VIII
CAPTURE OF HILL SEVENTY
August 15
This morning, at dawn, the Canadians captured Hill 70, attacked and gained a maze of streets and trenches forming the mining colonies of St.-Laurent and St.-Emilie, and are now fighting on the outskirts of Lens. A fair number of prisoners have been taken—I saw parties of them marching down under escort an hour or two ago. Some of the enemy's troops were seen running away from the wreckage of the red houses in the suburbs of Lens as soon as Hill 70 was taken, but in some parts of the outer defences north and west of the city the garrison is fighting fiercely. The Canadians have, at any rate, gained most of the outward bastions of Lens formed by the separate colonies, or cités, as they are called, made up of blocks of miners' cottages and works united in one big mining district.
Hill 70 is ours again after two years since we took it and lost it. I don't know whether that will cause a thrill to people at home. I think it will to those whose men fought there in the September of 1915. One of my own great memories of the war is of those days in the battle of Loos, when the Scots of the 15th Division and the Londoners of the 47th, and afterwards the Guards, went through the village of Loos and gained that dirty ridge of ground among old slag-heaps under frightful shell-fire. It was gained in the first great rush of the Londoners and the Scots. The Londoners played a football up the slopes, and the Scots went up with their pipes—do you remember?—and for a few hours they had a quiet time here and collected souvenirs, until later the enemy came back in fierce counter-attacks, and the Guards and the 1st Division fell back after heroic fighting and great losses. I saw the Jocks on that first day coming back with German helmets on their heads, laughing in spite of their wounds, and for the first time I saw masses of German prisoners taken by British troops, and in the square of Béthune, through which, in driving rain, there went a steady tide of men and artillery, there was a group of German guns as trophies of victory. It seemed a great victory at first. It was only afterwards we knew how much more might have been gained. And there was a tragic story to tell. Some of the Jocks went as far as an outlying northern suburb of Lens, but few of them ever came back again. Now to-day, after two years less a month, the Canadians have fought over the same ground, and have gone over and beyond Hill 70 and linked up many of their former gains in these mining cités on the outskirts of Lens.
In describing former fighting round Lens I said it was like a war in Wigan. The comparison is true. But to-day, when I watched the scene of the Canadian attack with heavy shell-fire over all these houses and pit-heads, I thought of another northern town which would look very much like this if the hell of war came to it. I thought of Bolton and its suburbs, Entwistle and other straggling little towns on the edge of the moors, with Doffcocker and rural villages among cornfields, and factory chimneys on the horizon, and slag-heaps beyond green fields. That will give an image to English people of the scene of war to-day, except that Lens and its suburbs were never so black as our English factory towns, and its walls are still red in spite of their shell-holes.
Before the attack began at dawn wild flights of shells passed over this little world of ruin to Hill 70, which is no hill at all, but just a low hummock of ground criss-crossed with trenches and burrowed with dug-outs and barren and filthy with relics of death, on the northern side of the city of Lens. From all the ruins around, separate villages of ruin joining up with the streets of Lens itself, red flames gushed up when our batteries fired at a hot pace, and where the shells burst there were long low flashes spreading across a sky heavy and black with storm-clouds. Over the German lines and the houses where they held the cellars the shells burst in a tumult which had a sudden beginning just before the dawn, and above all their smoke and fire there were fountains of wonderfully bright light, of burning gold and of running flame all scarlet and alive. The light was from our smoke-producing rockets, and the running flame was from drums of boiling oil which we fired into the enemy's trenches to burn him alive if we caught him there. I saw the far spread of gun-fire in the early morning after the thin crescent moon had faded, and when there was a grey, moist light over the city and fields.
Soon after the Canadians had taken Hill 70 the enemy flung back a great barrage, so that the ridge was vomiting up columns of black smoke like scores of factory chimneys on a foggy day. And in all the suburbs of Lens, those cités of St.-Laurent and St.-Emilie and St.-Pierre, and into Liévin and Calonne, and Maroc and Grenay, he pitched heavy shells which came howling across the wilderness of bricks and slag-heaps, and broke into gruff enormous coughs out of which black demons of smoke rose like the evil genii out of the bottle, darkening the view. An hour or so later the sun came brightly through the clouds, and these cités of strife, girdled by cornfields in which the stooks are standing, and by green hills across which the tide of slaughter has swept, leaving them in peace again, were flooded with fresh, glinting light, so that the scene was rich in colour. There was not a figure to be seen on Hill 70, not a movement of life among the houses around Lens. The Canadians had gone across in the smoke, and now they were hidden among the ruins. The only life was that of shell-fire, and it has a life of its own, though it is meant for death.
A little to the left in front of me was one of the fosses which rise among the broken houses. For some reason the enemy had special spite against it, and every few minutes a great shell came with a yell and smashed about it. The German gunners were flinging their stuff about in a random way, searching for our batteries and hoping to kill collections of men. They did not have much luck, and they all but caught sixty of their own men who had just come along as prisoners, and, having escaped from the barrage-fire, hoped for safety from their own guns. One of their shells fell within twenty yards of them, but before the next one came their guards told them to quick march, and they ran hard. They were wretched-looking men, more miserable in physique than any I have seen for a long time, and sallow and pinched and gaunt. Some of them were very young, but not all, and there were none so young as those described to me by some Canadian soldiers who fought with them to-day.
"They were children," said one man, "no bigger than schoolboys. I call it cruel to send such youngsters into the fighting-line."