The War on All Fronts: England's Effort / Letters to an American Friend

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

So much for the first day's news. On the following day Fricourt was captured; and the prisoners went up to 3,500, together with a quantity of war material. Meanwhile the French on the right had done brilliantly, capturing five villages, and 6,000 prisoners. The attack was well begun.

And the New Armies?—"Kitchener's Men"? "Whatever we have imagined of our New Armies," says an eye-witness of the first day's battle, "they are better than we can have ever dared to hope. Nothing has in any case stopped them, except being killed." And a neutral who saw the attack on Mametz told the same eye-witness that he had seen most of the fighting in the world in recent years, and that he "did not believe a more gallant feat was ever performed in war." The story of the British advance was written "in the dead upon the ground, and in the positions as they stand." "Nothing which the Japanese did in the Russian War" was more entirely heroic.

But let me carry on the story.

On Tuesday, July 11th, Sir Douglas Haig reported: "After ten days and nights of continuous fighting our troops have completed the methodical capture of the whole of the enemy's first system of defence on a front of 14,000 yards.

"This system of defence consisted of numerous and continuous lines of foretrenches, support trenches and reserve trenches, extending to various depths of from 2,000 to 4,000 yards, and included five strongly fortified villages, numerous heavily wired and intrenched woods, and a large number of immensely strong redoubts."

The villages captured were Fricourt, Mametz, Montauban, La Boiselle, and Contalmaison—the latter captured on July 10th, after particularly fierce fighting. Every observer dwells on "the immense strength of the German defences." "All the little villages and woods, each eminence and hollow, have been converted into a fortress as formidable as the character of the ground makes possible." The German has omitted nothing "that could protect him against such a day as this."

Yet steadily, methodically, with many a pause for consolidation of the ground gained, and for the bringing up of the heavy guns, the British advance goes forward—toward Bapaume and Lille; while the French press brilliantly on toward Péronne—both movements aimed at the vital German communications through France and Belgium. Every step of ground, as the Allies gain it, "is wrecked with mines, torn with shell, and watered with the blood of brave men." The wood-fighting, amid the stripped and gaunt trunks rising from labyrinths of wire, is specially terrible; and below the ground everywhere are the deep pits and dugouts, which have not only sheltered the enemy from our fire, but concealed the machine-guns, which often when our men have passed over, emerge and take them in the rear. The German machine-guns seem to be endless; they are skilfully concealed, and worked with the utmost ability and courage.

But nothing daunts the troops attacking day and night, in the name of patriotism, of liberty, of civilisation. Men from Yorkshire and Lancashire, from Northumberland, Westmoreland and Cumberland, the heart of England's sturdy north; men from Sussex and Kent, from Somerset and Devon; the Scotch regiments; the Ulster Division, once the Ulster Volunteers; the men of Munster and Connaught; the town-lads of Manchester; the youths of Cockney London:—all their names are in the great story. "There were no stragglers—none!" says an officer, describing in a kind of wonder one of the fierce wood-attacks. And these are not the seasoned troops of a Continental Army. They belong to regiments and corps which did not exist, except in name, eighteen months ago; they are units from the four-million army that Great Britain raised for this struggle, before she passed her Military Service Law. The "Old Army," the Expeditionary Force, which the nation owed to the organising genius of Lord Haldane and his General Staff, has passed away, passed into history, with the retreat from Mons, the first victory of Ypres, the saving of the Channel ports; but its spirit remains, and its traditions are firmly planted in the new attackers. I think of the men I saw in March, during that long and weary wait; of the desire—and the patience—in their eyes.

And of patience they and the nations behind them will still have ample need. Since surprise on the Somme front was no longer possible, the great advance has gone surely indeed, but more slowly. On July 14, after delay caused by extraordinarily heavy rains, the German second line was breached, and their trenches carried, on a front of four miles and held against counter attacks. Longueval, the wood of Bazentin-le-Grand, and the village, Bazentin-le-Petit, were attacked and captured with an élan that nothing could resist. "The enemy losses in guns," said the British Headquarters, "are now over 100. We have not lost one." On July 17, Ovillers was cleared, Waterlot Farm taken, and 1,500 more yards of the German line. The British had by now taken 11,000 prisoners, to a somewhat larger number taken by the French, 17 heavy guns, 37 field-guns, 30 trench howitzers, and 66 machine-guns. On Saturday night, July 22-23, the greater part of Pozières, on the high ground toward Bapaume, was taken. "Shortly after midnight," wrote the official correspondent at Headquarters with the Australian Imperial Forces in France, "on the 23rd, by a splendid night attack, the Australians took the greater portion of Pozières." The previous bombardment had been magnificent. "I had never before seen such a spectacle. A large sector of the horizon was lit up not by single flashes, but by a continuous band of quivering light." And under the protection of the guns, the Anzacs swept forward, passing over trenches, so entirely obliterated by shell-fire that they were often not recognised as trenches at all, till they were in the heart of the village. Then for two days they fought from house to house, and trench to trench; till on July 27th came the news—"The whole of the village of Pozières is now in our hands." And the Times correspondent writes "our establishment at Pozières will probably be regarded historically as closing the second phase of the battle of the Somme."

Since then (I write on August 16) three weeks have passed. The German Third Line has been entered at the Bois de Foureaux, the whole of Delville Wood has been carried; and in the combined advance of July 30th, the French swept on to Maurepas on the north of the Somme, and are closely threatening both Combles and Péronne, while we are attacking Thiepval on the left of our line and Guillemont on the right, and pushing forward, north of Pozières, toward Bapaume. The whole of the great advance has been a thrust up-hill from the valley floors of the Ancre and the Somme toward a low ridge running roughly east and west and commanding an important stretch of country and vital communications beyond. "It has in just four weeks of effort," writes Mr. Belloc—"accounted for some thirty thousand unwounded or slightly wounded prisoners; for much more than 100 guns; for a belt of territory over five miles in its extreme breadth, and—what is much more important than any of these numerical and local calculations—it has proved itself capable of continuous effort against all the concentration which the enemy has been able to bring against it."