June 4th.
That Friday night, while the enemy was preparing to hold his new front, and the stretcher-bearers and Red Cross workers on both sides were bringing in their wounded and dead, General Sir Julian Byng, the Corps Commander, was planning a counter-attack to recover the ground which had been lost. This attack was delayed for some hours, owing to the necessity for assembling artillery in such force as to silence the enemy, who still maintained a vigorous and occasionally an intense bombardment.
The advance was timed for six o'clock in the morning, but still the barrage did not lift, and it was nearly half-past nine when our troops moved forward in earnest. These troops belonged to the First and Third Divisions, but the brunt of the fighting was borne by survivors of the 7th and 8th Brigades of the latter Division, assisted by two companies of the King's Royal Rifles, an Imperial regiment which had been serving in the Salient to the left of the Canadian troops.
A bombardment of a vigour almost equal to that of the Germans of the previous day created a shelter for our advancing battalions. The enemy guns replied, and at one time the spectacle was witnessed of a double barrage of appalling intensity. None the less, the Canadians pushed on, and after fighting all day succeeded in reaching a portion of their old front-line trenches in the northern section. On the way thither they came across numbers of enemy dead lying about unburied. But the trenches were battered to pieces, and our troops were not in sufficient strength to hold on until the works could be reconstructed. The same was true of the battalions of the 8th Brigade, who advanced south of Maple Copse and east of Warrington Avenue, although the 49th Battalion, which had lost its commanding officer, Colonel Baker, struggled valiantly for a time to maintain itself. The upshot was that we were forced back to a new front line of trenches near Zillebeke.
The losses of these two days have been grievous--some 7,000 killed and wounded. It is to-day known that the commander of the heroic Third Canadian Division, Major-General Mercer, has fallen. Just as the Huns were making their advance at half-past one o'clock, the General was seen supporting himself against a parapet at the entrance of a dug-out known as the Tube, suffering from shell shock, and there beyond doubt he met his death, and there his body lies buried. A brigade commander and a battalion commander were taken prisoners. Two other colonels, Buller and Baker, have been slain.
The earth is all torn, seared, and fretted hereabouts, but a surprising amount of timber still stands. All through those two fierce days' fighting, wounded men were crawling about or lying motionless for hours, either helpless or to avoid observation. One man told me he had spent two nights on his back in No Man's Land without food, drink, or succour. Another was thrice buried by the effects of the much-vaunted minenwerfer shell--which ploughs up the surrounding earth--and thrice dug out by a passing officer. Machine-guns were repeatedly buried, and then rapidly and diligently excavated and brought by our gallant fellows again into action, much to the enemy's amazement and discomfiture.
It is now Sunday afternoon at Corps Headquarters.
As I write, staff officers hurry to and fro; occasionally a general or a battalion commander dashes by, all deeply preoccupied and intent on the business in hand. Some of them have not slept for three days. The troops who have borne the brunt are now going into rest billets.
As to these two days' struggle, if you were to take all the actions along the British front from the very beginning, there is none that illustrates so vividly, so intensely, the whole character of the fighting in this War. It combines the essential features of all, with the exception of poison gas. Brief, compact, and murderous, it was by far the greatest artillery ordeal to which the Canadians have yet been subjected. As an exhibition of German frightfulness on the one hand, and British steadfastness on the other, it is unsurpassed in the War. "Comparable only to Verdun," is the comment to me of a distinguished commander, when I mentioned the fury of the German bombardment.
Down the road leading from the battle front to the divisional headquarters appears the head of a long column of mud-stained, grimy-faced Canadians, with rusty, tattered accoutrements, their heads in the air, still keeping step, and singing--actually singing--with a sort of wild humour and abandon. And one catches the sound, not of the "Maple Leaf for Ever," or "My Little Grey Home in the West," but of the latest London music-hall ditty--the one a famous comedian chants nightly at the Alhambra: