FROM BAPAUME TO
PASSCHENDAELE

FROM BAPAUME TO
PASSCHENDAELE

1917
BY

PHILIP GIBBS

AUTHOR OF
"THE BATTLES OF THE SOMME," "THE SOUL
OF THE WAR," ETC.
WITH MAPS
TORONTO
WILLIAM BRIGGS
1918

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE COMPLETE PRESS
WEST NORWOOD ENGLAND

CONTENTS

FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE

INTRODUCTION

1917.... I suppose that a century hence men and women will think of that date as one of the world's black years flinging its shadow forward to the future until gradually new generations escape from its dark spell. To us now, only a few months away from that year, above all to those of us who have seen something of the fighting which crowded every month of it except the last, the colour of 1917 is not black but red, because a river of blood flowed through its changing seasons and there was a great carnage of men. It was a year of unending battle on the Western Front, which matters most to us because of all our youth there. It was a year of monstrous and desperate conflict. Looking back upon it, remembering all its days of attack and counter-attack, all the roads of war crowded with troops and transport, all the battlefields upon which our armies moved under fire, the coming back of the prisoners by hundreds and thousands, the long trails of the wounded, the activity, the traffic, the roar and welter and fury of the year, one has a curious physical sensation of breathlessness and heart-beat because of the burden of so many memories. The heroism of men, the suffering of individuals, their personal adventures, their deaths or escape from death, are swallowed up in this wild drama of battle so that at times it seems impersonal and inhuman like some cosmic struggle in which man is but an atom of the world's convulsion. To me, and perhaps to others like me, who look on at all this from the outside edge of it, going into its fire and fury at times only to look again, closer, into the heart of it, staring at its scenes not as men who belong to them but as witnesses to give evidence at the bar of history—for if we are not that we are nothing—and to chronicle the things that have happened on those fields, this sense of impersonal forces is strong. We see all this in the mass. We see its movement as a tide watched from the bank and not from the point of view of a swimmer breasting each wave or going down in it. Regimental officers and men know more of the ground in which they live for a while before they go forward over the shell-craters to some barren slope where machine-guns are hidden below the clods of soil, or a line of concrete blockhouses heaped up with timber and sand-bags on one of the ridges. They know with a particular intimacy the smallest landmarks there—the forked branch among some riven trees that are called a "wood," a dead body that lies outside their wire, the muzzle of a broken gun that pokes out of the slime, a hummock of earth that is a German strong point. They know the stench of these places. They know the filth of them, in their dug-outs and in their trenches, in their senses and in their souls. I and a few others have a view less intimate, and on a wider scale. We go to see how our men live in these places, but do not stay with them. We go from one battle to another as doctors from one case to another, feeling the pulse of it, watching its symptoms, diagnosing the prospects of life or death, recording its history, as observers and not as the patients of war, though we take a few of its risks, and its tragedy darkens our spirit sometimes, and the sight of all this struggle of men, the thought of all this slaughter and sacrifice of youth, becomes at times intolerable and agonizing. This broad view of war is almost as wearing to the spirit, though without the physical strain, as the closer view which soldiers have. The wounded man who comes down to the dressing-station after his fight sees only the men around him at the time, and it is a personal adventure of pain limited to his own suffering, and relieved by the joy of his escape. But we see the many wounded who stream down month after month from the battlefields—for three and a half years I have watched the tide of wounded flowing back, so many blind men, so many cripples, so many gassed and stricken men—and there is something staggering in the actual sight of the vastness and the unceasing drift of this wreckage of war. So we have seen the fighting in the year 1917 in the whole sweep of its bloody pageant; and the rapidity with which one battle followed another after an April day in Arras, the continued fury of gun-fire and infantry assaults, and the long heroic effort of our men to smash the enemy's strength before the year should end, left us, as chroniclers of this twelve months' strife, overwhelmed by the number of its historic episodes and by its human sacrifice.

The year began with the German retreat from the Somme battlefields. It was a withdrawal for strategical reasons—the shortening of the enemy's line and the saving of his man-power—but also a retreat because it was forced upon the enemy by the greatness of his losses in the Somme fighting. He would not have left the Bapaume Ridge and all his elaborate defences down to Péronne and Roye unless we had so smashed his divisions by incessant gun-fire and infantry assaults that he was bound to economize his power for adventures elsewhere. On the ground from which he drew back, more hurriedly than he desired because we followed quickly on his heels to Bapaume, he left some of his dead. Many of his dead. Below Loupart Wood I saw hundreds of them, strewn about their broken batteries, and lying in heaps of obscene flesh in the wild chaos of earth which had been their trenches. On one plot of earth a few hundred yards in length there were 800 dead, and over all this battlefield one had to pick one's way to avoid treading on the bits and bodies of men. From the mud, arms stretched out like those of men who had been drowned in bogs. Boots and legs were uncovered in the muck-heaps, and faces with eyeless sockets on which flies settled, clay-coloured faces with broken jaws, or without noses or scalps, stared up at the sky or lay half buried in the mud. I fell once and clutched a bit of earth and found that I had grasped a German hand. It belonged to a body in field-grey stuck into the side of a bank on the edge of all this filthy shambles.... In the retreat the enemy laid waste the country behind him. I have described in this book the completeness of that destruction and its uncanny effect upon our senses as we travelled over the old No Man's Land through hedges of barbed wire and across the enemy's trenches into his abandoned strongholds like Gommecourt and Serre, and then into open country where German troops had lived beyond our gun-fire in French villages still inhabited by civilians. It was like wandering through a plague-stricken land abandoned after some fiendish orgy, of men drunk with the spirit of destruction. Every cottage in villages for miles around had been gutted by explosion. Every church in those villages had been blown up. The orchards had been cut down and some of the graves ransacked for their lead. There had been no mercy for historic little towns like Bapaume and Péronne, and in Bapaume the one building that stood when we entered—the square tower of the Town Hall—was hurled up a week later when a slow fuse burnt to its end, and only a hole in the ground shows where it had been. The enemy left these slow-working fuses in many places, and "booby-traps" to blow a man to bits or blind him for life if he touched a harmless-looking stick or opened the lid of a box, or stumbled over an old boot. One of the dirty tricks of war.

We followed the enemy quickly to Bapaume northwards towards Quéant, but with only small patrols farther east, where he retired in easy stages with rear-guards of machine-gunners to his Hindenburg line behind St. Quentin. The absence of large numbers of British soldiers in this abandoned country scared one. Supposing the enemy were to come back in force? It was difficult to know his whereabouts. We were afraid of running our cars into his outposts. "Can you tell me where our front line is," asked a friend of mine to a sergeant leaning against a ruined wall and chatting to a private who stood next to him. The sergeant removed his cigarette from his mouth and with just the glint of a smile in his eyes said, "Well, sir, I am the front line." It was almost like that for a week or two. I went down roads where there was no sign of a trench or a patrol and knew that the enemy was very close. One felt lonely. Sir Douglas Haig did not waste his men in a futile pursuit of the enemy. He wanted them elsewhere, and decided that the Germans would not return over the roads they had destroyed by mine-craters to the villages they had laid waste. He was concentrating masses of men round Arras for the battles which had been planned in the autumn of '16.

The Commander-in-Chief has explained in one of his dispatches how the general plan of campaign for the spring offensive was modified because of the German retreat which relieved us of another battle of the Ancre. It was readjusted also, as he has written, in order to meet the wishes of the French Command, so that the attack on the Messines Ridge, to be followed by operations against the Flanders ridges towards the coast, had to be made secondary to the actions around Arras and the Scarpe. They were intended to hold a number of German divisions while the French undertook their own great offensive in the Champagne under the supreme command of General Nivelle. In the Arras battles our troops were to do the "team work" for the French, and if the combined operations did not produce decisive results the British Armies might then be transferred to Flanders, according to the original plan. It was a handicap to our own strategical ideas, and was certain to weaken our divisions without increasing our prestige before they could be sent to Flanders for the most important assaults on our length of front. In loyalty to our Allies it was decided to subordinate our own plan to theirs, and this agreement was carried out utterly. By bad luck the Italians were not ready to strike at the same time, and the Russian revolution had already begun to relieve the enemy of his Eastern menace, so that the Anglo-French offensive did not have the prospect of decisive victory which might have come if the German armies had been pressed on all fronts.

Our regimental officers and men knew nothing of all this high strategy, nothing of the international difficulties which confronted our High Command. They knew only that they had to attack strong and difficult positions and that the immediate success depended upon their own leadership and the courage and training of their men. They were sure of that and hoped for a victory which would break the German spirit. They devoted themselves to the technical details of their work, and only in subconscious thought pondered over the powers that lie behind the preparations of battle and decide the fate of fighting men. The scenes in Arras and on the roads that lead to Arras are not to be forgotten by men who lived through them. Below ground as well as above ground thousands of soldiers worked night and day for weeks before the hour of attack. Above ground they were getting many guns into position, making roads, laying cables, building huts and camps, hurrying up vast stores of material. Below ground they were boring tunnels and making them habitable for many battalions, with ventilation shafts and electric light. All the city of Arras has an underground system of vaults and passages dug out in the time of the Spanish Netherlands when the houses of the citizens were built of stone quarried from the ground on which they stood. These subterranean passages were deepened and lengthened until they went a mile or more beyond Arras to the edge of the German front lines. The old vaults where the merchants kept their stores were propped up and cleaned out, and in this underground world thousands of our men lived for several days before the battle waiting for "zero" hour on April 9, when they would come up into the light and see the shell-fire which was now exploding above them, unloosing boulders of chalky rock about them and shaking the bowels of the earth. The enemy knew of our preparations and of this life in Arras, and during the week before the battle he flung many shells into the city, smashing houses already stricken, "strafing" the station and the barracks, the squares and courtyards, and the roads that led in and out. During the progress of the battle I went many times into the broken heart of Arras while the bodies of men and horses lay about where transport columns had gone galloping by under fire and while the shrill whine of high velocities was followed by the crash of shells among the ruins. In the town and below it there were always crowds of men during the weeks of fighting outside. I went through the tunnels when long columns of soldiers in single file moved slowly forward to another day's battle in the fields beyond, and when another column came back, wounded and bloody after their morning's fight.

