The challenge of the dead

by Stephen Graham

Teutonic preparations went ahead. The Allies took little stock of these preparations, not believing that the enemy had much kick left in him. Instead of organising our defence we planned a new attack upon the Germans, and to the astonishment and chagrin of the latter the Byng Boys carried off the laurels of the Battle of Cambrai. Fritz was taken by surprise in late November, and we nearly went all the way to Cambrai. Fleet Street wished to have joy-bells rung in London, but the Church wisely bade us wait, while wrathful Germany averred that we had gone into a trap in which we should presently be terribly caught. Then in the break-through of Gouzeaucourt we learned the lesson that a new and more dangerous enemy was in front of us.

As you walk now along the Byng Boys way on a November afternoon and the sun goes down in greyness and gloom you can feel the mystery of the battle as if it had occurred hundreds of years ago. Reality has become remote, remote as the last songs and shouts of the men who went through. Sadness has covered the earth. It is all incredibly empty and desolate. On a post on the road you discern through the evening mist Ici Boursies and then after much plodding you pass the grey empty Canal du Nord with its crumpled rusty bridges, and skirt the naked bones of Bourlon Wood. Then by the side of the road all the dead of Anneux are lined up to see you pass. You go on, but they remain. It seems as if when you have passed some spectral sergeant must say to all those pallid ranks "Fall out!" and the order is broken up, and the dead mingle and commingle till another comes past upon the broad highway. Night settles like a curtain shutting off Cambrai from the view, and no light on any hand tells of a return to home or of happiness restored. Suddenly the silence is broken by three blundering lorries—old lorries of the war tearing past you back on the road to Bapaume—ghostly lorries laden with doors, doors only, to be dumped at some wilderness somewhere which was once a town. They pass, and the night-silence resumes its sway, and there are no stars but it is utter peace. Again a spectral post—Ici Fontaine, Ici Fontaine Notre Dame, and you have reached the end of the fight, and the bridge where life met death and both stood at last immobile, unyielding.

A happier-looking place is the wood of Havrincourt where a Brigade of Guards was sleeping, waiting and resting after the ordeal of Bourlon and Fontaine. They had been relieved on the 26th November and marched back in snow to this wood where in the umbrage of the forest and on the carpet of withered leaves and snow they set up many tents. And whiles they rested the enemy put into action a bold plan of encirclement which might have caused the complete loss of Sir Julian Byng's army and guns and of everything else in the pocket of Cambrai. One of the most remarkable moments of the whole war occurred. Of many impressions of what took place the story which one of the Guards' quartermasters tells is most pictorial. He had set off early in the morning of the 30th November for Villers au Flos to get money to pay his men. They had just come out of action. He rode through Metz and Bertingcourt, where the other Brigades were billeted, and no one was stirring. There was no hint of coming trouble when he passed through Ruyaulcourt, where lay the Divisional Headquarters Staff. On all roads were the usual road-carts, plodding along in humdrum style. But by the time he reached Villers au Flos, however, an alarm of some kind had evidently come, for the cashier was busy packing up his cash and his papers, and flatly refused to pay out any money whatever. Though not wishing to confess fright, he was evidently extremely perturbed.

"But I must have money for the men," cried the visiting officer. "The coffee-bars and canteens will soon be arriving up there and opening; the men are tired after the fighting. They have won a great victory and must have some relaxation now, so you'll have to give me some money."

"It isn't a victory, it's a retreat," said the cashier. "They say the Germans have broken through."

"Rot," said the Guardsman. "I have just come from the line and all is quiet. You get wind up easily, you folk."

