Wytschaete and Messines are safe in our hands, and our troops are far on the other side. A party of the enemy is holding out in Battle Wood, but that will not be for long, and is only a small episode. To-day and yesterday German troops massed at Warneton, as though for a counter-attack, but each time were scattered by our guns. From our new ridge, so long an evil barrier against us, we have observation on them, and the tables are turned.
III
AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE
June 9
The ground gained by our troops in the great battle of Messines remains firmly in our hands, and enemy attempts to counter-attack have been broken by our artillery, in most cases before the German troops have been able to advance. Last evening shortly before dusk of another day of brilliant sunshine, almost too hot for our men in shadeless country of the battlefields, SOS signals all along the line gave warning of German endeavours to thrust back our new front line far beyond the Messines Ridge, and away north of St.-Eloi on the old line of the Ypres salient, now by our victory no longer a salient.
Our gunners got to work again, in spite of a night-and-day strain for more than a week, and for several hours there was another tremendous bombardment from all our heavies and field-guns, watched for miles around by Flemish peasants sitting outside their windmills and outside cottage doors, looking at this lightning in the sky, which is a revelation to them of the mighty growth of that British Army since those early days when a few divisions and a few guns came to these fields of Flanders and fought to a thin, ragged line round Ypres. In many cases the rockets which rose from our lines last night calling for the help of the gunners were hardly needed, for though the enemy was seen to be assembling, he did not try to break through our barrage. In many places massed bodies of his men were caught round Warneton by this new storm of fire which burst upon them, and the night scenes behind the German lines must have been full of terror and tragedy for those poor wretches urged forward along the roads ploughed up by our shells. Only at Klein Zillebeke, on the northern flank of our battle-line, did they gain a temporary footing, and many of them lie dead there after the fierce fighting which is still in progress.
It is no wonder that, after such experiences of our gun-fire, the German prisoners show no regret at being in British hands. I saw new batches of them to-day, mopped up last night as an aftermath of the battle, young boys and middle-aged men, all very sturdy and strong, and astonishingly clean after their escape from the tumult of that frightful ground by Wytschaete and Messines. They stretched themselves in the sunshine, and took their ease in green fields, drinking quarts of water provided by their guards. It is not with resignation but with joy that they find themselves on our side of the lines, away from all that horror of the fire zone.
"Now we shall go on leave," they said to one of our officers; "we are sick of this war." He spoke to two German boys who have been fighting for a year, and are now only seventeen and look much younger. "You ought to be spanked and sent home to your mothers," he said. They laughed, and said: "That is what we should like, sir, if you please."
All the prisoners are extraordinarily ignorant of the feeling of hatred they have aroused against them in the world, and expect that they should be admired for the way they have fought. But they want the war to end quickly, and the rank and file do not seem to mind very much whether it ends by a German victory or German defeat, so that it ends somehow. One human being, shattered in nerves, half senseless, was dragged back after Hill 60 was mined, and he said that he had seen only two men of his company after the great explosion. All the others had been hurled sky-high by the flames and gases, or buried in the fall of earth.