As though red-hot needles were stabbing at the drums, our ears are ringing and deafened. The air quivers and the ground flies up as if it were about to open. Our eyes are scorched by a marching wall of flame, against which are etched our rapid gunners, hurling hell across the valley like men demented, and our gallant eighteen-pounders barking, recoiling and bristling like infuriated terriers. We’re off with a vengeance. The greatest offensive of the war has started. Shall we get away with it in so advanced a position? At all events, it’s an end of waiting—that at least is a comfort.
II
YESTERDAY’. attack was a complete success—so complete that, in spite of all our preparations, its magnitude took us unaware. Had anyone, had the faith to foresee a Him defeat of such dimensions, we should have been able to have made a more deadly use of our advantage. As it was we lost a certain amount of time and, as a consequence, wasted some of our chances.
The trouble was, as usual, that we were controlled too much from the rear by staff-people, who didn’t come up-front to see what was happening for themselves, but gathered all their information second and third-hand. When the psychological moment had arrived for us to go forward, they became nervous and held us back. There were interminable telephone conversations with observers, liaison-officers, battery-commanders, all and sundry, before they could be persuaded that we were not proposing to put our heads into a trap.
Staff-people are the most incorrigible pessimists. They will never believe the fighter when he sends back word that victory is in his hands. They make him leave off fighting to answer foolish questions; by the time they permit him to go on fighting the enemy has very frequently recovered himself. They are so cursed with a fatal belief in their own omniscience that they scarcely credit the combatants, who run all the risks, with sense.
In the old days battles were won by generals who led their troops. A person, sharing the dangers and setting an example by their courage. They were on the spot as eye-witnesses, and recognized to a second when the moment to take hazards had arrived. To-day of necessity our generals and their staffs are deskmen, with the natural caution and scepticism of deskmen. They sit far back of the line, remote from shell-fire, in chbteaux fitted out like surveyors’ offices with typewriters, photographs, scales and maps. They do all their fighting on paper. When they are directing an attack, they collect their information by telephone, doubt it, sift it, weigh it, ponder it and discuss it, when lightning action is all that is required. Many of them have never been anything but deskmen since this war started; their combatant experience was gained years ago in little sporting rough-and-tumbles with aborigines on the outskirts of civilization. Because they have never personally endured the modern hell into which they have to fling their men, they can form no mental picture of the situations that occur, and the prompt action that should be taken. They are equipped for planning the preliminary details of a show; but their control of an attack, when once it has started, is paralyzing. So much is this the case that it’s a common saying among the men that the battles which we win in the trenches are lost by the staff-people who are behind.
On the morning of August the eighth the weather conditions were all in our favour. The fog was worth several extra divisions to us. It kept the enemy guessing. We knew what we intended to do, but he had to find out. The fog enabled us to conceal our intentions up to the very last moment. Until we were upon him, he had no knowledge of the directions from which we were approaching; by the time we were upon him it was too late for him to take the proper defensive steps. The first warning he had was when out of the deathly stillness our murderous barrage came roaring and screaming about his head. Never on any front has there been so tremendous a concentration of guns as we let loose on him that morning. The weight of shells and mass of explosives that we threw over him literally rolled up the landscape and pinned everything living to the ground. It passed over his trench-system like a gigantic plough, burying men and weapons, and travelled on into the distance by a pre-arranged series of leaps and bounds. The tanks, following the curtain of fire and lumbering ahead of the infantry, trampled into flatness whatever resistance the creeping barrage had spared.
While the heavens were raining brimstone and fire up front, his back-country was faring no better, for every battery position, strong-point, support-trench, cross-road, regimental headquarters and camp of which we had knowledge was kept under continual bombardment by our siege-guns and heavies. Meanwhile our cavalry of the air were flying low along his roads, by which retreat was possible, machine-gunning and bombing. It was like stopping up all the holes and smoking a wild beast out of his lair. The remnants of his Front-line garrison, who had not been pulverised by our tanks or buried by our shelling, threw away their arms and came streaming through the dawn to encounter the mercy of our bayonets. Later, those who had been taken prisoners, straggled in groups of twos and threes past our guns. They looked more like animals than men, their eyes glaring, their heads nodding, their steps tottering. Some of them walked shufflingly, like blinded men, groping for their direction. Others ran panting at a wolf-trot, as if they still felt that they were pursued by death. All of them were polluted with the unspeakable stench of carnage; behind the smoke of battle, before we saw them, we could smell them coming.