At midday another attack was made on the Somersets, and driven off by rifles and machine-guns, and at two o'clock they reported that the enemy was massing in an attempt to turn their left flank, which was then weak. The artillery answered an urgent call, and the German assembly was destroyed. So the evening came and the night, and the Light Infantry held on east of Stirling Castle and partly in Inverness Copse with many dead and wounded about them, and lines of German dead in front of them, awaiting riflemen coming to their support.
In a brigade headquarters a group of officers waited more anxiously for this help, having more responsibility. They sat with wet towels about their heads and eyes, in poisonous fumes and dreadful stenches which crept down from above, where heavy shells burst incessantly, shaking all the earth and blowing out the candles. The concrete ceiling bulged in. Runners came in white-faced and shaking, after frightful journeys, and officers bent to the candlelight to read scribbled messages sent down by hard-pressed men. Outside were the groans of wounded men.
At dawn, Tanks went out to attack the strong points north of Inverness Copse, where the enemy had rallied again, and one of them approached Fitzclarence Farm and broke up a counter-attacking preparation there. Some Germans ran into the blockhouse there and shot down the steel doors and lay doggo. Others came out of a trench to attack the Tank, but fled before the fire. Later in the morning German aeroplanes came out and flew very low and played their machine-guns on to our men, but without doing much harm.
From 1 A.M. to 3.30 A.M. the enemy kept a terrific barrage over all our ground, and then flamed out all along the line the signal of a new counter-attack. It was the "flammenwerfer" attack against the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, and the whole sky was red with the light of these advancing fire-jets. For a time, in spite of the enemy's heavy losses, the Cornwalls had to retire before these far-reaching flames, but they rallied and went forward again, driving the enemy part of the way back, where he was swept by our artillery-fire. The enemy kept up a steady barrage-fire over three wide belts, and an officer who went up to report the position had the worst hours of his life on that journey through bursting shells and over the fields of dead. But in spite of a message that had come down reporting a new withdrawal, it was found that the line was intact, and that the thin ranks of Light Infantry and King's Royal Rifles had beaten back all the enemy's assaults, and had destroyed their spirit for further attacks by most deadly losses. We could not hold Inverness Copse, but the fighting here was worthy of men who, during two years of war, have fought with steadfast courage and have many acts of heroism in their long record.
XIII
THE SLAUGHTER-HOUSE OF LENS
August 23
One day, when it is possible to get in and around Lens, the veil will be torn from a human charnel-house, or, rather, from charnel-houses which none of us may yet enter or see through the drifting smoke. Yesterday I looked down on Lens and saw its roofless buildings and its gaping walls, but I could only guess at the scenes which are hidden below ground there in the tunnels where the Germans assemble for their counter-attacks against the Canadians, and to which they drag back their dead and wounded. Those places must reek with the smell of death and corruption, for the losses of the Prussian Guards during the last few and of other divisions who have come up against the Canadians, have been, I am told and believe, enormous. The Canadians tell me that their troops have never had harder or more prolonged fighting, not even in their old days of the Ypres salient nor on the Somme. Every hundred yards of the ground they have taken, and during the last week or so they have taken thousands of yards of open country and of ruined streets in and about the mining cités, until they have forced their way into Lens itself, have been contested by desperate fighting and held against unceasing counter-attacks delivered by great bodies of picked German troops supported by monstrous bombardments. Imagination can, if it likes, picture the slaughter involved in all this to those German assault troops, because they have not succeeded in gaining their purpose, and counter-attacks like that, in those numbers and in that strength, are shattered when they do not succeed. It is a wonderful tribute to the Canadians and to their grim tenacity that, after all the repeated counter-attacks against them, and after storms of fire from batteries which have increased in number every day, they hold their lines round Lens intact as they stood on August 15 and 16, and have gained an entry into the streets of Lens and swung up southwards with increasing pressure.
Lens is packed tight with German troops. They belong to the 4th Guards Division, and latterly to the 1st Guards Reserve, the crack division of the German army, which had a month's rest at Cambrai before being sent into this slaughter-house. For although that city is tunnelled throughout, all the cellars being linked up and strengthened with massive concrete, so that even heavy shells cannot pierce down to them, men cannot fight in tunnels if they are on the offensive, and must get out of them to make their counter-attacks. It is at those times that they suffer more hideously than in any other battle.