With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

To visit Vermelles, as I was privileged to do, is to get an object-lesson of the methods of the new French Army, that wonderful weapon of efficiency which has emerged finely tempered, pliant, and sharp from the furnace of those first disastrous months of war. Never was the painstaking thoroughness of the French mind seen to better advantage than in the patient and elaborate operations which culminated in the two centres of German resistance in Vermelles, the brewery and the château respectively, being squeezed in a pair of pincers, as it were, and crushed. The French, recognizing that the German machine-guns made a direct attack practically hopeless, sapped their way under each German stronghold in turn, and, having made a breach, rushed in with bomb and bayonet, and made good the position, afterwards sapping on to the next.

I found practically every house in Vermelles roofless, every window broken, every wall pierced with loopholes and pitted with shell-holes and bullet-marks. There were long, narrow trenches innumerable, marking the line of the French saps, and ending in deep, wide craters where the explosion had taken place and opened a passage for the French infantry. Four bleak walls surrounding an immense tumulus of rubbish were all that was left of the château, whose grounds were literally honeycombed with trenches in all directions. The Germans made their last stand here, holding in turn the two high red-brick walls surrounding the château grounds until the French, by means of a sap more than 100 yards long, blew a breach and rushed the place.

I saw this mine. It starts in the white chalky soil of some kind of garden outside the château wall. This same white soil nearly proved the undoing of the assailants, for the Germans in the château “spotted” the French operations by the high white piles of clay thrown up from the mine almost level with the top of the wall, and our Allies were forced to explode the mine before the operation was quite complete. However, it did its work well. Two huge craters were made right beneath the wall, the masonry of which was blown apart in great chunks, which were still lying about when I visited the spot. The last German resistance was broken. Vermelles was captured. There will be many Vermelles in this war before the Hun is beaten to the ground.

The trench mortar and the bomb have become essential weapons of the war of positions. Both weapons of the past, they seem strangely out of place beside such modern man-slaying instruments as the machine-gun and the magazine-rifle. But they have come in response to the demand of a unique situation because the weapons which military experts believed to represent the last word in progress in their profession no longer sufficed. Handier to manipulate than a field-gun, because much smaller in bulk, of short range, the trench mortar, throwing a heavy bomb filled with high-explosive, might at least blow in a part of a trench which, as I have shown, in the ordinary way is impregnable to direct assault. There are all kinds of trench mortars, from modern specimens to rudimentary kinds of catapults, knocked together by inventive officers or men in their spare time. The French, I believe, have actually used mortars taken from old fortresses of the days of Vauban.

Of all the ills attendant on the life of the men in the trenches I know of none more trying to the nerves than these trench mortars. As they are fired at close range from the enemy’s trench, which may be anything from 30 to 300 yards away, one has no warning of their coming. You hear a sudden report mingled with a kind of screech, and the rush of a heavy body through the air, then a deafening explosion, with a spout of earth and clouds of black smoke and a rain of fragments of iron and earth for yards around. The bombs thrown by the big mortars allow you about two seconds—the interval between the impact and the burst—in which to take cover. The small bombs, on the other hand—which our men call “sausages”—burst on impact, without warning.

Just as the men in the trenches in the winter months adapted their costume to suit the trying climate (rather to the horror of some military martinets out here!), so these weapons of trench warfare have been evolved by the men in the firing-line. The revival of bombing began when a British soldier, to while away an idle moment, put some high-explosive and a lighted fuse in a discarded bully-beef tin, and pitched it into the German trench opposite him. In his way the British soldier is as handy as the blue-jacket, and the long days of the winter monotony produced all kinds of inventions in the way of mortars and bombs, which led to the scientific development of this mode of warfare. A Territorial officer was discovered making all manner of ingenious bombs and trench appliances in his spare time. He was taken out of the trenches and installed in an empty school, and when last I heard of him had a regular factory turning out bombs for the firing-line.

Bombing is very tricky work. Your bomb must be safe as long as it is in your possession. Nor must it be liable to explosion if dropped after the safety-catch has been removed. That is why bombs are provided with time-fuses. Some nicety of judgment is required to hurl them so that they will explode on impact or immediately afterwards. If the time-fuse has still a second or so to burn when the bomb falls in the enemy trench, a resolute man will pick it up and fling it back, with disastrous consequences to the bomber. Therefore bombers must be trained. The training is extremely simple, but it is essential, and I look forward to the time when every soldier who comes out to France from home will have gone through a course of bombing just as he has gone through a course of musketry. The work of experimenting with bombs and of training in bombing has claimed many victims in our army behind the firing-line, but the blood thus shed has not been spilt in vain, for by every account the bombing companies now attached to each brigade are of invaluable assistance.

In the war of positions the bombers seem to be obtaining the chances for winning imperishable glory that in the Bewegungskrieg fell to the lot of the gunners. The bombers have their motto already, as unalterable as the rule of the sea. “The bombers go first!” Private Appleton, of the bombing company of the 16th (Vancouver) Battalion of the Canadian Division, consecrated the phrase in a beau geste which is the spirit of our bombers incorporate. The battalion was attacking a German stronghold known as The Orchard, situated south-east of Festubert, during the successful advance of the First Army on May 20. Just in front of the position a grave and unlooked-for obstacle was encountered in the shape of a deep ditch with a thick hedge on the other side. Many scrambled across the ditch, and at the only opening in the thick-set hedge an officer wanted to lead the way. Then spake Private Appleton, girded about with bombs. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, “bombers must go first!”

So the bombers went first. That is the rule of the game. When the first line of German trenches has been captured in an attack, up come the bombers, their bombing aprons lined with pockets (like the skirt of a lady shop-lifter), jogging as they trot along, and plunge, bombs uplifted to fling, into the narrow communication trenches where, behind the first traverse, Death, in grey-green dress, is lurking. The path of the bombers is starred with golden deeds. V.C.’s and D.S.O.’s and D.C.M.’s and M.C.’s reward their prowess sometimes, but more often their recompense has been a few feet of brown earth in Flanders and a corner for ever green in the memory of their fellows.

The bomb goes with the knife. The bayonet fixed on the rifle is too long for the corps-à-corps in a narrow trench. When a German trench has been obliterated by a bombardment or an exploded mine and the infantry rush forward, there is no time for the niceties of bayonet drill. You want to get at your man and kill him before he can recover from his shock. The French infantry have been known to fling aside their rifles when the charge sounds, and hurl themselves on the Germans with their bayonets alone or with clasp-knives, or even with knives of their own manufacture.