There were Tanks in action. Some of the men had seen them crawling forward over the open country, and then had lost sight of them. In the night the enemy had withdrawn all but his rear-guard posts to the trenches farther back, where he resisted fiercely with incessant machine-gun fire. The enemy's trench system south of Arras was enormously strong, but our bombardment had pounded it, and our men went through to the reserve support trench, and then on to the chain of posts in front of the Hangest Trench, which was strongly held, and after heavy fighting with bombs and bayonets to the Observatory Ridge, from which for two years and a half the enemy has looked down, directing the fire of his batteries against the French and British positions. Our storm troops in this part of the line were all men of the old English county regiments—Norfolks, Suffolks, Essex, Berkshires, Sussex, Middlesex, Queen's, Buffs, and Royal West Kents of the 12th Division. There was fierce fighting in Tilloy, to the south of Arras, by the Suffolks, Shropshire Light Infantry, and Royal Welsh Fusiliers of the 3rd Division, and afterwards they were held up by machine-gun fire from two formidable positions called the "Harp" and "Telegraph Hill," the former being a fortress of trenches shaped like an Irish harp, the latter rising to a high mound. These were taken by English troops and the Scots of the 15th Division, with the help of Tanks, which advanced upon them in their leisurely way, climbed up banks and over parapets, sitting for a while to rest and then waddling forward again, shaking machine-gun bullets from steel flanks, and pouring deadly fire into the enemy's positions, and so mastering the ground.
North of the Scarpe (north-east of Arras) the whole system of trenches was taken; and north again, along the Vimy Ridge, the Canadians and Highlanders of the 51st Division achieved a heroic success by gaining this high dominating ground, which was the scene of some of the fiercest French battles in the first part of the war, and which is a great wall defending Douai. It was reckoned up to noon to-day that over 3000 prisoners had been taken. They are streaming down to prisoners' camps, and to our men who pass them on the roads they are the best proofs of a victorious day.
Those of us who knew what would happen to-day—the beginning of another series of battles greater perhaps than the struggle of the Somme—found ourselves yesterday filled with a tense, restless emotion. Some of us smiled with a kind of tragic irony, because it was Easter Sunday. In little villages behind the battle lines the bells of French churches were ringing gladly because the Lord had risen; and on the altar steps priests were reciting the old words of faith, "Resurrexi et adhuc tecum sum! Alleluia!" The earth was glad yesterday. For the first time this year the sun had a touch of warmth in it—though patches of snow still staved white under the shelter of the banks—and the sky was blue, and the light glinted on wet tree-trunks and in the furrows of the new-ploughed earth. As I went up the road to the battle lines I passed a battalion of our men—the men who are fighting to-day—standing in a hollow square with bowed heads, while the chaplain conducted the Easter service. It was Easter Sunday, but no truce of God. I went to a field outside Arras, and looked into the ruins of the cathedral city. The cathedral itself stood clear in the sunlight, with a deep black shadow where its roof and aisles had been. Beyond was a ragged pinnacle of stone—the once glorious town hall and a French barracks—and all the broken streets going out to the Cambrai road. It was hell in Arras, though Easter Sunday. The enemy was flinging high explosives into the city, and clouds of shrapnel burst above, black and green. All around the country too, his shells were exploding in a scattered, aimless way, and from our side there was a heavy bombardment all along the Vimy Ridge, above Neuville-St.-Vaast, and sweeping round above St.-Nicholas and Blangy, two suburbs of Arras, and then south-west of the city on the ridge above the road to Cambrai. It was one continuous roar of death, and all the batteries were firing steadily. I watched our shells burst, and some of them were monstrous, raising great lingering clouds above the German lines.
There was one figure in this landscape of war who made some officers about me laugh. He was a French ploughman who upholds the tradition of war. Zola saw him in 1870, and I have seen him on the edge of the other battlefields; and here he was again driving a pair of sturdy horses and his plough across the sloping field—not a furlong away from the town where the German shells were raising rosy clouds of brick-dust. So he gave praise to the Lord on Easter morning, and prepared the harvests which shall be gathered after the war.
All behind the front of battle was a great traffic, and all that modern warfare means in the organization and preparation of an enormous operation was here in movement. I had just come from our outpost lines down south from the silence of that great desert which the enemy has left in the wake of his retreat, east of Bapaume and Péronne, and from that open warfare with village fighting, where small bodies of our infantry and cavalry have been clearing the countryside of rear-guard posts. Here, round about Arras, was the concentration for the old form of battle attack upon entrenched positions, fortified hills and strong natural fortresses, defended by massed guns as before the battles of the Somme. For miles on the way to the front were great camps, great stores, and restless activity everywhere. Supply columns of food for men and guns moved forward in an endless tide. Transport mules passed in long trails. Field-batteries went up to add to the mass of metal ready to pour fire upon the German lines. It was a vast circus of the world's great war, and everything that belongs to the machinery of killing streamed on and on. Columns of ambulances for the rescue, and not for that other side of the business, came in procession, followed by an army of stretcher-bearers, more than I have ever seen before, marching cheerily as though in a pageant. In some of the ambulances were Army nurses, and men marching on the roads waved their hands to them, and they laughed and waved back. In the fields by the roadsides men were resting, lying on the wet earth, between two spells of a long march or encamped in rest, the same kind of men whom I saw on July 1 of last year, some of them the same men—our boys, clean-shaven, grey-eyed, so young-looking, so splendid to see. Some of them sat between their stacked rifles writing letters home. And the tide of traffic passed them and flowed on to the edge of the battlefields, where to-day they are fighting.
April 10
The enemy has lost already nearly 10,000 prisoners and more than half a hundred guns, and in dead and wounded his losses are great. He is in retreat south of the Vimy Ridge to defensive lines farther back, and as he goes our guns are smashing him along the roads. During the night the Canadians gained the last point, called Hill 145, on the Vimy Ridge, where the Germans held out in a pocket with machine-guns, and this morning the whole of that high ridge, which dominates the plains to Douai, is in our hands, so that there is removed from our path the high barrier for which the French and ourselves have fought through bloody years. Yesterday before daylight and afterwards I saw this ridge of Vimy all on fire with the light of great gun-fire. The enemy was there in strength, and his guns were answering ours with a heavy barrage of high explosives. This morning the scene was changed as by a miracle. Snow was falling, blown gustily across the battlefields, and powdering the capes and helmets of our men as they rode or marched forward to the front. But presently sunlight broke through the storm-clouds and flooded all the countryside by Neuville-St.-Vaast and Thélus and La Folie Farm, up to the crest of the ridge, where the Canadians and Highlanders of the 51st Division had just fought their way with such high valour. Our batteries were firing from many hiding-places, revealed by short, sharp flashes of light, but few answering shells came back, and the ridge itself, patched with snowdrift, was quiet as any hill of peace. It was astounding to think that not a single German stayed up there out of all these who had held it yesterday, unless some poor wounded devils still cower in the deep tunnels which pierce the hill-side. It was almost unbelievable to me, who have known the evil of this high ridge month after month and year after year, and the deadly menace which lurked about its lower slopes. Yet I saw proof below, where all Germans who had been there at dawn yesterday, thousands of them, were down in our lines, drawn up in battalions, marshalling themselves, grinning at the fate which had come to them and spared their lives.