[CHAPTER II]
VILLERS-BRETONNEUX
Broken walls, littered streets, charred roof-beams rising in tortured disarray over the piles of red brick rubbish, stumps of trees, rusty entanglements, battered barricades, pitted pavements, disbanded vehicles and derelict guns. This is Villers-Bretonneux, the village from which the Australians drove the Germans on the night of April 24-25. The story of the attack, of which we have read so many accounts, was again told to me by an officer as we stopped for a while in the village to see the ground over which the men of the South proved their worth in what we hope will be the last battle of the Somme.
Amiens is the last fringe of civilization. Beyond that we come into the dead world which was over-run by the German hordes in the summer of 1918. In the late days of August when the battle lines were penetrated by them an approach to open warfare was reached. Endless streams of infantry in field grey streaked through and over the British defences and pushed forward behind light machine guns which now not alone covered the advance from the rear, but opened up a path by working from the front of the attacking soldiery. Under such protection the Germans dribbled through, taking all available shelter, fighting from behind clumps of trees and broken walls, firing from folds in the earth and newly formed shell-holes and driving the men in khaki in front of them. But Villers-Bretonneux, like a mighty rock, withstood the invasion of the war storm and here it broke itself against the barrier of flesh and blood which was Britain in arms.
The Germans trying to hammer their way through to Amiens were stopped here, but, determined to get through, they started a heavy bombardment which lasted for four hours and in which a lavish supply of gas, lachrymose, chlorine and mustard, was used. German tanks, high turreted and gigantic, figured in this attack for the first time. The battle fine extended from Villers-Bretonneux in the north to Hangard in the south, and five whole German divisions and some units from a sixth were engaged in the exploit. In this attack the Boche pushed the British back to the village of Cachy and on to the fringe of Bois l'Abbé. This was the position held on the evening of April 24. Villers-Bretonneux was in German hands, but only as Pompeii was in the hands of the Romans when Vesuvius was flooding the fated streets with streams of molten lava.
It was at night that the Australians came on to the scene of conflict, two brigades, one from the Fourth and one from the Fifth Australian Division attacking. They had marched up to their allotted positions, but neither brigade had before seen the ground which they were going to attack.
The night was one never to be forgotten, with its battle fights flaring far ahead, and the roads back from the fighting line crowded with refugees hurrying away from their devastated villages, their quiet farms and their burning homes. Old men who had not left their native place for the past twenty years, came along the roads, leading little ponies, frightened cows, or some other animals which belong to the stock of a well-tended farm.
Women, old and young, were on the road, carrying their children away from the horrible holocaust of war. Little boys and girls, wild-eyed and terrified, plodded along through the press on the roads, not knowing where they were going, but filled with one thought—to be out of it, to hide in some humble shelter far from the ravages of the terrible Boche. Mothers wept and ran backwards and forwards through the throng of moving figures, calling for petit Jean or petite Yvette. But the little children were lost, swallowed up in the vortex of the terrible night.
What was happening? What was going to happen? Nobody knew. Only one thing was certain. The Boche was at the throat of France, putting the country to the sword, burning the churches, trampling down the little homes of the simple people. Flying from the menace of the night as children would fly from a nursery in which a gorilla was loosened, the poor people were on the road hurrying away from the village of Villers-Bretonneux, from the town of Amiens, from the fated corners of France on which the German was pouring his hate.