.
The enemy yesterday fell in great numbers and his dead lie thick, and though he came on wave after wave, after all his day's agony and struggle he had not gained a yard of the crest, but was beaten back.
English in Death Struggle
Friday, April 12.—The enemy is playing a great game in which he is flinging all he has into the hazard of war. He has, of course, a stupendous number of men, and, while holding his lines across the Somme after his drive down from St. Quentin and playing a defensive part against the French on the British right, he has moved up to the north with secrecy and rapidity a large concentration of troops and guns for new and tremendous blows against Haig's forces. This is continuing his now determined policy to crush England before either France or America is able to draw off his divisions by counteroffensives.
So now the British troops in the north are faced by enormous forces. Nearly thirty German divisions are against them from Wytschaete to La Bassée Canal, and with those troops are innumerable machine guns, trench mortars, and massed batteries of field guns, very quick to get forward in support of their infantry.
This northern offensive is as menacing as that which began to the southward on March 21, and the gallant men among these little red brick villages in French Flanders and in the flat fields between Bailleul and Béthune are greatly outnumbered and can hold back the enemy only by fighting with supreme courage.
Horrors Amid Beauty
The scene today along the line of this hostile invasion was most tragic, because all the cruelty of war was surrounded by beauty so intense that the contrast was horrible. The sky was of Summer blue, with sunshine glittering on the red-tiled roofs of the cottages and on their whitewashed walls and little windowpanes. All the hedges were clothed with green and flaked by snow-white thorn blossoms.
In a night, as it seems, all the orchards of France have flowered, and cherry and apple trees are in full splendor of bloom, fields are powdered with close-growing daisies, and the shadows of trees are long across the grass as the sun is setting. But over all this and in the midst of all this is agony and blood. On the roads are fugitives, wounded soldiers, dead horses, guns, and transports.
There are fires burning on the hillsides. I saw their flames and their great, rolling clouds of smoke rise this morning from places where the day before I had seen French peasants plowing as though no war were near, and young girls scattering grain over the fields harrowed by their small brothers, and old women bending to the soil in the small farmsteads where all their life was centred, until suddenly the frightful truth touched them and they had to leave their homes.
Sometimes today I wished to God the sun would not shine like this nor nature mock at me with its thrilling-beauty of life. However, the British are full of confidence. If they were forced back they are glad to know that they made the enemy pay heavy prices and that their line is still unbroken. They are full of faith that against all odds they shall hold their own in the last battle of all.
Men Utterly Weary
Sunday, April 14.—The Commander in Chief's order of the day should reveal to the British people and to the world what is happening out here in France—the enemy's object to seize the Channel ports and destroy the British Army, and the frightful forces he has brought against it to achieve that plan, and the call that has come to the troops to hold every position to the last man. "Many among us now are tired. * * * With our back to the wall each one of us must fight to the end."
Yes, the men are tired, so tired after weeks of fighting, after these last days and nights, that they can hardly stagger up to resist another attack, yet they do so because their spirit wakes again above their bodily fatigue; so tired that they go on fighting like sleep-walkers, and in any respite lie in ditches and under hedges and in open fields under fire in deep slumber until the shouts of their Sergeants stir them again. Some of these men have been fighting since March 21 with only a few days' rest.
To people living in the villages of Flanders, from which one can see the whole sweep of the battleline, Friday night was full of terror, and from the windows they watched the burning of places from which they had escaped and the bonfires of their homes, and these refugees while sleeping with children at their breast wept.
Yesterday it was a drama of noise, beating against one's ears and against one's heart, and it was a strange, terrible thing to stand there, blind, as it were, listening to the infernal tumult of gunfire south of Bailleul, with knockings and sledgehammer strokes, loud and shocking, above the incessant drumfire of field artillery.
The German shells came howling over into fields and villages beyond Bailleul, bursting with gruff coughs, and there was an evil snarl of shrapnel in the mist. It was the noise of the greatest battle in history.
Fall of Neuve Eglise
Monday, April 15.—In the attempt to surround Bailleul two heavy attacks were made—one on the west toward Meteren, and one on the east at Neuve Eglise. Near Meteren the enemy failed utterly and suffered immense losses. There has been fierce fighting around a place called the Steam Mill, near Meteren, the enemy having been ordered to capture the Meteren road and the high ground beyond it at whatever sacrifice. They made the sacrifice, but did not get the ground.
Neuve Eglise, however, is now theirs. Last night the British troops who had held it through three days and nights of intense strife withdrew, unknown to the enemy, to a line a short distance back from the village, in order to avoid remaining a target for unceasing shellfire.
It is now the enemy's soldiers who this morning are in the ruins under the great bombardment. This battle at Neuve Eglise has been filled with grim episodes, for the village changed hands several times. Each side fought most fiercely, with any kind of weapon, small bodies of men attacking and counterattacking among the broken walls and bits of houses and under the stump of the church tower deathtrap, as it now is for them. Without yielding to the direct assaults, the British obeyed orders, stumbled out of the place, silently and unknown to the enemy, and took up a line further back.
On the night before last the British line fell back from near La Chèche and swung around in a loop south of Neuve Eglise toward Ravelsberg Farm. It was then that Neuve Eglise itself became a place of hellish battle.
