We had intended to close here the present chapter. But our impression of life at the front with the 62nd Division is incomplete without reference to the mimic warfare and the relaxation from war which likewise formed part of its experience. On that very day, June 16th, when the Bullecourt sector was finally consolidated, Divisional Sports were being held at Achiet-le-Petit. In a Coliseum made out of a German crater, which we illustrate from a pencil-sketch on the spot, the Divisional Band was playing on June 14th, and boxing contests were being fought. Two days later, a Gymkhana was held, in which some of the chief events were dribbling a football on horseback,[81] driving a pair of mules tandem,[82] and collecting stones to drop into a bucket.[83] On June 20th, three Officers of the 2/5th West Ridings rode from Achiet-le-Petit to Thiepval, and went over the ground which had been fought by the 1st Line Battalion of their Regiment nearly a year before. ‘Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit,’ they may have thought, as they contrasted their leisurely ride with the heat of battle which the site recalled; and the same thought, applied to their own experience, may have revealed the hope of a future day when Bullecourt, like Thiepval, would be remembered as a past stage in a victorious advance.

CHAPTER X

I.—THE NORTHERN RIDGES

Between the Battle of Arras in the Spring and the Battle of Cambrai in the Autumn came the Third Battle of Ypres in the Summer. This middle battle in time (with which, in the history of the West Riding, we shall not be much concerned) was the northernmost battle in space, and its success, if it had been fully successful, would have been amphibious in kind. It would have rendered untenable by Germany the sea-bases of her submarine campaign, thus relieving the food-problem for the Allies, and it would have removed the military peril, fought out to a standstill in 1915, which threatened Paris and the Channel ports. On this account, as we saw in the last Chapter, the northernmost battle of the three was originally the chief in significance according to Sir Douglas Haig’s plans. If we may regard the long Allied line, say, from Reims to the sea, throughout, and even beyond, the fighting season of 1917, as the scene of a single battle, we must add that the course of that battle did not follow Sir Douglas Haig’s wishes. We read above of a ‘revised’ scheme, of ‘restricted’ preparations for the attack in Flanders, and we infer (indeed, we are informed) that, if Haig had been in sole Command of the Allied Forces on the Western front, he would have disposed the programme a little differently. Happily, it is not our business to judge the strategy of the war. Our task is to narrate the part which was played by a few thousand Yorkshiremen in bringing the war to a victorious close. Strategy was not in their contract: the Colonel obeyed his Brigadier, the General his Corps Commander; and even in a larger sphere, Sir Douglas Haig was less than supreme. In the triple battle of 1917 many factors entered into account. To burn out the submarine nests, to countervail Italy’s fate of arms, to anticipate Russia’s defection, to release French industry and railways: these were a few of the considerations which affected the movements of the Allied Armies between Verdun and Ypres, the two flagstaffs of French and British ardour. That they were, primarily, political considerations does not mean that they were wrongly brought into account. Always the strategical initiative, as distinct from the tactical, lies partly outside the control of the fighting men. But there was worse than this in the series of conditions which determined the fighting of 1917. The sequence of battle-areas (Arras, Ypres, Cambrai) might be dictated by causes which prevailed over the best-laid plans; the course of the battles themselves, especially of the Summer-battle about Ypres, was dictated by less calculable chances. Among these were the ‘pill-boxes’ and the mud, the solid and the fluid conditions. When to break off that last battle was almost more difficult a problem than when to engage it; and if its commencement was postponed by causes outside Haig’s control, we can read between the lines of his Fourth Dispatch the hesitation with which he carried it on:

‘After weighing these considerations, as well as the general situation and various other factors affecting the problem, among them the desirability of assisting our Allies in the operations to be carried out by them on the 23rd October in the neighbourhood of Malmaison, I decided to continue the offensive further....

‘Though the condition of the ground continued to deteriorate, the weather after this was unsettled rather than persistently wet, and progress had not become impossible. I accordingly decided to press on while circumstances still permitted....

‘By this time the persistent continuation of wet weather had left no further room for hope....[84]’

it would be unnecessary to complete this final sentence, except that it closes with the definite statement, that, ‘in view of other projects which I had in view, it was desirable to maintain pressure on the Flanders front for a few weeks longer.’ Once more, we are not required to judge, but, at least, we may note the implication that, even when there was ‘no further room for hope’ (surely, a grave obstacle to progress) it was still necessary to ‘maintain pressure for a few weeks longer.’

The West Yorkshire troops did not come in till close to the end of this middle battle, and we shall presently be more fully concerned with the ‘other projects’ elsewhere. But we can imagine what it meant to those spent and battle-weary soldiers to ‘maintain pressure’ beyond the hope of progress. ‘Physical exhaustion,’ we read, ‘placed narrow limits on the depth to which each advance could be pushed’; and how far those limits should be forced was a matter of very difficult discretion. ‘Time after time,’ runs the Despatch, ‘the practically beaten enemy was enabled to re-organize and relieve his men, and to bring up reinforcements behind the sea of mud which constituted his main protection’; and at what point a ‘practically beaten’ enemy should be left behind his barrier of mud was, again, very hard to decide. Hard and difficult decisions for the High Command; but the hardship and the difficulty of the fighting fell heavily on the fighting men, and the Summer-battle of 1917, which was prolonged far beyond the Summer, entailed, as Sir Douglas Haig tells us, ‘almost superhuman exertions on the part of the troops of all arms and services.[85]’ The great Commander chose his word well. If the triple battle of 1917 were to be fought out again, with all the conditions constant except those which strategists could vary, there would be, conceivably, a new time-table and a new distribution of effort at Arras, Passchendaele and Cambrai: there would still be the ‘superhuman’ effort to overcome the German advantage of irregular, murderous blockhouses, like Martello-towers sunk in a sea of mud, and of not less irregular rain.