The wounded and the unwounded passed each other in these dimly lighted corridors. Their steel hats clinked together. Their bodies touched. Wafts of stale air laden with a sickly stench came out of the vaults. Faint whiffs of poison-gas filtered through the soil above and made men vomit. For the most time the men were silent as they passed each other, but now and then a wounded man would say, "Oh, Christ!" or "Mind my arm, mate," and an unwounded man would pass some remark to the man ahead. In vaults dug into the sides of the passages were groups of tunnellers and other men half screened by blanket curtains. Their rifles were propped against the quarried rocks. They sat on ammunition boxes and played cards to the light of candles stuck in bottles, which made their shadows flicker fantastically on the walls. They took no interest in the procession beyond their blankets—the walking wounded and the troops going up. Some of them slept on the stone floors with their heads covered by their overcoats and made pillows of their gas-masks. Under some old houses of Arras were women and children—about 700 of them—among our soldiers. They were the people who had lived underground since the beginning of the war and would not leave. Only four of them went away when they were told of the coming battle and its dangers. "We will stay," they said with a certain pride because they had seen so much war. A few women were wounded and one or two killed. Later, after the first day's battle, in spite of some high velocities from long-range guns, the streets and squares were filled with soldiers, and Arras was tumultuous with the movement of men and horses and mules and wagons. The streets seethed with Scottish soldiers muddy as they came straight out of battle, bloody as they walked in wounded. Many battalions of Jocks came into the squares, and their pipers came to play to them. I watched the Gordons' pipers march up and down in stately ritual, and their colonel, who stood next to me, looked at them with a proud light in his eyes as the tune of "Highland Laddie" swelled up to the gables and filled the open frontages of the gutted houses. Snowflakes fell lightly on the steel hats of the Scots in the square, and mud was splashed to the khaki aprons over their kilts—no browner than their hard lean faces—as a battery rumbled across the cobbled place and the drivers turned in their saddles to grin at the fine swagger of the pipers and the triumph of the big drumsticks. An old woman danced a jig to the pipes, holding her skirt above her skinny legs. She tripped up to a group of Scottish officers and spoke quick shrill words to them. "What does the old witch say," asked a laughing Gordon. She had something particular to say. In 1870 she had heard the pipes in Arras. They were played by prisoners from South Germany, and as a young girl she had danced to them.... There was a casualty clearing-station in Arras, in a deep high vault like the crypt of a cathedral. The way into it was down a long tunnelled passage, and during the battle thousands of men came here to have their wounds dressed. They formed up in queues waiting their turn and moved slowly down the tunnelled way, weary, silent, patient. Outside lay some of the bad cases until the stretcher-bearers carried them down, and others sat on the side of the road or lay at full length there, dog-weary after their long walk from the battlefields. Blind boys were led forward by their comrades, and men with all their heads and faces swathed about. They were not out of danger even yet, for the enemy hated to leave Arras as a health resort, but it was sanctuary for men who had been in hell fire up by Monchy.

The first day of the Arras battle was our victory. We struck the enemy a heavy blow, and the capture of the Vimy Ridge by the Canadians and the Highland Division was as wonderful as the great thrust by English and Scottish battalions along the valley of the Scarpe across the Arras-Cambrai road. By April 14 we had captured 13,000 prisoners and over 200 guns. But it was hard fighting after the first few hours of the 9th, and the operations that followed on both sides of the Scarpe were costly to us. The London men of the 56th Division, and the old county troops of the 3rd and 12th and 37th, and the Scots of the 15th suffered in heroic fighting against strong and fresh reserves of the enemy who were massed rapidly to check them and made fierce, repeated counter-attacks against the village of Rœux and its chemical works, north of the Scarpe, and against Monchy-le-Preux and Guémappe, south of the river. Again and again these counter-attacks were beaten back with most bloody losses to the enemy, but our own men suffered each time until they were weary beyond words. I saw the cavalry ride forward towards Monchy, where they came under great fire, and I saw the body of their General carried back to Tilloy. It was a day of tragic memory.

At this time, as Sir Douglas Haig has recorded, the battle of Arras might have ended. But the French offensive was about to begin, and it was important that the full pressure of the British attacks should be maintained in order to assist our Allies. A renewal of the assault was therefore ordered, and after a week's postponement to gather together new supplies, to change the divisions, and complete the artillery dispositions, fighting was resumed on a big scale on April 23. It was on a front of about nine miles, from Croisilles to Gavrelle. Important ground was taken west of Chérisy and east of Monchy, where our troops seized Infantry Hill, but the violent counter-attacks of the enemy in great strength prevented the gain of all our objectives on that day, and once more put our troops to a severe ordeal. Rœux and Gavrelle on the north of the Scarpe, Guémappe on the south, were the focal points of this struggle and the scene of the bitterest fighting in and out of the villages. On April 23 and 24 the enemy made eight separate counter-attacks against Gavrelle, and each was shattered by our artillery and machine-gun fire. On April 28 there was another great day of battle when the Canadians had fierce hand-to-hand fighting in the village of Arleux, and English troops made progress towards Oppy over Greenland Hill and beyond Monchy. Gavrelle was attacked seven times more by the enemy, who fell again in large numbers. The night attack of May 3 was unlucky in many of its episodes because some of our men lost their way in the darkness and had the enemy behind them as well as in front of them, and suffered under heavy artillery and machine-gun fire. It was "team work" for the French, and many of our sons fell that day not knowing that their blood was the price of loyalty to our Allies and part payment of the debt we owe to France for all her valour in this war. On May 3 the battle front was extended on a line of sixteen miles, and while the 3rd and 1st Armies attacked from Fontaine-lez-Croisilles to Fresnoy, the 5th Army stormed the Hindenburg line near Bullecourt. The Australians carried a stretch of this Hindenburg line. Chérisy fell into the hands of East county battalions, Rœux was entered again by English troops, and in Fresnoy, north of Oppy, the Canadians fought masses of Germans assembled for counter-attack and swept them out of the village. Heavy counter-attacks developed later, so that our men had to fall back from Chérisy and Rœux—Fresnoy was abandoned later—but the rest of the ground was held. During this month's fighting twenty-three German divisions had been withdrawn exhausted from the line, and we had captured 19,500 prisoners, 257 guns including 98 heavies, 464 machine-guns, 227 trench mortars, and a great quantity of war material. We advanced our line five miles on a front of over twenty miles, including the Vimy Ridge, which had always menaced our positions. Above all, we had drawn upon the enemy's strength so that the French armies were relieved of that amount of resistance to their offensive against the Chemin des Dames. That was the idea behind it all, and it succeeded, though the cost was not light. The battle of Arras petered out into small engagements and nagging fighting when on June 7 the battle of Messines began.

It was a model battle, and the whole operation was astonishing in the thoroughness of its preparations through every detail of organization, in the training of its method of attack, in generalship and staff work, and in its Intelligence department. The 2nd Army had long held this part of the Ypres salient, and knew the enemy's country as well as its own. The observers on Kemmel Hill, which looked across to Wytschaete Ridge, had watched every movement in the enemy's lines, and every sign of new defensive work. Aeroplane photographs, stacks of them, revealed many secrets of the enemy's life on this high ground which gave him observation of all our roads and villages in the flat country between Dickebusch and Ypres. A relief map on a big scale was built up in a field behind our lines, and the assault troops and their officers walked round it and studied in miniature the woods and slopes, strong points and trenches, which they would have to attack. For eighteen months past Australian and Canadian miners had been at work below ground boring deep under the enemy's positions and laying charges for the explosion of twenty-four mines. All that time the enemy, aware of his danger, had been counter-mining, and at Hill 60 there was constant underground fighting for more than ten months when men met each other in the converging galleries and fought in their darkness. As Sir Douglas Haig has written, at the time of our offensive the enemy was known to be driving a gallery which would have broken into the tunnel leading into the Hill 60 mines. By careful listening it was judged that if our attack took place on the date arranged, the enemy's gallery would just fail to reach us. So he was allowed to proceed. Eight thousand yards of gallery had been bored, and there were nineteen mines ready charged with over a million pounds of explosives. I saw those nineteen mines go up. The earth rocked with a great shudder, and the sky was filled with flame. It was the signal of our bombardment to break out in a deafening tumult of guns after a quietude in which I heard only the snarl of enemy gas-shells and the shunting and whistling of our railway engines down below there in the darkness as though this battlefield were Clapham Junction. Round about the salient a network of railways had been built with great speed under the very eyes of the enemy, and though he had shelled our tracks and engines he could never stop the work of those engineers who laboured with fine courage and industry so that the guns might not lack for shells nor the men for supplies on the day of attack. The battle of Wytschaete and Messines was a fine victory for us, breaking the evil spell of the Ypres salient in which our men had sat down so long under direct observation of the enemy on that ridge above them. Kemmel Hill, which had been under fire in our lines for three years, became a health resort for Australian boys whose turn to fight had not yet come, and they sat on top of the old observation-post where men had hidden below ground to watch through a slit in the earth, staring through field-glasses at the sweep of fire from Oostaverne to Pilkem, and eating sweets, and putting wild flowers in their slouch hats. Dickebusch lost its horror. The road to Vierstraat was no longer bracketed by German shells, and there was no further need of camouflage screens along other roads where notice-boards said: Drive slowly—dust draws fire. On the morning of battle after the capture of the ridge an Irish brigadier sat outside his dug-out on a kitchen chair before a deal table, where his maps were spread. "It's good to take the fresh air," he said. "Yesterday I had to keep below ground." All that made a difference on the right of the salient, but Ypres was still "a hot shop," as the men say, and the roads out of Ypres—the Lille road and the Menin road—were as abominable as ever, and worse than ever when at the end of July the battles of Flanders began.

