XX
THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND
October 9
Another battle was fought and another advance was made by our troops to-day with the French, in a great assault on their left. Our Allies gained about 1200 yards of ground in two strides, captured some hundreds of prisoners and many machine-guns and two field-guns, and killed large numbers of the enemy in this attack, and in the bombardments which have preceded it. The Allied troops are within a few hundred yards of that forest of which Marlborough spoke when he said, "Whoever holds Houthulst Forest holds Flanders," and have gone forward about 1500 yards in depth along a line beyond Poelcappelle across the Ypres-Gheluvelt road. The enemy has suffered big losses again. Two new divisions just brought into the line—the 227th straight from Rheims only getting into the line at three o'clock this morning, and the 195th arrived from Russia—have received a fearful baptism of fire, and at least three other divisions—the 16th, 233rd, and 45th Reserve Division—have been hard hit and are now bleeding from many wounds and have given many prisoners from their ranks into our hands.
How was this thing done? How did we have any success to-day when even the most optimistic men were preyed upon last night by horrid doubts? Our troops, we know, are wonderful. There is nothing they could be asked to do which they would not try to do, and struggle to the death to do. But last night's attack might have seemed hopeless in the morning except to men who had weighed all the chances, who had all the evidence in their hands—evidence, I mean, of the measure of the enemy's strength and spirit—and who took the terrific responsibility of saying "Go!" to the start of this new battle.
It was a black and dreadful night, raining more heavily after heavy rains. The wind howled and raged across Flanders with long, sinister wailings as it gathered speed and raced over the fields. Heavy storm-clouds hiding the moon and the stars broke, and a deluge came down, drenching all our soldiers who marched along the roads and tracks, making ponds about them where they stood. And it was cold, with a coldness cutting men with the sharp sword of the wind, and there was no glimmer of light in the darkness. To those of us who know the crater-land of the battlefields, who with light kit or no kit have gone stumbling through it, picking their way between the shell-holes in daylight, taking hours to travel a mile or two, it might have seemed impossible that great bodies of troops could go forward in assault over such country and win any kind of success in such conditions. That they did so is a proof, one more proof to add to a thousand others, that our troops have in them an heroic spirit which is above the normal laws of life, and that, whatever the conditions may be, they will face them and grapple with them, and, if the spirit and flesh of man can do it, overcome the impossible itself. This battle seems to me as wonderful as anything we have done since the Highlanders and the Naval Division captured Beaumont-Hamel in the mud and the fog. More wonderful even than that, because on a greater scale and in more foul weather.
This morning I have been among the Lancashire and West Riding men of the 66th and 49th Divisions who lay out last night before the attack, which followed the first gleams of dawn to-day, and who marched up—no, they did not march, but staggered and stumbled up to take part in the attack. These men I met had come back wounded. Only in the worst days of the Somme have I seen such figures. They were plastered from head to foot in wet mud. Their hands and faces were covered with clay, like the hands and faces of dead men. They had tied bits of sacking round their legs, and this was stuck on them with clots of mud. Their belts and tunics were covered with a thick, wet slime. They were soaked to the skin, and their hair was stiff with clay. They looked to me like men who had been buried alive and dug up again, and when I spoke to them I found that some of them had been buried alive and unburied while they still had life. They told me this simply, as if it were a normal thing. "A shell burst close," said a Lancashire fellow, "and I was buried up to the neck." "Do you mean up to the neck?" I asked, and he said, "Yes, up to the neck." There were many like that, and others, without being flung down by a shell-burst or buried in its crater, fell up to their waists in shell-holes and up to their armpits, and sank in water and mud.
A long column of men whom I knew had to make their way up at night to join in the attack at the dawn. I had seen them the day before, with rain slashing down on their steel hats and their shiny capes, and I thought they were as grand a set of lads as ever I have seen in France. They were men of the Lancashire battalions in the 66th Division.
It was at dusk that they set out on their way up to the battle-line, and it was only a few miles they had to go. But it took them eleven hours to go that distance, and they did not get to the journey's end until half an hour before they had to attack. It was not a march. It was a long struggle against the demons of a foul night on the battlefield. The wind blew a gale against them, slapping their faces with wet canes, so that their flesh stung as at the slash of whips. It buffeted them against each other and clutched at their rifles and tried to wrench their packs off their backs. And the rain poured down upon them in fierce gusts until they were only dry where their belts crossed, and their boots were filled with water. It was pitch-dark at the beginning of the night, and afterwards there was only the light of the stars. They could not see a yard before them, but only the dark figure of the man ahead. Often that figure ahead fell suddenly with a shout. It had fallen into a deep shell-hole and disappeared.