The enemy broke through into its ruined streets, and small parties of Wiltshires, Worcesters, and others sprang on the Germans or were killed. They fought desperately in backyards, over broken walls, and in shell-pierced houses, wherever they could find Germans or hear the tattoo of machine guns.
Several times the enemy was cleared out of most of the town, and the British held a hollow square containing most of the streets and defended it as a kind of fortress, though with dwindling numbers, under a heavy fire of shells and trench mortars and machine guns.
Capture of Bailleul
Tuesday, April 16.—It seemed inevitable after the British loss of Neuve Eglise that the enemy should make a quick and strong effort to capture Bailleul, and this he did last night by putting into the battle three divisions of fresh assaulting troops not previously used, and thus encircling that city by fierce attacks on ground southeast and east, including the ridge of Le Ravetsberg and Mont de Lille. His troops included his Alpine corps of Jaegers and possibly a Bavarian division and the 117th Division. Among the men defending the city against these heavy forces were the Staffords and Notts and Derbies.
Yesterday when I was in the country around Bailleul the enemy's guns were working up for this new attack, and there was a continual bombardment spreading up to Wytschaete Ridge. Heavy shells were being flung into Bailleul itself, and the smoke of fires was rising like mist from small towns and villages like Meteren and Morbecque down to Merville.
The British guns were also pounding the enemy's positions, and through that the concentrations of Germany—infantry, guns, transport, and cavalry—were moving up the roads in and north of Merville. The enemy must have lost severely again, for the British were stubborn in defense, but their machine-gun fire must have been of a deadly nature owing to their positions along the railway and on the ridge; but the enemy advanced upon them in waves, striking upon both sides of Bailleul, so that after great resistance the line was withdrawn beyond the town.
The capture of this city belongs to the third great attack which has been delivered by the enemy since March 21. Always he has massed his strength opposite the British lines and struck with full weight against their troops. In the first phase down from St. Quentin and the Cambrai salient the French came to their help and relieved them by their gallant aid, but the Germans then edged away from the French to strike the British again, this time at Arras, where they failed.
A third phase has now followed in this northern blow and once again the British have had to sustain the abominable pressure of German divisions constantly relieved and supported by fresh divisions passing through them, while the British troops fight on and on, killing the enemy in large numbers, but having to withdraw to new lines of defense. Under these enormous odds their heroism and their sacrifices are beyond words that may be uttered except in the silence of one's heart.
Wonderful Panorama
Wednesday, April 17.—Yesterday morning the fortune of war seemed again in favor of the enemy by the capture of Wytschaete Ridge down to Spanbroekmolen and by the entry of Meteren, west of Bailleul. The hard-pressed British troops were forced to give ground at both these places, after a grand resistance which cost the enemy many lives, but in the evening counterattacks hurled the enemy back from Wytschaete village, that pile of brick dust above stumps of dead trees which were Wytschaete Wood, and in a separate battle west of Bailluel the British regained, at least for a time, a part of Meteren. This morning renewed counterattacks gave them back all of Meteren and the enemy garrison there was destroyed.
I watched the battle last night and again this morning from the centre of the arc of fire, which was like a loop flung around from Wytschaete to Bailleul and in a sharp curve around to Merris and the country about Merville, so that the great gunfire and whole sweep of battle were close about on three sides.
It was an astounding panorama of open warfare, such as I never dreamed of seeing on this western front, where for so long both sides were hemmed in by trenches. Bailleul was still blazing. In the early evening, after a wet, misty day which filled all this battlefield with a whitish fog, one could only see that city under a cloud, but as the sky darkened and the wind blew some mist away enormous flames burned redly in the poor dead heart of Bailleul, and in their glare there were dark masses of walls and broken roofs outlined jaggedly by fire.
To the left the village of Locre was aflame under a storm of high explosives, and the enemy's guns were putting heavy shells down the roads which lead out to that place.
There were fires of burning farms and hamlets as far southward as Merville behind one, as one stood looking out to Bailleul, and lesser fires of single cottages and haystacks, and the wind drifted all the smoke of them across the sky in long white ribbons.
Drumfire Rocks Earth
It was just before dusk when the counterattacks began northward from Wytschaete and southward from Meteren, and although before then there had been a steady slogging of guns and howling of shells, at that time this volume of dreadful noise increased tremendously, and drumfire broke out in fury, so that the sky and earth trembled with it. It was like the beating of all the drums of the world in muffled tattoo, above which and through which there were enormous clangoring hammer strokes from the British and German heavies.
It went on till evening, with a few pale gleams of sun through storm clouds and the smoke of guns, and for miles all this panorama of battle was boiling and seething with bursting shells and curling wreaths of smoke from the batteries in action.
When darkness came each battery was revealed by its flashes, and all the fields around were filled with red winkings and sharp stabs of flame. There was no real darkness of night, for every second the sky was crossed by rushes of light and burning beacons in many places, and gun flashes etched outlines of trees and cottages.
The general situation today is in our favor for the time being by the recapture of Wytschaete and Meteren and the repulse of many German attacks, but it is with natural regret one hears of the withdrawal from the heights east of Ypres in order to straighten the line and economize men. There was one other regret today, though only sentimental. The enemy knocked down the Albert church tower, the tower of the golden Virgin, who had bent head downward over that ruined city with her babe outstretched. It was a great landmark bound up with all our memories.