He gained his point, and was happy to turn about his horse with a full 16,000 francs to pay out. On his return, however, the German break-through became apparent and he realised that the cashier had been right. He sampled all the adventures of the situation. First he saw soldiers without rifle or equipment running intently, and he, not suspecting the significance of their flight, thought there was a paper-chase on, arranged by some regiment that was resting in the neighbourhood. But at Bertingcourt, to his great astonishment, he met a battalion of Guards in fighting order marching to action in the opposite direction from that in which he understood the enemy to be. It was incredible that it could have happened, but he realised that the enemy had somehow shifted his ground. This regiment had been fighting at Bourlon and Fontaine in the north—and now they were marching south to fight again. South and not north—what could have happened! He "passed the time of day" to the commander and learned that the worst was true, the enemy had broken through at Gouzeaucourt. The further he rode along the way to Havrincourt Wood the stranger became the sights which confronted his eyes. The roads, which had now been cleared by order, began to have troops going up to stem the German advance, and every now and then a car plunging the other way. Out of Bertingcourt he met the 2nd Brigade Machine-Gun transport, saddled up and under orders. The water in the jackets of the machine-guns was frozen and they wondered how they'd thaw them. There were still many fugitives on the road, and at cross-roads he overheard two of them who were contradicting one another in the most violent language as to which was the way. He could tell that their nerves had got the better of them by their high falsetto tones. They were as unlike characteristic British soldiers as it is possible to imagine. At Metz-en-Couture there was a complete jam of traffic, which lasted all the way along the high-road towards Gouzeaucourt. The retiring masses were greatly in excess of those going up. They were mostly the transport of those who belonged to the rear—railway-men, A.S.C., ambulance, canteen, Y.M.C.A. and what-not. A pained expression was on the chauffeurs' faces, every one of whom seemed to desire to say what a terrific speed he would make if he could only get clear of the deadlock. He saw the ranks of the Guards broken and made uneven by the struggle to get through. Outside Metz was a Colonel of Grenadiers on horseback, enraged past belief at the obstruction of his Guardsmen, and addressing the chauffeurs and wagon-men in every imaginable blend of language. His aspect so terrified our officer with the cash that he decided to make a detour and get to his quarters at Havrincourt Wood by a cross-country route. But the Germans had a high-velocity gun on Metz and shelled it methodically, and he had not taken many steps when an exploding shell wounded his horse in the head. He did not want anything to happen to him with 16,000 francs on his person, so he decided to brave the presence of the justifiably enraged Grenadier and proceed along the roadway as best he could. This he did, but when at last he got to Havrincourt Wood his battalion was gone and he was not able to get abreast of his men and pay them till they came out of action some days afterwards and the Germans had been stopped.

The alarm had come about breakfast-time. Nothing was doing in camp; no parades. Both officers and men were taking things easy in order to shake off the Bourlon Wood exhaustion. Some were sleeping, some were shaving, one Brigadier was in his bath, when the order came for the Guards to stand-to and be in readiness, as the position east of Gouzeaucourt was considered "obscure."

The Headquarters of the 1st Brigade was at Metz, and a great deal was due, no doubt, to the Brigadier who discovered that the Germans had broken through and promptly decided to push on and occupy the high ground east of Gouzeaucourt. The General of the 1st Brigade of Guards was a fine figure of a soldier, with bold eyes, massive shoulders and brows, and finely-curved smiling lips. Mounted on his white horse at the cross-roads of Metz he was in charge of the situation. It was he who saw the first fugitives come in, green, trembling, speechless with panic, and as others followed breathless the same way, he deflected their course into a great courtyard, lately the courtyard of the Army Corps Headquarters. With that the Brigadier rode out along the Gouzeaucourt road, and presently beyond Gouzeaucourt Wood he came into contact with German patrols, and he rode back to Metz and called out the Guards. Meanwhile the extraordinary stampede continued—Labour men, gunners with breech-blocks in their hands, riflemen with or without rifles and equipment, transport, some men half-dressed. And those who could speak called out to those whom they met that the Germans were coming. There were officers as well as men, and even chaplains, in the throng, and a German aeroplane hovered overhead and followed with machine-gun fire, methodically stirring up the panic to a higher and higher pitch. The Guards debouched from Metz in close column and deployed in artillery formation under cover of Gouzeaucourt Wood. As they hurried up the road they passed the fugitive streams going the other way. The look on the Guards' faces as they encountered the others was one of astonishment and bewilderment. It would have been difficult to agree that the two streams of troops belonged to the same nation. Two different conditions of soldiery. With one there was discipline, with the others discipline had gone.

The road from Gouzeaucourt to Metz is a sort of gully, a deep-dug way between high banks, and along the sides one still sees shards of old rifles, rusty helmets, bits of equipment, and mess-tins. The peasants in farming the ditches have unearthed not a few Mills' bombs which now repose in piles by the side of the road. Here also reposes a dug-up Lewis gun and various parts and bits of war's attire thrown away possibly in the stampede, perhaps however, despite an inevitable association of ideas, belonging to another moment of the war. For although the Guards re-established the line once more it broke again in the succeeding March, when once more the Germans pursued their foes through the jetsam-covered streets of Gouzeaucourt.