In any old billet in Flanders one hears the tale of battle told by men who were there, and it is worth while, as yesterday, when I sat down at table with the officers of a battalion of Suffolks in a Flemish farmhouse. The men were camped outside, and as I passed I liked the look of these lads, who had just come out of one of the stiffest fights of the war. They looked amazingly fresh after one night's rest, and they stood in groups telling their yarns in the good old dialect of their county, laughing as though it had all been a joke, though it was more than a joke with death on the prowl.
"Your men look fit," I said to the colonel of the Suffolks, and he smiled as though he liked my words, and said, "You couldn't get their tails down with a crowbar. It was a good show, and that makes all the difference. They have been telling the Australian boys that you have only got to make a face at the Hun and he puts his hands up. They knocked the stuffing out of the enemy."
Inside the farmhouse there was the battalion mess, at one long table and one short, because it was felt better for all the officers to be together instead of splitting up into company messes. I looked down the rows of faces, these clean-cut English faces, and was glad of the luck which had brought so many of these young officers back again. They told the tale of the battle, and each of them had some detail to add, because that was his part of the show, and it was his platoon, and they had left the fighting-line the night before. They spoke as though all the things had happened long ago, and they laughed loudly at episodes of gruesome interest and belonging to those humours of war which are not to be written.
There was a thick mist when they went away at dawn, so dense that they could not see the line of our barrage ahead, though it was a deep belt of bursting shells. They had been told to follow close, and they were eager to get on. They went too fast, some of them almost incredibly fast, over the shell-craters, and round them, and into them, and out of them again, stumbling, running, scrambling, not turning to look when any comrade fell.
"I was on the last position three-quarters of an hour before the barrage passed," said a young officer of the Suffolks. He spoke the words as if telling something rather commonplace, but he knew that I knew the meaning of what he said, a frightful and extraordinary thing, for with his platoon he had gone ahead of our storm of fire and had to wait until it reached and then passed them. Some of their losses were because of that, and yet they might have been greater if they had been slower because the enemy was caught before they could guess that our men were near. They put up no fight in the pill-boxes, those little houses of concrete which stank horribly because of the filth in them, and from the shell-craters where snipers and machine-gunners lay men rose in terror at the sight of the brown men about them, and ran this way and that like poor frightened beasts, or stood shaking in an ague of fear. Some ran towards their own lines with their hands up, shouting "Kamerad," believing they were running our way. They were so unready for attack that the snipers had the safety-clip on their rifle-barrels, and others were without ammunition.
In one shell-hole was an English-speaking German. "I saved him," said one of the young Suffolk officers. "He was a downhearted fellow, and said he was fed up with the war and wanted nothing but peace."
Near another shell-hole was a German who looked dead. He looked as if he had been dead for a long time, but an English corporal who passed close to this body saw a hand stretch out for a bayonet within reach, and the man raised himself to strike. Like a man who sees a snake with his fangs out, the corporal whipped round, grabbed the German's bayonet and ran him through. The way to the last objective was easy on the whole, and the enemy was on the run with our men after them until they were ordered to stop and dig in. The hardest time came afterwards, as it nearly always comes when the ground gained had to be held for three more days and nights without the excitement of attack and under heavy fire. That is when the courage of men is most tried, as this battalion found. The enemy had time to pull themselves together. The German gunners adapted their range to the new positions and shelled fiercely across the ways of approach, and scattered 5·9's everywhere. It was rifle-fire for the Suffolk men all the time. They had not troubled to bring up a great many bombs, for the rifle has come into its own again, now that the old trench warfare is gone for a time, or all time, and with rifle-fire and machine-gun fire they broke down the German counter-attacks and caught parties of Germans who showed themselves on the slopes of the Passchendaele Ridge, and sniped incessantly. They used a prodigious quantity of small-arms ammunition, and the carriers risked their lives every step of the way to get it up to them. They fired 30,000 rounds and then 16,000 more. There was one officer who spent all his time sniping from a little patch of ground that had once been a garden. He lay behind a heaped ruin and used his field-glasses to watch the slopes of rising ground on his left, where human ants were crawling. Every now and then he fired and picked off an ant until his score reached fifty. German planes came flying over our troops to get their line, flying very low, so that their wings were not a tree's height above the shell-craters, and our boys lay doggo not to give themselves away. Some of the hostile planes were red-bellied, and others which came searching the ground were big, porpoise-like planes. They dropped signal-lights and directed the fire of the 5·9's. A private of the Suffolks, lying low but watchful, saw a light rise from the ground as one of these machines came over, and it was answered from the aeroplane. "That's queer," he thought; "dirty work in that shell-hole." He crept out to the shell-hole from which the signal had come, and found three German soldiers there with rockets. They tried to kill him, but it was they who died, and our man brought back their rifles and kit as souvenirs.
More rifle ammunition was wanted as the time passed, and the carriers took frightful risks to bring it. The drums of the Suffolks did well that day as carriers and stretcher-bearers, passing up and down through the barrage-fire, and there was a private who guided a party with small-arms ammunition—ten thousand rounds of it—to the forward troops, with big shells bursting over the ground. Twice he was buried by shell-bursts, which flung the earth over him, but on the way back he helped to carry a wounded man 800 yards to the regimental aid post under hot fire. He was a cool-headed and gallant-hearted fellow, and went up again as a volunteer to the forward positions, and on the same night crawled out on a patrol with a young lieutenant to reconnoitre a position on the left which was still in German hands. From farther left, on rising ground, the Germans sprinkled machine-gun fire over the battalion support lines, and the earth was spitting with those bullets. But in their own lines the German soldiers were moving about with Red Cross flags picking up their wounded, and they did not fire at our stretcher-bearers, apart from the barrage-fire of 5·9's through which they had to make their way. Only once did they play a bad trick. Under the Red Cross flag some stretcher-bearers went into a pill-box which had been abandoned, and shortly after machine-gun fire came from it. That is the kind of thing which makes men see red.