Its mechanism is extremely simple. It can be carried at a good pace over a distance of several hundred yards by a single man, and it is not distinguishable from the ordinary rifle except at fairly close range. It is my conviction that the automatic rifle is the key to the machine-gun problem, which has hitherto proved of such insurmountable difficulty to the Allies in the different theatres of war.
It has been said that we hold our trenches with infantry, the French with their 75-centimetre guns—“the black butchers,” as my friend, Mr. George Adam, calls them in his admirable book “Behind the Scenes at the War”—but the Germans with machine-guns. The more machine-guns we have—and this view is fully upheld by the new Ministry of Munitions at home—the thinner we can make our front line in the trenches, and the more men we shall accordingly have at our disposal for an offensive at one or more points.
CHAPTER III
THE FIGHT FOR THE SALIENT
I.
The Capture and Loss of Hill 60.
The grass has grown up thick and long about the little graves strung out in a great semicircle about Ypres, marking the line of the famous salient, in the defence of which so many thousands of Britons and Frenchmen cheerfully laid down their lives. Spring and summer have smiled on the wooded and undulating plain about the ruined towers of Ypres, and the profusion of wild flowers, the wealth of green foliage, which their gentle caress has brought forth, has so transformed the land that the awful battle-pictures these green pastures have seen now seem like a far-off dream.
With wise strategy we drew in the horns of the Yser salient on May 3, and fell back to the position we now hold, at the beginning of August, from the Yser Canal, north of Ypres, through Wieltje, Verlorenhoek, and Hooge, back to the foot of Hill 60, and thence down to St. Eloi. Thus a great part of the battlefield, which was the scene of the tremendous struggle lasting from April 17 until May 13, is now in German hands—St. Julien, sacred for ever in the Empire’s history in memory of Canadian gallantry there; St. Jean, where the gallant Geddes died; Zonnebeke, where, by the light of candles stuck in beer-bottles, those gallant doctors, Ferguson and Waggett—Waggett, the throat specialist of Harley Street, now Major Waggett, R.A.M.C.—in the cellars of the ruined houses worked for hours over the wounded, and brought them safely away.
Yet I have contrived to visit in person many corners of the battlefield of Ypres, sometimes a day or two after the great contest had raged itself out. On the chaussée by the Yser Canal, north of Ypres, I have seen the humble graves, many of them nameless, in which the poor French victims of the first great gas attack were laid to rest, their rusting rifles and blood-stained uniform close at hand. I have stood in the emplacements of our guns about Ypres amid the putrefying carcasses of horses and piles of empty shell-cases. I have walked through trenches dug across the battlefield where, through fissures in the ground, one yet might see the dead, buried as they died, in uniform.
I have looked upon the hill of St. Eloi—the Mound of Death—that tumulus of glory of the Princess Pat.’s. I have seen the brown and scarred top of Hill 60, where in the yawning craters rent by our mines 2,000 Britons and Germans are yet lying awaiting the Last Trump, where shells and bullets have stripped the trees of their last leaf, and where chlorine gas has stained the herbage yellow.
I have talked with the Generals who directed the fight, who spoke eagerly of its strategy and tactics, and of the undying heroism of our men. I have spoken with the humble privates, whose only recollection of this classic struggle is of long marches over the hard and galling pavé of the Belgian roads, of such an inferno of shell-fire as no man ever dreamt of before, of hours spent, hungry and thirsty, with nerves benumbed, in narrow trenches where comrades cried sharply “Oh!” and “Ah!” as fragments of shell or bullets struck them, where dead men sprawled around, where wounded sighed and died, where one fired and loaded and fired and “stuck it,” because, avowedly, one wouldn’t go back for no bloody German—in reality, because one was British.
I have been among the Canadians who went through the gas horror with a gallantry that made the Empire ring. I have talked with soldiers to whom, but five days out from England, the hell of fire that swept the salient night and day was their first taste of war, and with veterans fresh from the fight on whose breasts the discoloured medal ribbons spoke of former service in the field. From all I have seen myself and all I have heard from others, my mind has focussed so sublime a spectacle of heroism, of pluck undaunted by adversity, of resourcefulness never foiled by confusion, that I have felt impelled to try my hand at painting the picture of that battle which history will set down as one of the crucial struggles of the war.