The Tank officer was a friend in distress. He dismantled his machine-guns, took them into the trench and fought alongside the Australians until they were relieved.
Just west of Van Hove Farm, in a gap between the Australians and the English, the Germans got into a place called Polka Estaminet—don't imagine it as a neat little inn with a penny-in-the-slot piano in the front parlour—and they had to be driven out by sharp rifle-fire. Next morning one of our men walked into a pocket of a hundred Germans, and a young Australian officer was told off with twenty men to bomb them out. There was a battle of bombs, which was very hot while it lasted, and then the Germans bolted off under machine-gun and rifle fire. Australian patrols went out and brought in forty wounded Germans and counted sixty to eighty dead.
VII
A BATTLE IN A THUNDER-STORM
June 29
In a violent thunder-storm whose noise and lightning mingled in an awesome way with the tumult and flame of the great artillery a minor battle broke out last evening round Lens and southwards beyond Oppy. The Canadians fought their way into Avion, a southern suburb of Lens, to a line giving them the larger half of the village, and driving the enemy back across the swamps to the outer defences of Lens city. Outside Oppy and south of it troops of old English county regiments seized the front-line system of German trenches and captured about 200 prisoners and several guns. West of Lens some Midland troops stormed and gained a line of trenches which belong to the main defences of the city, and north of it there was a big raid which caused great loss of life to the enemy. It was a heavy series of blows falling suddenly upon him, and giving him no time for a leisurely retirement to his inner line of defence in Lens.
I saw the beginning of the battle, and watched the frightful gun-fire until darkness and dense banks of smoke blotted out this vision of the mining cities in which men were fighting through bursting shells. That beginning was a terrifying sight, and a sense of the enormous tragedy of the world in conflict overwhelmed one's soul, because of the strange atmospheric effects, and that most weird mingling of storm and artillery, as though the gods were angry and stirred to reveal the eternal forces of their own thunderbolts above this human strife. Just in front of where I crouched in a shell-crater was Swallows' Wood, or the Bois d'Hirondelle, and beyond that La Coulotte, which the Canadians had just taken, and a little way farther the long straggle of streets which is Avion, leading up to Lens, with its square-towered church and high water-towers and factory chimneys. Straight and long, bordered by broken trees, went the Arras-Lens road, on which any man may walk to a certain rendezvous with death if he goes far enough, and I saw how it crossed the Souchez river by the broken bridge of Leauvette, from which the Canadians were going to make their new attack. A gleam of sunlight rested there for a while, and the little river was a blue streak this side of Avion. But the sky began to darken strangely. The air was still and hushed. A blue dusk crept across the landscape. The trees of Hirondelle Wood and the towers of Lens blackened. Far behind Vimy, old ruins—of Souchez and Ablain-St.-Nazaire—were white and ghostly.
One of my companions in a shell-hole looked up and said: "Is the 'good old German God' at work again?" Other powers were at work. Huge shells from our heavy howitzers, now away behind us, passed overhead with a noise such as long-tailed comets must have. I watched them burst, raising volumes of ruddy smoke in Avion and Lens. To the right of Lens by Sallaumines there was some other kind of explosion, rolling up and up in big, curly clouds. In the still air there was the drone of many engines. The darkening sky was full of black specks, which were British aeroplanes flying out on reconnaissance over Lens and Avion. "O brave birds!" said a friend by my side, waving up to them. German shrapnel puffed about their wings, bursting with little glints of flames, but they flew on.
It was then just seven o'clock. Our guns had almost ceased fire. There were strange sinister silences over all the battlefield, broken only by single gun-shots or the high snarl of German shrapnel or the single thud of a German crump. It was almost dark. The blue went out of the little Souchez river. Lens and Avion were in gulfs of blackness. A long rolling thunderclap shook all the sky, and flashes of lightning zigzagged over the Vimy Ridge, whitening the edges of its upheaved earth. The sky opened, and a storm of rain swept down fiercely.