“Noyon is a good spot,” he said. “I shall come here again when you give me a lift.”
A few days later my brother was firing at masses of Germans with open sights, and the British army was in a full-tide retreat, and the junior officer who had played his gramophone was dead, with other officers and men of that battery. When I next passed through Noyon shells were falling into it, and later I saw it in ruins, with the glory of the Romanesque cathedral sadly scarred. I have ofttimes wondered what happened to the little family in the old hotel.
So March 21st came, as we knew it would come, even to the very date, and Ludendorff played his trump cards and the great game.
Before that date I had an interview with General Gough, commanding the Fifth Army. He pulled out his maps, showed his method of forward redoubts beyond the main battle zone, and in a quiet, amiable way spoke some words which froze my blood.
“We may have to give ground,” he said, “if the enemy attacks in strength. We may have to fall back to our main battle zone. That will not matter very much. It is possible that we may have to go farther back. Our real line of defense is the Somme. It will be nothing like a tragedy if we hold that. If we lose the crossings of the Somme it will, of course, be serious. But not a tragedy even then. It will only be tragic if we lose Amiens, and we must not do that.”
“The crossings of the Somme... Amiens!”
Such a thought had never entered my imagination. General Gough had suggested terrible possibilities.
All but the worst happened. In my despatches, reprinted in book form with explanatory prefaces, I have told in full detail the meaning and measure of the British retreat, when forty-eight of our divisions were attacked by one hundred and fourteen German divisions and fell back fighting stubborn rear-guard actions which at last brought the enemy to a dead halt outside Amiens and along the River Ancre northward from Albert, where afterward in a northern attack the enemy under Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria broke through the Portuguese between Givenchy and Festubert, where our wings held, drove up to Bailleul, which was burned to the ground, and caused us to abandon all the ridges of Flanders which had been gained at such great cost, and fall back to the edge of Ypres. In this book I need not narrate all this history again.
They were evil days for us. The German offensive was conducted with masterly skill, according to the new method of “infiltration” which had been tried against Italy with great success in the autumn of '17 at Caporetto.
It consisted in a penetration of our lines by wedges of machine-gunners constantly reinforced and working inward so that our men, attacked frontally after terrific bombardment, found themselves under flanking fire on their right and left and in danger of being cut off. Taking advantage of a dense fog, for which they had waited according to meteorological forecast, the Germans had easily made their way between our forward redoubts on the Fifth Army front, where our garrisons held out for a long time, completely surrounded, and penetrated our inner battle zone. Through the gaps they made they came in masses at a great pace with immense machine—gun strength and light artillery. On the Third Army front where penetrations were made, notably near Bullecourt between the 6th and 51st Divisions, the whole of our army machine was upset for a time like a watch with a broken mainspring and loose wheels. Staffs lost touch with fighting units. Communications were broken down. Orders were given but not received. After enormous losses of men and guns, our heavy artillery was choking the roads of escape, while our rear-guards fought for time rather than for ground. The crossings of the Somme were lost too easily. In the confusion and tumult of those days some of our men, being human, were demoralized and panic-stricken, and gave ground which might have been longer held. But on the whole, and in the mass, there was no panic, and a most grim valor of men who fought for days and nights without sleep; fought when they were almost surrounded or quite surrounded, and until few of them remained to hold any kind of line. Fortunately the Germans were unable to drag their heavy guns over the desert they had made a year before in their own retreat, and at the end of a week their pace slackened and they halted, in exhaustion.