Flights of British aeroplanes were on the wing, and German aeroplanes tried to fight their way over our lines. I saw several with the swish of machine-gun bullets and the high whining shells of British "Archies" about them. I have never before seen so great a conflict in the skies. It was a battle up there, and as far as I could see we gained a mastery over the enemy's machines, though some of them were very bold.
On the earth it was open warfare of the old kind, for we were beyond the trenches and our men were moving across the fields without cover. Some of our machine-gunners were serving their weapons from shell-holes, and the only protection of the headquarters staff of the cavalry was a shallow ditch in the centre of the battlefield sheltered by a few planks, quite useless against shell-fire, but keeping off the snow, which fell in heavy wet flakes. There the officers sat in the ditch, shoulder to shoulder, studying their maps and directing the action while reports were called down the funnel of a chimney by an officer who had been out on reconnaissance.
"It is villainously unhealthy round here," said this officer, who spoke to me after he had given his news to the cavalry general. He looked across to Monchy, and said, "Old Fritz is putting up a stiff fight." At that moment a German crump fell close, and we did not continue the conversation.
Across the battlefield came stretcher-bearers, carrying the wounded shoulder high, and the lightly wounded men walked back from Monchy and Guémappe very slowly, with that dragging gait which is bad to see. I spoke to a wounded officer and asked him how things were going.
"Pretty hot," he said, and then shivered and said, "but now I feel cold as ice."
Snow fell all through the afternoon, covering the litter of battle and the bodies of all our dead boys, giving a white beauty even to the ugly ruins of Tilloy and changing the Devil's Wood by enchantment to a kind of dream-picture. Through this driving snow our guns fired ceaselessly, and I saw all their flashes through the storm, and their din was enormous. Away in front of me stretched the road to Cambrai, the high road of our advance. It seemed so easy to walk down there—but if I had gone farther I should not have come back.
In a hundred years not all the details of this battle will be told, for to each man in all the thousands who are fighting there is a great adventure, and they are filled with sensations stronger than drink can give, so that it will seem a wild dream—a dream red as flame and white as snow.
For this amazing battle, which is bringing to us tides of prisoners and many batteries of guns, is being fought on spring days heavy with snow, as grim as sternest winter except when in odd half-hours the sun breaks through the storm-clouds and gives a magic beauty to all this whiteness of the battlefields and to trees furred with bars of ermine and to all the lacework of twigs ready for green birth. Now as I write there is no sun, but a darkness through which heavy flakes are falling. Our soldiers are fighting through it to the east of Arras, and their steel helmets and tunics and leather jerkins are all white as the country through which they are forcing back the enemy.
While the battle was raging on the Vimy heights English and Scottish troops of the 15th, 12th, and 3rd Divisions were fighting equally fiercely, with more trouble to meet round about Arras. Beyond the facts I have already written there are others that must be recorded quickly, before quick history runs away from them.
Some day a man must give a great picture of the night in Arras before the battle, and I know one man who could do so—a great hunter of wild beasts, with a monocle that quells the human soul and a very "parfit gentil knight," whose pen is as pointed as his lance. He spent the night in a tunnel of Arras before getting into a sap in No Man's Land before the dawn, where he was with a "movie man," an official photographer (both as gallant as you will find in the Army), and a machine-gunner ready for action. Thousands of other men spent the night before the battle in the great tunnels, centuries old, that run out of Arras to the country beyond, by Blangy and St.-Sauveur. The enemy poured shells into the city, which I watched that night before the dawn from the ramparts outside, but in the morning they came up from those subterranean galleries and for a little while no more shells fell in Arras, for the German gunners were busy with other work, and were in haste to get away. The fighting was very fierce round Blangy, the suburb of Arras, where the enemy was in the broken ruins of the houses and behind garden walls strongly barricaded with piled sand-bags. But our men smashed their way through and on. Troops of those old English regiments were checked a while at strong German works known as the Horn, Holt, Hamel, and Hangest positions, and at another strong point called the Church Work. It was at these places that the Tanks did well on a day when they had hard going because of slime and mud, and after a journey of over three miles from their starting-point knocked out the German machine-guns, and so let the infantry get on. Higher north at a point known as Railway Triangle, east-south-east of Arras, where railway lines join, Gordons, Argylls, Seaforths, and Camerons of the 15th Division were held back by machine-gun fire. The enemy's works had not been destroyed by our bombardment, and our barrage had swept ahead of the troops. News of the trouble was sent back, and presently back crept the barrage of our shell-fire, coming perilously close to the Scottish troops, but not too close. With marvellous accuracy the gunners found the target of the Triangle and swept it with shell-fire so that its defences were destroyed. The Scots surged forward, over the chaos of broken timber and barricades, and struggled forward again to their goal, which brought them to Feuchy Well, and to-day much farther. A Tank helped them at Feuchy Chapel, cheered by the Scots as it came into action scorning machine-gun bullets. The Harp was another strong point of the enemy's which caused difficulty to King's Own Liverpools, the Shropshire Light Infantry, Royal Fusiliers, East Yorks, Scottish Fusiliers, and Royal Scots, as I have already told, on the first day of battle, and another Tank came up, in its queer, slow way, and the gallant men inside served their guns like a Dreadnought, and so ended the business on that oval-shaped stronghold.