South of all this the Australians were fighting in the centre of yesterday's great attack where the ground rises to the foul heights of Polygon Wood. The Australian lads were in their most perfect form. They had had some rest since the hard, bad days at Bullecourt and in the dreadful valley of Noreuil, where I went to see them outside the Quéant-Drocourt line. Since then I had seen them in the harvest-fields of France, in the market squares of Flemish towns, along the dusty roads which lead up to the Front. Always I felt it good to see those easy-going fellows in their flap hats, so lithe, so clean-cut, so fresh. It was an honour to get a salute from them now and then, for they are not great at that sort of thing, and one could see with half an eye that they have not lost any of their quality since some of them fought their great epic at Helles and Suvla Bay, and afterwards at Pozières gained and held their ground under months of great shell-fire, and then at Bullecourt fought with the grim endurance of men who will not yield to any kind of hammering if their pride is in the job. They are boys, many of them, and simple-looking fellows who were not cut to the model of barrack-room soldiers. They have a wildish gipsy look when one sees them camped in the fields, and free-and-easy manners in the village estaminets. When I heard they were going to attack Polygon Wood I knew that we should get it, if human courage could have the say, for the Australians are not easily denied if they set their mind on a thing, and for all their boyishness—though they have middle-aged follows among them too—they have a grim passion in them at such times. Yet they are free-and-easy always, even on the battlefield, and a bit impatient of checks and restraints. Knowing them, and the heart and soul of them, one of their commanding officers arranged a method of preventing them from getting bored with the long strain of a two hours' wait, which was ordered when they should have gained their first objective. He sent up to them by the carrying parties bundles of the previous day's papers, all the picture papers especially, and large quantities of cigarettes. The idea worked beautifully, and it was the strangest thing that has happened in any great battle. The Australian lads got at the papers, and on the ground which they had just captured spread them out and studied the news of the day and smoked their cigarettes with quiet enjoyment, while ahead of them rolled a stupendous barrage, with thousands of heavy shells that came screaming over their heads from our guns behind them, answered by other shells that came the other way, and burst farther back on the battlefield. So they were seen by one of our airmen, who was surprised by what he saw.
The going had been pretty bad before then, as I was told to-day by some of the men whom I met slightly wounded along the Menin road. The enemy seemed to smell danger in the night and put over a heavy barrage just before the attack started. It was on the tail of the Australians, and might have demoralized them if they had not been so high in heart. They got away in good order, and kept going to keep pace with the travelling storm of shells which broke before them. One queer thing happened near Clapham Junction. The enemy had apparently planned a raid with "flammenwerfer," or flame-jets as we call these devilish engines, at the very time of the attack and they were met by the Australian shock of assault, and fell before it. While some of the Australians worked round Glencorse Copse and Nonne Boschen or Nuns' Wood, others fought up by Westhoek across the Hanebeek towards the post called by a curious coincidence Anzac Corner. After heavy fighting for a little while at one of the blockhouses the Australian flag was planted at Anzac Corner and waves there still. In Nonne Boschen the ground was marshy and encumbered with fallen trees, but the boys struggled through somehow, and then started for the Polygon Wood, where there is no wood, as there seldom is in these places when our artillery has done its work, but only some blasted trunks and stakes. In Glencorse Wood and round about it there were a good many Germans, and they fought hard. Fifty of them were killed in hand-to-hand fighting, or fighting at close quarters, and a blockhouse on the north-west of the wood, where the garrison would not surrender, but kept his machine-guns going, was taken by a bombing attack. So after a two hours' wait at the end of the first lap the Australians flung away their cigarettes and the assaulting waves passed on to the ridge of Polygon Wood. They could not take all the line they had been asked to take in the first attempt, and were checked on the right by machine-gun fire. So they dug in on a crescent, which had its right ear somewhere by Carlisle Farm to the north of Black Watch Corner, until supports came up to make good their losses on the way, and they were able to go forward and straighten out. After that the counter-attacks began. All of them were broken up by artillery-fire, and when one of the German divisions was flung in, the only men who reached our lines were those who tried to escape from the barrage which our guns put over their assembly position. I should like to give a fuller history than I did yesterday about the taking of Inverness Copse and the bogs of the Dumbarton Lakes, and the tangled ground of Shrewsbury Forest, but I have no time, as the wires wait, except to pay a tribute to the men who fought there over most difficult country, crowded with blockhouses, and under severe fire from the enemy's guns. Men from Surrey and Kent, from the Midlands, from Wales, from the North, the battalions of the 8th and 14th Divisions, all fought and won with equal courage and success.
September 23
The enthusiasm of the troops who fought in Thursday's battle of the Menin road is good enough proof that they achieved success that morning without those great losses which take the heart out of victory. All the men I have seen are convinced that the enemy's losses are heavy. Not so much in the actual attack, where he held his blockhouse system with small garrisons, as afterwards, when he tried to counter-attack.
I have already put on record some of the attempts he made to regain ground on the afternoon of the battle. Yesterday and to-day he has continued his efforts with even more disastrous results to his unhappy troops. About midday yesterday a German regiment was sent up in motor-omnibuses to a point behind the enemy's lines to make a new assault upon our positions in Polygon Wood. The three battalions then took to the road, and were seen very quickly by our observers. The artillery made that road a way of fire, and the German soldiers were caught in it and dispersed. Odd companies of them worked their way forward by other tracks, but lost themselves in the chaos of shell-craters, where other heavy shells burst among them. They were no longer battalions or companies, but a terror-stricken collection of individual soldiers, taking cover in holes and without guidance or command. An officer collected fifty of them and led them back to reorganize. He had no notion of what had happened to the rest of the regiment, except that it was broken and ineffective, in this wild turmoil of crater earth. He went forward again on reconnaissance, and walked into a body of Australians, who took him prisoner.
So it happened with another column at Zandvoorde. One of our aerial observers watched the long trail of men marching up the road and sent a message to the guns. They were the heavy guns which found the target with 9·2 shells and with twelve-inchers, which are monstrous and annihilating. Down there at Zandvoorde it must have been hell. We can only guess how many men were blown to pieces, and it is not a picture on which the imagination should care to linger. It was a bloody shambles.
Along the Menin road later in the day came another long column of marching men. They were men of the Sixteenth Bavarian Division, who had been sent up in urgent haste without knowledge of the ground, without maps, and with officers who seem to have had no definite instructions except to fling their men in an attack somehow and anyhow. Over their heads in the darkness under the stars flew a British aeroplane with a bomb of the heaviest kind. When our airman saw these hostile troops advancing, flying low like a great black bat he dropped his frightful thing on the head of the column. It burst with a deafening roar and scattered the leading company. Flying in the same sky-space as the big aeroplane was a number of other night raiders of ours. They also flew low above the marching troops, and all down the road dropped their explosives. Our guns added their help, and they fired many rounds down the Menin road, bracketing the ditches. It is a dreadful thing to walk along a road which is being "bracketed," and with those birds of prey above them the Bavarians must have suffered the worst kind of horror. They did not get near to our lines with any counter-attack.
None of these counter-attacks has reached our lines near Polygon Ridge, which is the ground most wanted by the enemy, and the nearest seems to have been yesterday afternoon, when some of the Australian boys with whom I talked to-day saw the movement of men and the glint of bayonets in a little wood on an opposite spur. They saw the movement of men for a minute of two, and after that a fury of shells which fell into the wood and filled it with flame and smoke.
"I don't know how a mortal man could have lived through that," said one of these lads. "If any Fritz got out of that without being cracked he must have had the luck of Old Harry."