“What the German soldier accomplished, lived through, and suffered during the Flanders battle will stand in his honor for all time as a brazen monument that he set himself with his own hands on enemy soil!
“The enemy's losses, too, were heavy. When, in the spring of 1918, we occupied the battlefield, it presented a horrible spectacle with its many unburied dead. Their number ran into thousands. Two-thirds of them were enemy dead; one-third were German soldiers who had met here a hero's death.
“And yet the truth must be told; individual units no longer surmounted as before the demoralizing influences of the defensive campaign.
“October 26th and 30th and November 6th and 10th were also days of pitched battle of the heaviest kind. The enemy stormed like a wild bull against the iron wall that kept him at a distance from our U-boat base. He hurled his weight against the Houthulst Wood; he hurled it against Poelcapelle, Passchendaele, Becelaere, Gheluvelt, and Zandvoorde; at very many points he dented the line. It seemed as if he would charge down the wall; but, although a slight tremor passed through its foundation, the wall held. The impressions that I continued to receive were extremely grave. Tactically everything had been done; the fore field was good. Our artillery practice had materially improved. Behind nearly every fighting—division there stood a second, as rear wave. In the third line, too, there were still reserves. We knew that the wear and tear of the enemy's forces was high. But we also knew that the enemy was extraordinarily strong and, what was equally important, possessed extraordinary will-power.”
That was the impression of the cold brain directing the machinery of war from German headquarters. More human and more tragic is a letter of an unknown German officer which we found among hundreds of others, telling the same tale, in the mud of the battlefield:
“If it were not for the men who have been spared me on this fierce day and are lying around me, and looking timidly at me, I should shed hot and bitter tears over the terrors that have menaced me during these hours. On the morning of September 18th my dugout containing seventeen men was shot to pieces over our heads. I am the only one who withstood the maddening bombardment of three days and still survives. You cannot imagine the frightful mental torments I have undergone in those few hours. After crawling out through the bleeding remnants of my comrades, and through the smoke and debris, wandering and running in the midst of the raging gun-fire in search of a refuge, I am now awaiting death at any moment. You do not know what Flanders means. Flanders means endless human endurance. Flanders means blood and scraps of human bodies. Flanders means heroic courage and faithfulness even unto death.”
To British and to Germans it meant the same.
VI
During the four and a half months of that fighting the war correspondents were billeted in the old town of Cassel, where, perched on a hill which looks over a wide stretch of Flanders, through our glasses we could see the sand-dunes beyond Dunkirk and with the naked eyes the whole vista of the battle-line round Ypres and in the wide curve all the countryside lying between Aire and Hazebrouck and Notre Dame de Lorette. My billet was in a monastery for old priests, on the eastern edge of the town, and at night my window was lighted by distant shell-fire, and I gazed out to a sky of darkness rent by vivid flashes, bursts of red flame, and rockets rising high. The priests used to tap at my door when I came back from the battlefields all muddy, with a slime-plastered face, writing furiously, and an old padre used to plague me like that, saying: