Fields of Victory

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

Letters came and went. The men were paid. Records of every kind were kept. New maps were made, printed, and sent round—and quickly, since food and supplies depended on them. "One breakdown on a narrow road, one failure of an important message over a telephone wire—and how much may depend on it!"

"Yet thanks to intelligent and devoted work, to experience and resource, how little in these later stages of the war has gone wrong!"

The fighting men, the Staff work, the auxiliary services of the British Army—the long welding of war had indeed brought them by last autumn to a wonderful efficiency. And that efficiency was never so sharply tested as by the exchange of a stationary war for a war of movement. The Army swept on "over new but largely devastated country," into unknown land, where all the problems, as compared with the long years of trench war, were new. Yet nothing failed—"except the astounded enemy's power of resistance."

So much from a first-hand record of the First Army's advance. It carries me back as I summarise it to my too brief stay at Valenciennes, and the conversations of the evening with the Army Commander and several members of his Staff. The talk turned largely on this point of training, Staff work, and general efficiency. There was no boasting whatever; but one read the pride of gallant and devoted men in the forces they had commanded. "Then we have not muddled through?" I said, laughing, to the Army Commander. Sir Henry smiled. "No, indeed, we have not muddled through!"

And the results of this efficiency were soon seen. Take first the attack of the First and Third Armies on this section. North of Moeuvres the Canadians, under General Home, crossing the Canal in the early morning of September 27th, on a narrow front, and spreading out behind the German troops holding the Canal, by a fan-shaped manoeuvre, brilliantly executed, which won reluctant praise from captured German officers, pushed on for Bourlon and Cambrai. The 11th Division, following close behind, turned northward, with our barrage from the heavy guns, far to the west, protecting their left flank, towards the enemy line along the Sensée, taking ground and villages as they went. Meanwhile the front German line, pinned between our barrage behind them and the Canal, taken in front and rear, and attacked by the 56th Division, had nothing to do but surrender.

"The day's results," says my informant of the First Army, "were the great Hindenburg system (in this northern section) finally broken, the height before Cambrai captured, thousands of prisoners and great quantities of guns taken, and our line at its furthest point 7,000 yards nearer Germany. A great triumph!"

Meanwhile in the centre—just where I have asked the reader of this paper to stand with me in imagination on the hill-side overlooking the Canal du Nord—General Byng's Third Army, including the Guards' Division, forced the Canal crossings in face of heavy fire, and moving forward towards Cambrai in the half light of dawn, took trenches and villages from the fighting and retreating enemy. After the forward troops were over, the engineers rushed on, bridging the Canal, under the fire of the German guns, rapidly clearing a way for infantry and supplies. A map issued by the Tank Corps shows that close to this point on the Cambrai-Bapaume road six tanks were operating—among them no doubt that agile fellow, whose tracks still show on the hillside!—while on the whole front of the Third and First Armies sixty-five tanks were in action. By the end of that long day 10,000 prisoners had been taken, and 200 guns, an earnest of what was to follow.

It was on the front of the Fourth Army, however, in the section from St. Quentin to Gouzeaucourt, that the heaviest blow was planned by the Commander-in-Chief. Here the "exceptional strength of the enemy's position made a prolonged bombardment necessary." So while the First and Third Armies were advancing, on the north, with a view to lightening the task of the Fourth Army, for forty-eight hours General Rawlinson maintained a terrible bombardment, which drove the defenders of the famous line underground, and cut them off from food and supplies. And on the morning of the 29th the Fourth Army attacked.

But I have no intention of repeating in any detail the story of that memorable day. The exploit of the 46th Division under General Boyd, in swimming and capturing the southern section of the Canal below Bellenglise, will long rank as one of the most amazing stories of the war. Down the steep banks clambered the men, flung themselves into the water, and with life-belts, and any other aid that came handy, crossed the Canal under fire, and clambered up the opposite bank. And the achievement is all the more welcome to British pride in British pluck, when it is remembered that, according to the German document I have already quoted, it was an impossible one. "The deep canal cutting from the southern end of the canal tunnel ... with its high steep banks constitutes a strong obstacle. The enemy will hardly attack here." So writes the German officer describing the line.

But it was precisely here that "the enemy" did attack!—capturing prisoners (4,000 of them by the end of the day, with 70 guns) and German batteries in action, before the German Command had had time to realise the direction of the attack.