It was a great day for the Australians and the New-Zealanders, their greatest and most glorious day. I saw them going up—these lithe, loose-limbed, hatchet-faced fellows, who look so free and fine in their slouch hats and so hard and grim in their steel helmets. There were many thousands of them on the roads or camped beside the roads, and Flanders for a time seemed to have become a little province of Australia.
Then the New-Zealanders came along, a type half-way between the English of the old country and the Australian boys—not so lean and wiry, with more colour in the cheeks, and a squarer, fuller build. It was good to see them—as fine a set of boys as one could see in the whole world, so that it was hard to think of them in the furnace fires up there, and to know that some of them would come back maimed and broken. In a dug-out on the battlefield I talked with some of them, and they were cheery lads, full of confidence in the coming battle. They wanted to go as far as the Australians, to do as well, and among the Australians also there was a friendly rivalry, the new men wanting to show their mettle to those who are already old in war, one battalion keen to earn the honour which belongs by right of valour to another which had fought before. It was certain they would get to the Broodseinde cross-roads if human courage could get there against high explosives, and they were there without a check, over every obstacle, regardless of the enemy's fire, too fast some of them behind their own. So the New-Zealanders went up to Abraham Heights and carried all before them. The hardest time was last night in the mud and the cold, under heavy fire now and then, but they have stuck it out, as our English boys have stuck it through many foul days and in harder times than these, and that is good enough.
The German prisoners do not hide their astonishment at the spirit of our men, and they know now that our troops are terrible in attack, and arrive upon them with a strange, fearful suddenness behind the barrage. One man, a German professor of broad intelligence and a frank way of facing ugly facts, said that our artillery was too terrific for words. They got harassed all the way up to the front line, and lost many men. When they got there they had to lie flat in the bottom of shell-holes, and the next thing they knew was when they were surrounded by masses of English soldiers. He described our men as gallant and chivalrous. This professor thinks it will not be long before Germany makes a great bid for peace by offering to give up Belgium. By midwinter she will yield Alsace-Lorraine, Russia will remain as before the war, except for an autonomous Poland; Italy will have what she has captured; and Germany will get back some of her colonies, he thinks. He laughed when an indemnity was mentioned, and said "Germany is bankrupt." He describes the German Emperor as a broken man and all for peace, the Crown Prince posing as the head of the military party but being unpopular. If the German people knew that the submarine threat had failed they would demand that the war should stop at once. That is the opinion of one educated German who has suffered the full horror of war and his words are interesting if they represent no more than his own views.
XIX
SCENES OF BATTLE
October 7
The scene of war since Thursday, when our troops went away in the wet mist for the great battle up the slopes of the Passchendaele Ridge, has been dark and grim and overcast with a brooding sky, where storm-clouds are blown into wild and fantastic shapes. Yesterday over the country round Ypres, which still in its ruins holds the soul of all the monstrous tragedy hereabouts, white cloud-mountains were piled up against black, sullen peaks and were shot through with a greenish light, very ghastly in its revelation of the litter and the wreckage of the great arena of human slaughter. Etched sharply against this queer luminance were the lopped trunks of shell-slashed trees and bits of ruined buildings with tooth-like jags above heaps of fallen masonry. Rain fell heavily for most of the day, as nearly all the night, and as it rains to-day, and a wet fog rose from the ground where the shell-craters were already ponds brimming over into swamps of mud. Through the murk our guns fired incessantly, almost as intense as the drum-fire which precedes an attack, though there was no attack from our side or the enemy's, and it was a strange, uncanny thing to hear all that crashing of gun-fire and the wail of great shells in flight to the German lines through this midday darkness.
I marvelled at the gunners, who have gone on so long—so long through the days and nights—feeding those monsters. The infantry have a hard time. It is they who fight with flesh and blood against the machinery of slaughter which is set against them. It is they who go out across the fields on that wild adventure into the unknown. But the gunners, standing by the heavies and the 18-pounders in the sodden fields, with piles of shells about them and great dumps near by, have no easy, pleasant time. On the morning of the last battle I saw the enemy's shells searching for them, flinging up the earth about their batteries, ploughing deep holes on either side of them. They worked in the close neighbourhood of death, and at any moment, between one round and another, a battery and its gun teams might be blown up by one of those howling beasts which seem to gather strength and ferocity at the end of their flight before the final roar of destruction. Now and again a lucky shell of the enemy's gets an ammunition dump, and a high torch rises to the dark sky, and in its flames there are wild explosions as the shells are touched off. But the gunners go on with their work in all the tumult of their own batteries, deafening and ear-splitting and nerve-destroying, and our young gunner officers, muddy, unshaven, unwashed, with sleep-drawn eyes, pace up and down the line of guns saying, "Are you ready, Number One?—Number One, fire!" with no sign of the strain that keeps them on the rack when a big battle is in progress. For them the battle lasts longer than for the infantry. It begins before the infantry advance, it lulls a little and then breaks out into new fury when the German counter-attacks begin. It does not end when the SOS signals have been answered by hours of bombardment, but goes on again to keep German roads under fire, to smother their back areas, to batter their gun positions.
So yesterday, when the German guns were getting back behind the Passchendaele, hauled back out of the mud to take up new emplacements from which they can pour explosives on the ground we have captured, our gunners could not rest, but made this work hideous for the enemy and followed his guns along their tracks. The British gunners in these frightful battles have worked with a courage and endurance to the limit of human nature, and the infantry are the first to praise them and to marvel at them. The infantry go marching in the rain and trudging in the mud, and stumbling over the water-logged craters, and out on the battlefield standing knee-deep in pools and bogs that have been made by shell-fire, cutting up the beds of the Flemish brooks, like the Hanebeek and the Stroombeek and the Reutelbeek, and by the heavy downpour on the upheaved earth. Winter conditions have come upon us, too. They were the old winter pictures of war that I saw yesterday round about the old Ypres salient, when wet men gathered under the lee side of old dug-outs with cold rain sweeping upon them, so that their waterproof capes stream with water, and pattering upon their steel hats with a sharp metallic tinkling sound. Along the roads Australian and New Zealand horsemen go riding hard, with their horses' flanks splashed with heavy gobs of mud. Gun-wagons and transports pass, flinging mud from their wheels. Ambulances, with their red crosses spattered with slime, go threading their way to the clearing-stations, with four pairs of muddy boots upturned beneath the blankets which show through the flap behind, and a dozen "sitting cases" huddled together, with their steel hats clashing and their tired eyes looking out on the traffic of war which they are leaving for a time. They come down cold and wet from the line, but in an hour or two they are warm, inside the dressing-stations, between sand-bagged walls built up inside ruined houses, still within range of shell-fire, but safer than the fields from which these men have come.