The Wytschaete-Messines Ridge is the eastern spur of that long range of "abrupt isolated hills," to use the words of Sir Douglas Haig, which divides the valleys of the Lys and the Yser, and links up with the ridges stretching north-eastwards to the Ypres-Menin road, and then northwards to Passchendaele and Staden. One of the objects of our campaign in 1917 was to gain the high ground to Passchendaele and beyond. A mere glance at a relief map is enough to show the formidable nature of the positions held by the enemy on those slopes which dominated our low ground. When one went across the Yser Canal along the Menin road, or towards the Pilkem Ridge, those slopes seemed like a wall of cliffs barring the way of our armies, however strongly our tide of men might dash against them. The plan to take them by assault needed enormous courage and high faith in the mind of any man who bore the burden of command, and his faith and courage depended utterly on the valour of the men who were to carry out his plan against those frowning hills. The men did not fail our High Command, and for three and a half months those troops of ours fought with a heroic resolution never surpassed by any soldiers in the world, and hardly equalled, perhaps, in all the history of war, against terrible gun-fire and innumerable machine-guns, in storms and swamps, in bodily misery because of the mud and wet, in mental suffering because of the long strain on their nerve and strength, with severe casualties because of the enemy's fierce resistance, but with such passionate and self-sacrificing courage that the greatest obstacles were overcome, and the enemy was beaten back from one line of defence to another with large captures of prisoners and guns until, in the middle of November, the crest of Passchendaele was gained.

Before the first day of the battle the 5th Army, with the 1st French Army on its left, below the flooded ground of St.-Jansbeek, crossed the Yser Canal and seized 3000 yards of the enemy's trench system. During that night the pioneer battalion of the Guards, working under fierce fire, built seventeen bridges across the canal for the passage of our troops on the day of assault. On that day, July 31, at 3.50 in the morning, battle was engaged on a front of fifteen miles from Boesinghe to the River Lys, where the 2nd Army was making a holding attack on our right wing. The German front-line system of defence was taken everywhere. Our troops captured the Pilkem Ridge on the left, Velorenhoek, the Frezenberg Redoubt, the Pommern Redoubt, and St.-Julien north of the Ypres-Roulers railway, and were fighting forward against fierce resistance on both sides of the Ypres-Menin road. They stormed through Sanctuary Wood and captured Stirling Castle, Hooge, and the Bellewaerde Ridge, and by the end of the day had gained the crest of Westhoek Ridge. On the 2nd Army front the New-Zealanders carried the village of La Basseville after close fighting, which lasted fifty minutes, and English troops on their left captured Hollebeke and difficult ground north of the Ypres-Comines Canal. Over 6000 prisoners, including 133 officers, surrendered to us that day.

It was in the afternoon of the first day that the luck of the weather was decided against us and there began those heavy rain-storms which drenched the battlefields in August and made them dreadful for men and beasts. All this part of Flanders is intersected by small streams or "beeks" filtering through the valleys between the ridges, and our artillery-fire had already caused them to form ponds and swamps by destroying their channels so that they slopped over the low-lying ground. The rains enlarged this area of flood, and so saturated the clayey soil that it became a vast bog with deep overbrimming pits where thousands of shell-craters had pierced the earth. Tracks made of wooden slabs fastened together were the only roads by which men and pack-mules could cross this quagmire, and each of these ways became taped out by the enemy's artillery, and very perilous. They were slippery under moist mud, and men and mules fell into the bogs on either side, and sometimes drowned in them. At night in the darkness and the storms it was hard to find the tracks and difficult to keep to them, and long columns of troops staggered and stumbled forward with mud up to their knees if they lost direction, and mud up to their necks if they fell into the shell-holes. It was over such ground as this, in such intolerable conditions, that our men fought and won their way across the chain of ridges which led to Passchendaele. I saw some of the haunting scenes of this struggle and went over the ground across the Pilkem Ridge, and along the Ypres-Menin road to Westhoek Ridge, and up past Hooge to the bogs of Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse, and beyond the Yser Canal to St.-Jean and Wieltje, where every day for months our gunners went on firing, and every day the enemy "answered back" with scattered and destructive fire, searching for our batteries and for the bodies of our men. The broken skeleton of Ypres was always in the foreground or the background of this scene of war, and every day it changed in different atmospheric phases and different hours of light so that it was never the same in its tragic beauty. Sometimes it was filled with gloom and shadows, and the tattered masonry of the Cloth Hall, lopped off at the top, stood black as granite above its desolate boulder-strewn square. Sometimes when storm-clouds were blown wildly across the sky and the sunlight struck through them, Ypres would be all white and glamorous, like a ghost city in a vision of the world's end. At times there was a warm glow upon its rain-washed walls, and they shone like burnished metal. Or they were wrapped about with a thick mist stabbed through by flashes of red fire from heavy guns, revealing in a moment's glare the sharp edges of the fallen stonework, the red ruins of the prison and asylum, the huddle of shell-pierced roofs, and that broken tower which stands as a memorial of what once was the splendour of Ypres. A military policeman standing outside the city gave an order to all going in: "Gasmasks and steel hats to be worn," and at that moment when one fumbled at the string of one's gas-bag and fastened the strap of a steel hat beneath one's chin, the menace of war crept close and the evil of it touched one's senses. It was very evil beyond the Lille gate and the Menin gate, where new shell-holes mingled with old ones, and men walked along the way of death. The spirit of that evil lurked about the banks of the Yser Canal with its long fringe of blasted trees, white and livid, with a leprous look when the sunlight touched their stumps. The water of the canal was but a foul slime stained with gobs of colour. The wreckage of bridges and barges lay in it. In its banks were unexploded shells and deep gashes where the bursts had torn the earth down, and innumerable craters. The Yser Canal holds in a ghostly way the horror of this war. Yet it is worse beyond. Out through the Menin gate the view of the salient widens, and every yard of the way is bleeding with the memory of British soldiers who walked and fought and died here since the autumn of '14. How many of them we can hardly guess or know. The white crosses of their graves are scattered about the shell-churned fields and the rubbish-heaps of brick, though many were never buried, and many were taken back by stretcher-bearers who risked their lives to bring in these bodies. There is no house where the White Château used to be. There is no grange by the Moated Grange where men crept out at night, crawling on their stomachs when the flares went up. Hundreds of thousands of men have gone up to Hell-fire Corner, some of them with a cold sweat in the palms of their hands and brave faces and an act of sacrifice in their hearts. It was the way to Hooge. It was a corner of the hell that was here always under German guns and German eyes from the ridge beyond. They had high ground all around us, as the country goes up from Observatory Ridge and Sanctuary Wood and Bellewaerde to the Westhoek Ridge and the high plateau of Polygon Wood. No men of ours could move in the daylight without being seen. The Menin road was always under fire. Every bit of broken barn, every dug-out and trench, was a mark for the enemy's artillery. During the Flanders fighting all this ground was still in the danger zone, though the enemy lost much of his direct observation after our first advance. But he was still trying to find the old places and hurled over big shells in a wild scattered way. They flung up black fountains of earth with frightful violence. Everywhere there were shell-holes so deep that a cart and horse would find room in them. One looked into these gulfs with beastly sensations—with a kind of animal fear at the thought of what would happen to a man if he stood in the way of such an explosion. There was a sense of old black brooding evil about all this country, and worst of all in remembrance were the mine-craters of Hooge. I stared into those pits all piled with stinking sand-bags on which fungus grew, and thought of friends of mine who once lived here, with the enemy a few yards away from them, with mines and saps creeping close to them before another upheaval of the earth, with corpses and bits of bodies rotting half buried where they sat, always wet, always lousy, in continual danger of death. The mines went up and men fought for new craters over new dead. The sand-bags silted down after rain, and machine-gun bullets swept through the gaps, and men sank deeper into this filth and corruption. The place is abandoned now, but the foulness of it stayed, with a lake of slime in which bodies floated, and the same old stench rose from its caverns and craters. Bellewaerde Lake, to the north of Hooge, is not what it used to be when gentlemen of Ypres came out here to shoot wild-fowl or walk through Château Wood around the White Château of Hooge with a dog and a gun. There are still stumps of trees, shot and mangled by three years of fire, but no more wood than that, and the lake is a cesspool into which the corruption of death has flowed. Its water is stained with patches of red and yellow and green slime, and shapeless things float in it. Beyond is the open ground which goes up to Westhoek Ridge above Nonne Boschen and Glencorse Wood, for which our men fought on the first day of battle and afterwards in many weeks of desperate struggle. The Australians took possession of this country for a time and had to stay and hold it after the excitement of advance. They came winding along the tracks in single file through this newly captured ground, carrying their lengths of duck-board and ammunition boxes with just a grim glance towards places where shells burst with monstrous whoofs. "A hot spot," said one of these boys, crouching with his mates in a bit of battered trench outside a German pill-box surrounded by dead bodies. Our guns were firing from many batteries, and flights of shells rushed through the air from the heavies a long way back and from the field-guns forward. It was the field-guns which hurt one's ears most with their sharp hammer-strokes. Now and again a little procession passed to which all other men gave way. It was a stretcher-party carrying a wounded man shoulder high. There is something noble and stately about these bearers, and when I see them I always think of Greek heroes carried back on their shields. There was a vapour of poison gas about these fields, not strong enough to kill, but making one's eyes and skin smart. The Australians did not seem to notice it. Perhaps the stench of dead horses overwhelmed their nostrils. It was strong and foul. The carcasses of these poor beasts lay about as they had been hit by shrapnel or shell splinters, and down one track came a living horse less lucky than these, bleeding badly from its wounds and ambling slowly with drooping head and glazed eyes. Worse smells than of dead horse crept up from the battered trenches and dug-outs, where Glencorse Wood goes down to Inverness Copse. It was the dreadful odour of dead men. It rose in gusts and waves and eddies over all this ground, for the battlefield was strewn with dead. I saw many German bodies in the fields of the Somme, and on the way out from Arras, and on the Vimy Ridge, but never in such groups as lay about the pill-boxes and the shell-craters of the salient. Everywhere they lay half buried in the turmoil of earth, or stark above ground without any cover to hide them. They lay with their heads flung back into water-filled craters or with their legs dangling in deep pools. They were blown into shapeless masses of raw flesh by our artillery. Heads and legs and arms all coated in clay lay without bodies far from where the men of whom they had been part were killed. God knows what agonies were suffered before death by men shut up in those German blockhouses, like Fitzclarence Farm, and Herenthage Château, and Clapham Junction, which I passed on the way up. Some of the garrisons had not stayed in the blockhouses until our troops had reached them. Perhaps the concussion of our drum-fire was worse inside those concrete walls than outside. Perhaps the men had rushed out hoping to surrender before our troops were on them, or with despairing courage had brought their machine-guns into the open to kill our first waves before their own death. Whatever their motive had been, many of these men had come out, and they lay in heaps, mangled by shell-fire that came across the fields to them in a deep belt of high explosives. Here under the sky they lay, a frightful witness against modern civilization, a bloody challenge to any gospel of love which men profess to believe. Over Nonne Boschen and Inverness Copse, and Polygon Wood beyond, and the long claw-like hook of the Passchendaele Ridge, the sky was clear at times and the water-pools reflected its light. But these places had no touch of loveliness because of the light. Once in history meek-eyed women walked in Nonne Boschen, which was Nun's Wood, and in Inverness Copse, as we call it, maids went with their mates in the glades. Now they are places haunted by ghastly memories, and there rises from them a miasma which sickens one's soul. Yet bright above the evil of them and clean above their filth there is the memory of that youth of ours who came here through fire and flame and fell here, so that the soil is sacred as their field of honour.

