German soldiers arriving one morning at Cambrai by train found themselves under the fire of a single airplane which flew very low and dropped bombs. They exploded with heavy crashes, and one bomb hit the first carriage behind the engine, killing and wounding several men. A second bomb hit the station buildings, and there was a clatter of broken glass, the rending of wood, and the fall of bricks. All lights went out, and the German soldiers groped about in the darkness amid the splinters of glass and the fallen bricks, searching for the wounded by the sound of their groans. It was but one scene along the way to that blood-bath through which they had to wade to the trenches of the Somme.
Flights of British airplanes circled over the villages on the way. At Grevilliers, in August, eleven 112-16 bombs fell in the market square, so that the center of the village collapsed in a state of ruin, burying soldiers billeted there. Every day the British airmen paid these visits, meeting the Germans far up the roads on their way to the Somme, and swooping over them like a flying death. Even on the march in open country the German soldiers tramping silently along—not singing in spite of orders—were bombed and shot at by these British aviators, who flew down very low, pouring out streams of machine-gun bullets. The Germans lost their nerve at such times, and scattered into the ditches, falling over one another, struck and cursed by their Unteroffizieren, and leaving their dead and wounded in the roadway.
As the roads went nearer to the battlefields they were choked with the traffic of war, with artillery and transport wagons and horse ambulances, and always thousands of gray men marching up to the lines, or back from them, exhausted and broken after many days in the fires of hell up there. Officers sat on their horses by the roadside, directing all the traffic with the usual swearing and cursing, and rode alongside the transport wagons and the troops, urging them forward at a quicker pace because of stern orders received from headquarters demanding quicker movement. The reserves, it seemed, were desperately wanted up in the lines. The English were attacking again. .. God alone knew what was happening. Regiments had lost their way. Wounded were pouring back. Officers had gone mad. Into the midst of all this turmoil shells fell—shells from long-range guns. Transport wagons were blown to bits. The bodies and fragments of artillery horses lay all over the roads. Men lay dead or bleeding under the debris of gun-wheels and broken bricks. Above all the noise of this confusion and death in the night the hard, stern voices of German officers rang out, and German discipline prevailed, and men marched on to greater perils.
They were in the shell-zone now, and sometimes a regiment on the march was tracked all along the way by British gun-fire directed from airplanes and captive balloons. It was the fate of a captured officer I met who had detrained at Bapaume for the trenches at Contalmaison.
At Bapaume his battalion was hit by fragments of twelve-inch shells. Nearer to the line they came under the fire of eight-inch and six-inch shells. Four-point-sevens (4.7's) found them somewhere by Bazentin. At Contalmaison they marched into a barrage, and here the officer was taken prisoner. Of his battalion there were few men left.
It was so with the 3d Jager Battalion, ordered up hurriedly to make a counter-attack near Flers. They suffered so heavily on the way to the trenches that no attack could be made. The stretcher-bearers had all the work to do.
The way up to the trenches became more tragic as every kilometer was passed, until the stench of corruption was wafted on the wind, so that men were sickened, and tried not to breathe, and marched hurriedly to get on the lee side of its foulness. They walked now through places which had once been villages, but were sinister ruins where death lay in wait for German soldiers.
“It seems queer to me,” wrote one of them, “that whole villages close to the front look as flattened as a child's toy run over by a steam-roller. Not one stone remains on another. The streets are one line of shell—holes. Add to that the thunder of the guns, and you will see with what feelings we come into the line—into trenches where for months shells of all caliber have rained... Flers is a scrap heap.”
Again and again men lost their way up to the lines. The reliefs could only be made at night lest they should be discovered by British airmen and British gunners, and even if these German soldiers had trench maps the guidance was but little good when many trenches had been smashed in and only shell-craters could be found.
“In the front line of Flers,” wrote one of these Germans, “the men were only occupying shell-holes. Behind there was the intense smell of putrefaction which filled the trench—almost unbearably. The corpses lie either quite insufficiently covered with earth on the edge of the trench or quite close under the bottom of the trench, so that the earth lets the stench through. In some places bodies lie quite uncovered in a trench recess, and no one seems to trouble about them. One sees horrible pictures—here an arm, here a foot, here a head, sticking out of the earth. And these are all German soldiers-heroes!