IX
LONDONERS IN GLENCORSE WOOD
August 17
The battle of Langemarck yesterday, and all the struggle southward to the ground about Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse was one of the most heroic as well as one of the bloodiest days of fighting in all this war. The enemy put up a fierce resistance except at points where underfed boys had been thrust out in shell-holes, as in the neighbourhood of Langemarck, to check the first onslaught of our men if possible, and if not to die. Behind them, as storm troops for counter-attack, were some of the finest troops of the German army. Among them was the 54th Division, which had already been severely mauled by our gun-fire and was utterly exhausted. But other divisions, like the 34th, who were in front of our Londoners, were fresh and strong, only just brought into the battle-line. Behind the immediate supporting troops were massed reserves whom the German command held ready to hurry up in wagons and light railways to any part of the field where their lines were most threatened, or when instant counter-attacks might inflict most damage on our men.
In gun-power the enemy was and is strong. He had prepared a large concentration of guns south-east of our right flank, and whatever may be his reserves of ammunition he has gathered up great stores for this present battle. On the right of our attack he stood on high ground, the crest of Polygon Wood, and the slopes down from Abraham Heights and the Gravenstafel Ridge. It is the big door which he must slam in our face at all costs, because it opens out to his plains beyond; and against it he has massed all his weight. Our men, it will be seen, were not likely to have a walk-over. They did not, but took all they gained by hard fighting. It could in no sense of the word be a walk-over. The ground was hideous, worse than in the winter on the Somme. That seems strange, with a hot sun shining overhead and dust rising in clouds along traffic roads behind the battle-line as I saw it to-day. That is the irony of things. Where our men were fighting yesterday and to-day there are hundreds of thousands of shell-holes, some three feet deep and some ten feet deep, and each shell-hole is at least half full of water, and many of them are joined so that they form lakes deep enough to drown men and horses if they fall in. So it was, and is, around the place where Langemarck village stood, and where the old lake of the château that no longer stands has flooded over into a swamp, and where a double row of black tree-stumps goes along the track of the broken road where the people of Langemarck used to walk to church before the devil did in so many old churches and established little hells of his own on their rubbish-heaps. So it was yesterday and remains to-day all about, the stumps of trees sticking up out of a mush of slimy, pitted ground which go by the romantic names of Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse, and Shrewsbury Forest and Polygon Wood. The photographs of our airmen taken yesterday in low flights over these damned places reveal the full foulness of them. Seen from this high view, they are long stretches of white barren earth pock-marked by innumerable craters, where no man or human body is to be seen, though there are many dead and some living lying in those holes, and they are all bright and shining, because the sun is glinting on the water which fills them, except where dense clouds of smoke from great gun-fire drift across.
The courage of men who attacked over such ground was great courage. The grim, stubborn way in which our soldiers made their way through these bogs and would not be beaten, though they slipped and fell and stuck deep while the enemy played machine-gun bullets on to their lines and flung high explosives over the whole stretch of bog-land through which they had to pass, is one of the splendid and tragic things in our poor human story.
I told yesterday how some of our English battalions took Langemarck like this, leaving many comrades bogged, wounded, and spent, but crawling round the concrete houses, over the old cellars of the village and routing out the Germans who held them with machine-guns. At the blockhouse on the way up, called Au Bon Gîte, an oblong fort of concrete walls ten feet thick, the Germans bolted inside as soon as they saw our men, slammed down an iron door, and for a time stayed there while our bombers prowled round like hungry wolves waiting for their prey. Later they gave themselves up because our line swept past them and they had no hope.
In another place of the same kind, called Reitre Farm, from which came a steady blast of machine-gun fire, our men made several desperate rushes and at last, when many lay wounded, a machine-gunner of ours got close and thrust the barrel of his weapon through a slit in the wall and swept the inner chamber with a flood of bullets.