Thus to turn the back on danger and face the unknown, worn out with fatigue and hunger, shaken by the loss of many dear comrades—what a test of discipline! The men were admirable; their officers were magnificent. The success of the withdrawal was, first and last, the work of the Regimental Officer, as those most qualified to speak readily attest. With most of the field officers killed or wounded or gassed, it was primarily the subaltern, the boy fresh from a public school or the Varsity, from Sandhurst or the O.T.C., or, in the Territorials, the young clerk or business man, who led his men down over unreconnoitred ground through the rain and the darkness, steeling them against the danger that always threatened by a fine display of nonchalance and good-humour.
Nothing was left behind. All the arms and ammunition and supplies that could not be taken away were destroyed. They tell of a Colonel who did away with a box of kippers rather than let them fall into the hands of the Germans. To his surprise at breakfast the next morning in the new line the kippers appeared on the breakfast-table (an ammunition-box on the bottom of a trench). The Regimental Sergeant-Major confessed that the sacrifice had been too great. He could not bring himself to take any chance of making a present of the kippers to the Germans. So he had clandestinely rescued them.
At midnight the last men quitted our front trenches, and, going “as they pleased,” made off through the pouring rain to rejoin their comrades. A private in the 2nd Cheshires got left behind. He remained at his post at the parapet with a waterproof sheet over his shoulders, firing at intervals at the German parapet opposite him. Presently he noticed that the trench had grown very still. He left his post and went round the adjacent traverse. Nobody there! He went round the traverse on his other side. Again a vista of empty trench! He hurried down the trenches for a hundred yards or so, and found that everyone had gone. He was, as he put it afterwards, “left to face the whole blooming German Army alone.” He lost no time in joining the retirement.
Many of the wounded of the days of heavy fighting had been taken to the ruined villages of Frezemberg and Zonnebeke, where the doctors tended them by candlelight in the cellars. During the evening, in anticipation of the withdrawal, by hook and by crook, seventy-six motor ambulances were got together. From dusk until half an hour after midnight, it had been found impossible to remove a single wounded man, as each would have had to be carried by hand over marshy ground through inky darkness, and without lights, for no lights could be shown. The Germans were shelling both villages heavily, and I should like to pay a tribute here to the splendid courage of the motor-ambulance drivers who sat imperturbably at the steering-wheel of their cars in the open street and waited for the wounded, with shells falling fast about them.
The evacuation of the wounded at Zonnebeke was the work of Colonel Ferguson, R.A.M.C., and of Major Waggett, R.A.M.C., the throat specialist of Harley Street. Thanks to the untiring devotion of these two officers, every wounded man was safely got away, with the exception of a few men with shattered limbs whom it would have been dangerous to move, and who were left behind with comforts and medicines, and two R.A.M.C. orderlies to tend them. Every man of the R.A.M.C., doctors and orderlies alike, worked like Trojans that night, and added fresh laurels to the rich harvest which the corps has gleaned already in this war.
On our right centre, where the men had stood for days a very heavy bombardment, the troops were very loth to fall back. Some of the men left insulting messages addressed to the “Germs,” as they call them, pinned on to the trenches. One man was seen going round “tidying up” his section of trench, “just to leave things clean for the Germs,” as he naïvely explained!
The enemy did not let us remain in peace for long. After a few days’ shelling, during which it was observed that his 6-inch howitzers were “registering,” at 5.30 on the morning of May 8, he made a sledgehammer attempt to smash in the front of the 5th Corps. He started as usual with a terrific bombardment from north of Passchendaele and from Zonnebeke, which gradually concentrated on the front of the 28th Division between north and south of Frezemberg.
The General commanding this division told me that it was the most terrible bombardment he had ever listened to. The German shooting was marvellously accurate, and their guns simply wiped out our trench line. “This fire,” in the blunt phrase of Sir John French’s despatch, “completely obliterated the trenches and caused enormous losses.”
It was an awful ordeal. The men who came out of it alive told me in awed voices that the shelling was like machine-gun fire, an incessant rain of high-explosive shells that fairly plastered the whole of the ground. The din was ear-splitting, the earth trembled, the air was unbreathable with the fumes from the explosives, and in the space of a minute or two the trenches were reduced to broken heaps of rubbish crowded with dead and wounded men. At one place a trench became impassable with the dead, so the survivors filled it in and planted a cross on top—surely the finest grave for a soldier!
A heavy infantry attack followed the bombardment. It was too much for our men. Some battalions had been for a fortnight in the firing-line without the chance of a wash (“A lick and a promise was all the cleaning up we did,” a Colonel of one of these battalions said to me afterwards, “and, by Jove! it was a long promise”), with a scant supply of drinking-water, and salt beef and hard biscuit the only food. Most wires were cut, and the only connection between the firing-line and the Brigade Headquarters in many cases was by orderly. The gallantry of the despatch-bearers in these terrible days was beyond all praise. They were shot down by the dozen, but there were never lacking volunteers “to have a shot” at getting through when no word had come back from the last man sent back.