In the first phase of the battle of Flanders the new system of German defence was formidable. It was that "elastic system" by which Hindenburg hoped to relieve his men from the destructive fire of our artillery by holding his front line thinly in concrete blockhouses and organized shell-craters with enfilade positions for machine-gun fire, keeping his local reserves at quick striking distance for counter-attack. Our first waves of men flowed past and between these blockhouses in their struggle to attain their objectives, and were swept by cross-fire as they went forward, so that they were thinned out by the time they had reached the line of their advance. The succeeding waves were sometimes checked by German machine-gunners still holding out in undamaged shelters, and our troops in the new front line, weak and exhausted after hours of fighting, found themselves exposed to fierce counter-attacks in front while groups of the enemy were still behind them. For several weeks there were episodes of this kind, when our men had to give ground, though the line of advance seldom ebbed back to its starting line, and some progress was made however great the difficulties. Still the "pill-box" trouble was a serious menace, costly in life, and new methods of attack had to be devised during the progress of fighting when the area of the 2nd Army was extended on our left so that the 5th Army was relieved of some of its broad battle front. Our heavy howitzers concentrated on every blockhouse that could be located by aeroplane photographs or direct observation, with such storms of explosive that if they were not destroyed the garrisons of machine-gunners inside were killed or stupefied by concussion. Our method of attack in depth, as at Wytschaete and Messines—battalions advancing in close support of each other, so that the final objective was held by fresh troops to meet the inevitable counter-attacks—succeeded in a most striking way, in spite of the fearful condition of the ground. The enemy changed his new method of defence to meet this new method of attack. He went back to strongly held lines with support troops close forward, and had to pay the penalty by heavier losses under our artillery. The abominable weather and state of ground were his best lines of defence, and in August and October he had astounding luck.

Through all these battles our men were magnificent—not demi-gods, nor saints with a passion for martyrdom, nor heroes of melodrama facing death with breezy nonchalance while they read sweet letters from blue-eyed girls, but grim in attack and stubborn in defence, getting on with the job—a damned ugly job—as far as the spirit could pull the body and control the nerves. They were industrious as ants on this great muck-heap of the battlefield. Transport drivers, engineers, signallers, and pioneers laboured for victory as hard as infantry and gunners, and worked, for the most part, in evil places where there was always a chance of being torn to rags. The gunners, with their wheels sunk to the axles, served their batteries until they were haggard and worn, and they had little sleep and less comfort, and no hour of safety from infernal fire. They were wet from one week to another. They stood to the tags of their boots in mud. They had many of their guns smashed to spokes and splinters. They were lucky if lightly wounded. But their barrage-fire rolled ahead of the infantry at every attack and they shattered the enemy's divisions. The stretcher-bearers seemed to give no thought to their own lives in the rescue of the wounded; and down behind the lines—not always beyond range of gun-fire—doctors and hospital orderlies and nurses worked in the dressing-stations with the same dogged industry and courage as men who carried up duck-boards to the line, drove teams of pack-mules up tracks under fire, or unloaded shells from trains that went puffing to the edge of the battlefields. It was all part of the business of war. Wounded men who came back from battle were dealt with as so many cases of damaged goods, to be packed off speedily to make way for others. There was no time for sentiment—and no need of it. I used to go sometimes to an old mill-house on days of battle. During the Flanders fighting thousands of wounded men came to this place as a first stage on their journey to base hospitals. The lightly wounded used to sit in a long low tent beside the mill, round red-hot braziers, waiting in turn to have their wounds dressed. These crowds of men were of many battalions and of all types of English, Scottish, and Irish troops, with smaller bodies of Australians, New-Zealanders, Canadians, South-Africans, Newfoundlanders. They were clotted with mud and blood, and numb and stiff until the warmth of the braziers unfroze them. They sat silent as a rule, with their steel hats tilted forward, but there was hardly a groan from them, and never a whimper, nor any curse against the fate that had hit them. If I questioned them they answered with a stark simplicity of truth about the things they had seen and done, with often a queer glint of humour—grim enough, God knows, but humour still—in their tale of escape from death. Always after a talk with them I came away with a deep belief that the courage, honesty, and humanity of these boys were a world higher than the philosophy of their intellectual leaders, and I hated the thought that we have been brought to such a pass by the infamy of an enemy caste, and by the low ideals of Europe which have been our own law of life, that all this splendid youth, thinking straight, seeing straight, acting straight, without selfish motives, with clean hearts and fine bodies, should be flung into the furnace of war and scorched by its fires, and maimed, and blinded, and smashed. Only by the dire need of defence against the enemies of the world's liberty can such a sacrifice be justified, and that is our plea before the great Judge of Truth. Such thoughts haunt one if one has any conscience, but when I went among the troops on the roads or in their camps, and heard their laughter after battle or before it, and saw the courage of men refusing to be beaten down by the vilest conditions or heavy losses, and was a witness of their pride in the achievements of their own battalions, I wondered sometimes whether the sufferings of these men were not so pitiful as I had thought. Their vitality helps them through many hardships. Their interest in life is so great that until death comes close it does not touch them—not many of them—with its coldness. In their comradeship they find a compensation for discomfort, and their keenness to win the rewards of skill and pluck is so high that they take great risks sometimes as a kind of sport, as Arctic explorers or big game hunters will face danger and endure great bodily suffering for their own sake. Those men are natural soldiers, though all our men are not like that. There are some even who like war, though very few. But most of them would jeer at any kind of pity for them, because they do not pity themselves, except in most dreadful moments which they put away from their minds if they escape. They scorn pity, yet they hate worse still, with a most deadly hatred, all the talk about "our cheerful men." For they know that however cheerful they may be it is not because of a jolly life or lack of fear. They loathe shell-fire and machine-gun fire. They know what it is "to have the wind up." They have seen what a battlefield looks like before it has been cleared of its dead. It is not for non-combatants to call them "cheerful." Because non-combatants do not understand and never will, not from now until the ending of the world. "Not so much of your cheerfulness," they say, and "Cut it out about the brave boys in the trenches." So it is difficult to describe them, or to give any idea of what goes on in their minds, for they belong to another world than the world of peace that we knew, and there is no code which can decipher their secret, nor any means of self-expression on their lips.

In this book the messages which I wrote from day to day are reprinted with only one alteration—though some are left out. For reasons of space (there is a limit to the length of a book) I have not included any narrative of the Cambrai battles, and thought it best to end this book with the gain of Passchendaele. The alteration is one which makes me very glad. I have been allowed to give the names of the battalions, which I could not do during the progress of the fighting because the enemy wanted to know our Order of Battle. For the first time, therefore, the world will know the regiments who fought without fame in the dismal anonymity of this war, with such Spartan courage, up to that high crest of Passchendaele which was their goal, beyond the bogs and the beeks where masses of men struggled and fell. There is no criticism in this book, no judgment of actions or men, no detailed summing up of success and failure. That is not within my liberty or duty as a correspondent with the Armies in the Field. The Commander-in-Chief himself has summarized the definite gains of the campaign in Flanders:

"Notwithstanding the many difficulties, much has been achieved. Our captures in Flanders since the commencement of operations at the end of July amount to 20,065 prisoners, 74 guns, 941 machine-guns, and 131 trench-mortars. It is certain that the enemy's losses greatly exceeded ours. Most important of all, our new and hastily trained armies have shown once again that they are capable of meeting and beating the enemy's best troops, even under conditions which required the greatest endurance, determination, and heroism to overcome. The total number of prisoners taken in 1917, between the opening of the spring offensive on April 9 and the conclusion of the Flanders offensive, not including those captured in the battle of Cambrai, was 57,696, including 1290 officers. During the same period we captured also 109 heavy guns, 560 trench-mortars and 1976 machine-guns."

These are great gains in men and material, and the capture of the ridges has given us strong defensive positions which should be of high value to us in the new year of warfare calling to our men, unless the world's agony is healed by the coming of Peace.

[I am indebted to Mr. Robert Donald, editor of the Daily Chronicle, for permission to republish the articles which I have written for that newspaper as a war correspondent with the British Army in the Field. My letters from the Front also appeared in the Daily Telegraph and a number of Provincial, American, and Colonial papers, and I am grateful for the honour of serving the great public of their readers.]

PART I

RETREAT FROM THE SOMME

I

A NEW YEAR OF WAR

New Year's Eve, 1916

Last New Year's Eve—the end of a year which had been full of menace for our fighting men, because, at the beginning, our lines had no great power of guns behind them, and full of hopes that had been unfilled, in spite of all their courage and all their sacrifice—an artillery officer up in the Ypres salient waited for the tick of midnight by his wrist-watch (it gave a glow-worm light in the darkness), and then shouted the word "Fire!" ... One gun spoke, and then for a few seconds there was silence. Over in the German line the flares went up and down, and it was very quiet in the enemy trenches, where, perhaps, the sentries wondered at that solitary gun. Then the artillery officer gave the word of command again. This time the battery fired nine rounds. A little while there was silence again, followed by another solitary shot, and then by six rounds. So did the artillery in the Ypres salient salute the birth of the New Year, born in war, coming to our soldiers and our race with many days of battle, with new and stern demands for the lives and blood of men.

To-night it is another New Year's Eve, and the year is coming to us with the same demands and the same promises, and the only difference between our hopes upon this night and that of a year ago is that by the struggle and endeavour of those past twelve months the ending is nearer in sight and the promise very near—very near as we hope and believe—its fulfilment. The guns will speak again to-night, saluting by the same kind of sullen salvo the first day of the last year of war. The last year, if we have luck. It is raining now, a soft rain swept gustily across the fields by a wind so mild after all our wild weather that it seems to have the breath of spring in it. For a little while yesterday this mildness, and the sunlight lying over the battlefields, and a strange, rare inactivity of artillery, gave one just for one second of a day-dream a sense that Peace had already come and that the victory had been won. It was queer. I stood looking upon Neuville-St.-Vaast and the Vimy Ridge. Our trenches and the enemy's wound along the slopes in wavy lines of white chalk. There to my right was the Labyrinth and in a hollow the ruins of Souchez. When I had first come to these battlefields they were strewn with dead—French dead—after fighting frightful and ferocious in intensity. Unexploded shells lay everywhere, and the litter of great ruin, and storms of shells were bursting upon the Vimy Ridge.

The last time I went to these battlefields the high ridge of Vimy was still aflame, and British troops were attacking the mine-craters there. Yesterday all the scene was quiet, and bright sunlight gleamed upon the broken roofs of Neuville, and the white trenches seemed abandoned. The wet earth and leaves about me in a ruined farmyard had the moist scent of early spring. A man was wandering up a road where six months ago he would have been killed before he had gone a hundred yards. Lord! It looked like peace again! ... It was only a false mirage. There was no peace. Presently a battery began to fire. I saw the shells bursting over the enemy's position. Now and again there was the sullen crump of a German "heavy." And though the trenches seemed deserted on either side they were held as usual by men waiting and watching with machine-guns and hand-grenades and trench-mortars. There is no peace!

It was enormously quiet at times in Arras. The footsteps of my companion were startling as they clumped over the broken pavement of the square, and voices—women's voices—coming up from some hole in the earth sounded high and clear, carrying far, in an unearthly way, in this great awful loneliness of empty houses, broken churches, ruined banks and shops and restaurants, and mansions cloistered once in flower gardens behind high white walls. I went towards the women's voices as men in darkness go towards any glimmer of light, for warmth of soul as well as of body.

A woman came up a flight of stone steps from a vaulted cellar and stared at me, and said, "Good day. Do you look for anything?"

I said, "I look only into your cellar. It is strange to find you living here. All alone—perhaps."

"It is no longer strange to me. I have been here, as you say, alone, all through the war, since the day of the first bombardment. That was on October 6, 1914. Before then I was not alone. I was married. But my husband was killed over there—you see the place where the shell fell. Since then I am alone."

For two years and two months she and other women of Arras—one came now to stand by her side and nod at her tale—have lived below ground, coming up for light and air when there is a spell of such silence as I had listened to, and going down to the dark vaults when a German "crump" smashes through another roof, or when German gas steals through the streets with the foul breath of death.

I asked her about the Kaiser's offer of peace. What did she think of that? I wondered what her answer would be—this woman imprisoned in darkness, hiding under daily bombardments, alone in the abomination of desolation. It was strange how quickly she was caught on fire by a sudden passion. All the tranquillity of her face changed, and there were burning sparks in her eyes. She was like a woman of the Revolution, and her laughter, for she began her answer with a laugh, was shrill and fierce.

"Peace! William offers peace, you say? Bah! It is nothing but humbug [la blague]. It is a trap which he sets at our feet to catch us. It is a lie."

She grasped my arm, and with her other hand pointed to the ruins over the way, to the chaos of old houses, once very stately and noble, where her friends lived before the fires of hell came.

"The Germans did that to us. They are doing it now. But it is not enough. What they have done to Arras they want to do to France—to smash the nation to the dust, to break the spirit of our race as they have broken all things here. They wish to deceive us to our further ruin. There will be no peace until Germany herself is laid in ashes, and her cities destroyed like Arras is destroyed, and her women left alone, with only the ghosts of their dead husbands, as I live here alone in my cellar. Peace! Je m'en fiche de ça!"

There was a queer light in her eyes for a moment, in the eyes of this woman of Arras who saw down a vista of two years and two months all the fire and death that had been hurled into this city around her, and the bodies of little children in the streets, and her dead husband lying there on the cobble-stones, where now there was a great hole in the roadway piercing through to the vaults.

I met other women of Arras. Two of them were young, daintily dressed as though for the boulevards of Paris, and they walked, swinging little handbags, down a street where at any moment a shell might come to tear them to pieces and make rags of them. Another was a buxom woman with a boy and girl holding her hands. The boy had been born to the sound of shell-fire. The girl was eight years old, but she now learns the history of France, not only out of school books, but out of this life in the midst of war.

"They are frightened—the little ones?" I asked. A solitary gun boomed and shook the loose stones of a ruined house.

The woman smiled and shrugged her shoulders.

"They are used to it all. Peace will seem strange to them."

"Will there ever be peace?" I asked.

The woman of Arras looked for a moment like the one I had spoken to on the steps of the cellar. Then she smiled, in a way that made me feel cold, for it was the smile of a woman who sees a vengeance for the wreckage of her life.

"There is no peace at Verdun," she said. "Our soldiers have done well there."

I said good day to her and went through the ruins again and out of the city, and stood watching an artillery duel up towards Souchez. The stabs of flame from our batteries were like red sparks in the deepening mist. They were like the fire in the eyes of the women who lived in cellars away back there in Arras, with a smouldering passion in the gloom and coldness of their lives.

In many French villages the pipes are playing the New Year in, and their notes are full of triumph, but with a cry in them for those who have gone away with the old year, lying asleep on the battlefields—so many brave Scots—like "the flowers o' the forest" and last year's leaves. I heard the pipes to-day in one old barn, where a feast was on, not far from where the guns were shooting through the mist with a round or two at odd moments, and though I had had one good meal, I had to eat another, even to the Christmas plum pudding, just to show there was no ill-feeling.

It was the pudding that threatened to do me down.

But it was good to sit among these splendid Seaforths and their feast, all packed together shoulder to shoulder, and back to back, under high old beams that grew in French forests five centuries ago. They were the transport men, who get the risks but not the glory. Every man here had ridden, night after night, up to the lines of death, under shell-fire and machine-gun fire, up by Longueval and Bazentin, carrying food for men and guns at their own risk of life. Every night now they go up again with more food for men and guns through places where there are now shell-craters in the roads, and the reek of poison gas.

The young transport officer by my side (who once went scouting in Delville Wood when the devil had it all his own way there) raised his glass of beer (the jug from which it had been poured stood a yard high in front of me) and wished "Good luck" to his men in the New Year of war, and bade them "wire in" to the feast before them. So in other Scottish billets the first of the New Year was kept, and to-night there is sword-dancing by kilted men as nimble as Nijinski, in their stockinged feet, and old songs of Scotland which are blown down the wind of France, in this strange nightmare of a war where men from all the Empire are crowded along the fighting-lines waiting for the bloody battles that will come, as sure as fate, while the New Year is still young.

The queerest music I have heard in this war zone was three days ago, when I was walking down a city street. The city was dead, killed by storms of high explosives. The street was of shuttered houses, scarred by shell-fire, deserted by all their people, who had fled two years ago. I walked down this desolation, so quiet, so dead, where there was no sound of guns, that it was like walking in Pompeii when the lava was cooled. Suddenly there was the sound of a voice singing loud and clear with birdlike trills, as triumphant as a lark's song to the dawn. It was a woman's voice singing behind the shutters of a shelled city! ...

Some English officer was there with his gramophone.

II

AN ATTACK NEAR LE TRANSLOY

January 28, 1917

The "show" (as our men call it) near Le Transloy yesterday was more than a raid—those daily in-and-out dashes which are doing most deadly work along our line. It was an attack for the definite purpose of gaining an important bit of ground on the slope which goes down to the ruined village and of driving the enemy out of some strong points. The interest of it, involving the capture of six officers and 352 men of picked regiments, is the way in which we caught the enemy utterly by surprise and the rapid, easy way in which the whole operation was done. A touch which seems fantastic came at the end of the adventure when these young Germans, still breathless with the amazement of their capture, were bundled into omnibuses which had been brought up near the lines to wait for them—the old London omnibuses which used to go "all the way to the Bank—Bank—Bank!" in the days before the world began to crack—and taken to their camp on our side of the battlefields.

It was a grim, cold morning—piercingly cold, with a wind cutting like a knife across the snowfields. Not a morning when men might be expected to go out into the nakedness of No Man's Land. It was a morning when these German officers and men of the 119th and 121st Regiments, the Würtembergers of Königin Olga, were glad to stay down in the warmth of their dug-outs, cooking coffee on the little stove with which each man of these favoured troops was provided, to the great envy of Bavarians on their right, who go on shorter rations and fewer comforts. They had some good dug-outs in and near the Sunken Road—which runs up from Morval to Le Transloy, and strikes through a little salient in front of our lines—till yesterday morning. The trenches on either side of the Sunken Road were not happy places for Würtembergers. For months past our guns had been pounding them so that they were mostly battered down, and only held here and there by little groups of men who dug themselves in. There was no wire in front of them, and here during the wet weather, and now during the great frost, the German troops (as we know from the prisoners to-day) suffered badly from trench-feet and stomach troubles, and in spite of their moral (they were all stout-hearted men) from what the French call the "cafard," and we call the "hump."

Yesterday morning one or two shivering wretches stood sentry in the German line trying to gain shelter from the knife-blade of the wind. All others were below ground round the "fug" of their braziers. They believed the British over the way were just as quiet in the good work of keeping warm. That was their mistake. In our trenches the men were quiet, but busy, and above ground instead of below. They were waiting for a signal from the guns, and had their bayonets fixed and bombs slung about them, and iron rations hung to their belts. A rum ration was served round, and the men drank it, and felt the glow of it, so that the white waste of No Man's Land did not look so cold and menacing. They were men of the Border Regiment and the Inniskillings of the 29th Division. Suddenly, at about half-past five, there was a terrific crash of guns, and at the same moment the men scrambled up into the open and with their bayonets low went out into No Man's Land, each man's footsteps making a trail in the snow. I think it took about four minutes, that passage of the lonely ground which was a hundred yards or so between the lines, all pock-marked with shell-holes, and hard as iron after the freezing of the quagmire. There was no preliminary bombardment. As soon as the guns went off the men went, with the line of shells not far in front of them. They found no men above ground when they pierced the German line. It was curious and uncanny—the utter lifelessness of the place they came to capture. Good, too, for men attacking, for men who always listen for the quick rush of bullets, which is the ugliest sound in war. Not a single machine-gun spat at them. They knew quickly that they had surprised the enemy utterly. They found the dug-outs and called down the challenge and heard it answered. The Würtembergers came up dazed with the effect of the capture, hardly believing it, as men in a dream. One of the officers explained: "We thought it was just a morning strafe. We kept down in the dug-outs till it was over. We had no idea of an attack. How did you get here so quickly?"

They were abashed. They said they would have put up a fight if they had had any kind of chance. But they were trapped. They could do nothing but surrender with the best grace possible. On the right, from two isolated bits of trench, there came a burst of rifle-fire. A few Germans there had time to recover from the stunning blow of the first surprise and fought pluckily till overpowered. The Borders and the Inniskillings went on farther than the objective given to them, to a point 500 yards away from the German first line, and established themselves there. From neighbouring ground, through the white haze over the snowfields, red lights went up with the SOS signal, and presently the German gunners got busy. But the prisoners were bundled back to the omnibuses, and the men took possession of the dug-outs. Proper organization was difficult above ground. It was too hard to dig. From the farthest point, later in the day, the men were withdrawn to the ground given to them for their objectives and German attempts to organize counter-attacks were smashed by our artillery, because we have absolute observation of their movements from the higher ground won by great fighting in the Somme battles. To-day there was much gunning in all the neighbourhood of the fight, and the roar of guns rolled over the desolate fields of snow, the wide lonely waste which makes one's soul shiver to look at it as I stared at the scene of war, to-day and yesterday, in the teeth of the wind.

III

THE ABANDONMENT OF GRANDCOURT

February 8

That the troops of our Naval Division (the 63rd) should have been able to walk into Grandcourt yesterday and take the place after its abandonment by the enemy (except for a few men left behind to keep up appearances as long as possible, poor wretches) is a proof that the German High Command prefers, at this point of the struggle, to save casualties rather than to hold bad ground at any cost. It is a new phase, worthy of notice. A year ago he would not let his pride do this. Less than a year ago, when we took ground from him by a sudden assault, he would come back with a frightful counter-blow, and there would be a long and bloody struggle, as at the Bluff and St.-Eloi, over trenches taken and retaken. Combles was the first place from which he crept away without a fight. Grandcourt is the second place, abandoned for the same reason—because it was caught in the pincers of our forward movements. It lies low on the south side of the Ancre, below Miraumont, and it became a place of misery to German troops after the capture of Beaucourt and Beaumont-Hamel, on the other side of the river—still worse when on Sunday last our men advanced north of Beaucourt, capturing a couple of hundred prisoners and consolidating on a line of ground dominating Grandcourt, on the north-west. It was probably then that the enemy decided to withdraw to a stronger and higher position south of Miraumont and Pys, which he has been digging and defending with rapid industry in spite of the hard frost, which double the labour of the spade. Fear, which is a great General makes him a hard digger, and he will burrow underground while our men are scraping the snow away on our side of the line. A few men, as I have said, were left behind to make a show. They were seen moving about in the neighbourhood of a German trench barring the way to Grandcourt on the south-west. It was some time before our patrols, creeping out over the snow, saw that this half-mile of line was empty of men, and that the enemy had gone back to some place unknown. On Tuesday our troops moved into this position, watched by those few men, left as scarecrows, who are now our prisoners, and who saw the English soldiers get up out of their ditches and shell-craters and cross the snowfield in open order with a steady trudge, their bayonets glittering, and then drop down into the battered trench in which there was nothing but the litter of former habitation and some dead bodies. Yesterday it was decided to push on to Grandcourt. Observing officers could see the snow on the broken roofs and ruined walls of that village, where bits of brick and woodwork still stand after heavy bombardment. They could not see whether the place was still held. Only actual contact would show whether those quiet ruins would be noisy with the chatter of machine-gun fire if our men went in. A sinister spot—with an evil-sounding name to soldiers of the Somme, because here for many months the enemy had massed his guns which fired down to Contalmaison and flung high explosives over the country below the Pozières Ridge.

It was in the afternoon that the entry was made beneath a great barrage of our shells advancing beyond the infantry and through a heavy fire from the enemy's guns, which did not check the advance of our men. A few German soldiers were taken in rear-guard posts. They came out of shell-craters with their hands up, and were sent back to our lines. There was no fighting in the ruins of the village. Grandcourt was ours, with its deep dug-outs littered with German clothes and stored with rations of German soldiers, which our own men enjoyed as a change of diet, while they took cover from the enemy's shell-fire over his old home.

Last night in the light of a full moon, curiously red so that the snow was faintly flushed, two more attacks were made and two more positions taken, north and south-east of Grandcourt. On the north side of the Ancre Baillescourt Farm was seized, and in its neighbourhood eighty soldiers and one officer were made prisoner. They belonged to the same corps as those I saw last Sunday, and were recruited from the Hamburg-Altona district; all stout fellows, well nourished and well clothed. They had not expected the attack, not so soon, anyhow, and were caught in dug-outs by the ruined farmhouse, which some months ago was a good landmark with its white walls and barns still standing. Now it is but a litter of beams and broken plaster, like all houses along the line of battle.

IV

THE GORDONS IN THE BUTTE DE WARLENCOURT

February 9

The frost lasts. Even in times of peace I suppose it would be remembered years hence because of its intensity of cold and continuance. Here on the Western Front it will be remembered by men who live, now very young, and then with hair as white as the snow which now lies in No Man's Land, because of its unforgettable pictures in sunlight and moonlight, its fantastic cruelties of coldness and discomfort, and its grim effect upon the adventures of war when the patrols go out by night and British soldiers crawl across snow-filled shell-holes.

There was a queer episode of Canadian history—only a few days old—which began when a sprightly young Dados (he's the fellow that gets all the chaff from the Divisional Follies) startled a respectable old lady behind the counter of a milliner's shop in a French village by demanding 100 ladies' "nighties" ("chemises de nuit" he called them) of the largest size. The village heard the story of this shopping expedition, listened to the old lady's shrill cackle of laughter, and wondered what joke was on among the Canadian troops. It was one of those jokes which belong to the humours of this war, mixed with blood and death. Up in the Canadian trenches there were shouts of hoarse laughter, as over their khaki a hundred brawny young Canadians put on the night-dresses. They had been tied up with blue ribbon. The old moon, so watchful there in the steel-blue sky, had never looked down upon a stranger scene than these white-robed soldiers who went out into No Man's Land, with rifles and bombs. Some of the night-dresses, so clean and dainty as they had come out of the milliner's shop, were stained red before the end of the adventure. And Germans in their dug-outs caught a glimpse of these fantastic figures before death came quickly, or a shout of surrender. The Pierrots went back with some prisoners in the moonlight, and Canadian staff officers chuckled with laughter along telephone wires when the tale was told.

Some of the prisoners who are taken do nothing but weep for the first few days after capture. "The prisoners are young," reports the Intelligence officer about the latest batch, "and have wept copiously since their capture." The men I have seen myself during the past few days had a look of misery in their eyes. They hate these midnight raids of ours, coming suddenly upon them night after night through the white glimmer of the snowfields. They have taken dogs into the trenches now to give a quicker and surer warning than young sentries, who are afraid to cry out when they see white figures moving, because they think they see them always, when shadows stir in the moonlight across the snow. Our men during recent nights have heard these dogs giving short, sharp barks. One of them came out into No Man's Land and sniffed about some black things lying quiet under the cover of snow. No alarm was given when some friends of mine went out to make an attack some nights ago, and it was lucky for them, for if they had been discovered too soon all their plans would have been spoilt, and white smocks would not have saved them.

They were the 8/10th Gordons of the 15th Division. Some of my readers will remember the crowd, for I have described my meetings with them up and down the roads of war. It is they who arranged the details of the night's adventure, and because it is typical of the things that happen—of the Terror that comes in the night—it is worth telling. The Highlanders, when they took up their attacking line, were dressed in white smocks covering their kilts, and in steel helmets painted white. Their black arms and feet were like the smudges on the snow. They lay very quiet, visible on the left, from the Butte de Warlencourt, that old high mound in the Somme battlefields which was once the burial-place of a prehistoric man and is now the tomb of young soldiers in the Durham Light Infantry who fought and died there. The moon was bright on the snow about them, but a misty vapour was on the ground. Each man had been warned not to cough or sneeze. Their rifles were loaded, and with bayonets fixed, so that there should be no rattle of arms or clicks of bolts. They were in two parties, and their orders were to overthrow the advanced German posts which were known to be in front of the Butte, and to form a ring of posts round the position attacked while its dug-outs were being dealt with. A heavy barrage was fired suddenly up and down the German lines, so as to bewilder the enemy as to the point of attack, and the Gordons in their white smocks rose up and advanced. Two shots rang out from one of the German posts. No more than that. The two waves of men went on. Those on the right flank had trouble in crossing the ground. Several of them fell into deep shell-craters frozen hard. A machine-gun was fired on the left, but was then silenced by our shell-fire. The men inclined a little to the left, and came round on the west side of the position, where there was a small quarry. On their way they surprised an enemy post and took six prisoners.

A little way farther on they came across a trench-mortar, a dug-out, and two terror-stricken men. An officer put a Stokes bomb down the mortar and blew it up. The men were taken, and the dug-out was destroyed. Then the Gordons went on to the Butte de Warlencourt. Underneath it were the dug-outs of a German company, snow-capped and hidden. The Scots went round like wolves hunting for the way down. There were four ways down, and three of them were found low down about four yards apart. Men were talking down there excitedly. Their German speech was loud and there was the note of terror in it.

"Come out!" shouted the Gordons several times; but at one entrance only one man came out, and at another only one, and at the third twelve men, who were taken prisoners. The others would not surrender. Some bombs and a Stokes shell were thrown down the doorways, and suddenly this nest of dug-outs was seen to collapse, and black smoke came up from the pit, melting the edges of the snow. Down below the voices went on, rising to high cries of terror. Then flames appeared, shedding a red glare over No Man's Land.

On the left the Gordons had been held up by machine-gun fire and rifle-fire, which came across to them from a trench to which they were advancing. At the west side of the trench, in a wired enclosure, the machine-gun was troublesome. Some of the white smocks fell. An attempt was made to rush it, but failed. Afterwards the gun and the team were knocked out by a shell. A group of Germans came out of the trench and started bombing, until a Stokes bomb scattered them. Then the Gordons went down and brought out some prisoners, and blew up a dug-out.

It was time to go back, for the German barrage had begun; but the Gordons were able to get home without many casualties. Nearly two hours afterwards a loud explosion was heard across the way, as though a bomb store had blown up. The sky was red over there by the flare of a fire.... In the dug-outs of the Butte de Warlencourt a whole company of Germans was being burnt alive.

V

THE BATTLE OF BOOM RAVINE

February 15

On the way to Miraumont there was a deep gully called Boom Ravine, and here on February 17 there was fierce fighting by the Royal Fusiliers, the Northamptons, and the Middlesex men of the 29th Division.

In difficulty, in grim human courage, in all its drama of fog, and darkness, and shell-fire, and death, it seems to me to hold most of what this war means to individual men—all that can be asked of them in such hours.

The thaw had just set in and the ground was soppy, which was bad luck. In spite of the thaw, it was horribly, damply cold, but the men had been given a good meal before forming up for the attack, and officers brought up the rum ration in bottles, so that the men could attack with some warmth in them. In the utter darkness, unable to make any glimmer of light lest the enemy should see, the brigades tried to get into line. Two companies lost themselves, and were lost, but got into touch again in time. It was all black and beastly. A great fire of high explosives burst over our assembly lines. The darkness was lit up by the red flashes of these bursting shells. Men fell, wounded and dead. The Royal Fusiliers were specially tried, and their brigadier wondered whether they would have the spirit to get up and attack when the hour arrived. But when the moment came the survivors rose and went forward, and fought through to the last goal. They were the first to get to Grandcourt Trench, which lay between them and the Boom Ravine. The wire was not cut, and there was a hammering of machine-guns and the swish of machine-gun bullets. This battalion had already lost all its officers, who had gone forward gallantly, leading their men and meeting the bullets first. A sergeant-major took command, shouted to his men to keep steady, and found a gap through the wire. They forced their way through, passed Grandcourt Trench, and, with other men, dropped into Boom Ravine.

That place is a sunken road, almost parallel with Grandcourt Trench, and with South Miraumont Trench beyond. Before war came—even last summer, indeed—it was like a Devonshire lane, with steep shelving banks, thirty to forty feet high, and trees growing on either side, with overhanging roots. It was not like a Devonshire lane when our men scrambled and fell down its banks. It was a ravine of death. Our shell-fire had smashed down all the trees, and their tall trunks lay at the bottom of the gulley, and their branches were flung about. The banks had been opened out by shell-craters, and several of the German dug-outs built into the sides of them were upheaved or choked. Dead bodies or human fragments lay among the branches and broken woodwork. A shell of ours had entered one dug-out and blown six dead men out of its doorway. They sprawled there at the entrance. Inside were six other dead. From dug-outs not blown up or choked came groups of German soldiers, pallid and nerve-broken, who gave themselves up quickly enough. One man was talkative. He said in perfect English that he had been coachman to an English earl, and he cursed our artillery, and said that if he could get at our blinking gunners he would wring their blighted necks—or words to that effect.

But the battle was not over yet. While Boom Ravine was being cleared of its living inhabitants by the Royal Fusiliers other waves were coming up; or, rather, not waves, but odd groups of men, dodging over the shell-craters, and hunting as they went for German snipers, who lay in their holes firing until they were pinned by bayonet-points. Their bodies lie there now, curled up. Some of them pretended to be dead when our men came near. One of them lay still, with his face in the moist earth. "See that that man is properly dead," said an officer, and a soldier with him pricked the man. He sprang up with a scream, and ran hard away—to our lines. Six prisoners came trudging back from the Ravine, with a slightly wounded man as an escort. On the way back they found themselves very lonely with him, and passed some rifles lying in their way. They seized the rifles and became fighting men again, until a little Welsh officer of the South Wales Borderers met them, and killed every one of them with a revolver.

VI

THE ENEMY WITHDRAWS

February 18

The enemy is steadily withdrawing his troops from many positions between Hebuterne and the ground south-west of Bapaume, and our patrols are pushing forward into abandoned country, which they have penetrated in some places for nearly three miles beyond our former line. They are already north-west of Serre, south of Irles, above Miraumont, Petit-Miraumont and Pys, which are now in our hands without a battle. We have gained a number of German strongholds which we expected to win only by heavy fighting, and the enemy has yielded to our pressure, the ceaseless pressure of men and guns, by escaping to a new line of defence along the Bapaume Ridge. This is the most notable movement which has taken place in the war since the autumn of the first year. The German retirement in the battle of the Marne was forced upon them only by actual defeat on the ground. This is a strategical retreat, revealing a new phase of weakness in their defensive conditions. It has not come to our Generals as a surprise. After the battle of Boom Ravine, there were several signs that the enemy contemplated a withdrawal from the two Miraumonts, and our recent capture of Baillescourt Farm and the ground on the north of the Ancre seriously menaced Serre. Yesterday morning, through a heavy grey mist, fires were seen burning along the German front line. For several days the enemy's field-batteries had been firing an abnormal amount of ammunition, and it seemed likely that they were getting rid of their supplies in the forward dumps before withdrawing their guns. Patrols sent out had a queer, uncanny experience. It was very quiet in the mist, almost alarmingly quiet. They pushed in after the enemy. Not a sound, not a shot came from Serre.... These reports were sent back, and more patrols were sent forward in various directions. They pushed on, picking up a few prisoners here and there who were sniping from shell-holes and serving solitary machine-guns. These men confessed that they had been left behind with orders to keep firing and to make a show so that we might believe the ground was still strongly held. Farther on the right the same thing was happening. Patrols went out and sent back messages saying that no enemy was ahead. They went into Miraumont, and in the centre of the main road a mine blew up with a loud explosion; but by great good luck none of our men were hurt. At the end of the street six Germans were seen among the ruins. They were fired at and disappeared. Miraumont was taken without another shot than this, and with it Little Miraumont, next door.

Last night our troops advanced towards Warlencourt and south of Irles, and they took possession of the famous Butte, that high mound above the bones of some prehistoric man, for which there had been so much bloody fighting in the autumn and the first month of this year. From the direction of Bapaume the noise of heavy explosions was heard, as though ammunition dumps were being blown up, and for the first time perhaps since the German retreat from the Marne the enemy was destroying his own material of war on his way back.

VII

OUR ENTRY INTO GOMMECOURT

February 28

Last night the German troops abandoned Gommecourt and Pusieux and our men followed the first patrols, who had felt forward and took possession of the salient which keeps to the line of the park surrounding the famous old château.

This entry into Gommecourt without a fight was most sensational. It was here on July 1 of 1916 that waves of London men of the 56th Division assaulted an almost impregnable position, and by the highest valour and sacrifice broke and held its lines until forced back by massed gun-fire which threatened them with annihilation. Many of our dead lay there, and the place will be haunted for ever by the memory of their loss and great endurance. At last the gates were open. The enemy's troops had stolen away in the dusk, leaving nothing behind but the refuse of trench life and the litter of trench tools. In order to keep the way open for their withdrawal, strong posts of Germans with machine-guns held out in a wedge just south of Rossignol Wood and in Biez Wood, which is west of Bucquoy. These rear-guard posts, numbering an officer or two and anything between thirty to sixty men with machine-guns, and telephones keeping them in touch with the main army, were chosen for their tried courage and intelligence, and stayed behind with orders to hold on to the last possible moment.

All the tricks of war are being used to check and kill our patrols. In addition to trip-wires attached to explosives, German helmets have been left about with bombs concealed in them so as to explode on being touched, and there are other devices of this kind which are ingenious and devilish. The enemy's snipers and machine-gunners give our men greater trouble, but are being routed out from their hiding-places. There were a lot of them in the ruins of Pusieux, but last night, after sharp fighting and a grim man-hunt among the broken brickwork, the enemy was destroyed in this village, and our line now runs well beyond it to Gommecourt, on the left and down to Irles on the right. The enemy has destroyed Irles church tower, as he has destroyed the church of Achiet-le-Petit, and the famous clock tower of Bapaume, on which we tried to read the time from the high ground westward during the battles of the Somme. This is to get rid of observation which might be useful to us in our advance.

Heavy shell-fire has been concentrated by enemy batteries on the village of Irles, and he is also barraging with high explosives upon Serre, Miraumont, Grandcourt, and other places from which he has withdrawn. It is probable that he is using up his reserves of ammunition in the dumps along the line of his retirement. Many of his heavy guns still remain on railway mountings behind Bapaume—we are now less than a mile from that town—and they are doing double duty by quick firing. The latest village to fall into our hands is Thilloy, north of Ligny-Thilloy, and just south of Bapaume, and the enemy is now retiring to Loupart Wood, Achiet-le-Petit, and Bucquoy, strongly defended for the time being by a thick belt of wire.

It is enormously interesting to speculate upon this new plan of the German High Command. It is a plan forced upon him by steady pressure of our attacks, which thrust him into bad ground, where the condition of his troops was hideous, but, beyond all, by the fear that our fighting power in the spring might break his armies if they stayed on their old line. Now he is executing with skill, aided by great luck—for the foggy weather is his luck—a manœuvre designed to shorten his line, thereby increasing his offensive and defensive man-power, and to withdraw in the way that he intends to make it difficult for pursuit, and so to gain time to fall back upon new and stronger lines of defence.

It is difficult to describe the feelings of our men who go forward to these villages and capture them, and settle down in them for a day or two, unless you have gazed at those places for months through narrow slits in underground chambers, and know that it would be easier to go from life to eternity than cross over the enemy's wire into those strongholds while they are inhabited by men with machine-guns.

You cannot imagine the thrill of walking one day into Gommecourt, or Miraumont, or Irles, without resistance, and seeing in close detail the way of life led by the men who have been doing their best to kill you. There is something uncanny in handling the things they handled, in sitting at the tables where they took their meals, in walking about the ruins which our guns made above them. I had this thrill when I walked through Gommecourt—Gommecourt the terrible, and the graveyard of so many brave London boys who fell here on July 1—and up through Gommecourt Park, with its rows of riven trees, to a point beyond, and to a far outpost where a group of soldiers attached to the Sherwood Foresters of the 46th Division, full of spirit and gaiety, in spite of the deadly menace about them, had dragged up a heavy trench-mortar and its monstrous winged shells, which they were firing into a copse 500 yards away where Fritz was holding out. So through the snow I went into Gommecourt down a road pitted with recent shell-holes, and with a young Sherwood Forester who said, "It's best to be quick along this track. It ain't a health resort."

It was not a pretty place at all, and there were nasty noises about it, as shells went singing overhead, but there was a sinister sense of romance, a look of white and naked tragedy in snow-covered Gommecourt. Our guns had played hell with the place, though we could not capture it on July 1. Thousands of shells, even millions, had flung it into ruin—the famous château, the church, the great barns, the school-house, and all the buildings here. Not a tree in what had once been a noble park remained unmutilated. On the day before the Germans left a Stokes mortar battery of ours fired 1100 shells into Gommecourt in a quarter of an hour.

"No wonder old Fritz left in a hurry," said the young officer who had achieved this record. He chuckled at the thought of it, and as he went through Gommecourt with me pointed out with pride the "top-hole" effect of all our gun-fire. To him, as a gunner, all this destruction was a good sight. He stopped in front of a hole big enough to bury a country cottage, and said, "That was done by old Charley's 9·45 trench-mortar. Some hole, what?"

"Looks as if some German officer had had to walk home," said the trench-mortar officer, who was a humorous fellow, as he glanced at a shattered motor-car.

So many of the young officers of ours are humorous fellows, and I am bound to say that I never met a merrier party than a little lot I found at a spot called Pigeon Wood, far beyond Gommecourt, where the enemy flings shells most of the day and night, so that it is a litter of broken twigs and branches.

A sergeant-major took me up there and introduced me to his officers.

"This is the real Street of Adventure," he said, "though it's a long way from Fleet Street"—which I thought was pretty good for a sergeant-major met in a casual way on a field of battle. It appeared that there was to be a trench-mortar "stunt" in half an hour or so, and he wanted me to see "the fun." Through the driving snow we went into the bit of wood, trampling over the broken twigs and stepping aside from shell-holes, and because of the nasty noises about—I hear no music in the song of the shell—I was glad when the sergeant-major went down the entrance of a dug-out and called out for the officer.

It was one of the deep German dug-outs thirty or forty feet down, and very dark on the way. In the room below, nicely panelled, were the merry grigs I had come to meet, and in less than a minute they had made me welcome, and in less than five I was sitting on a German chair at a German table, drinking German soda-water out of German glasses, with a party of English boys 500 yards from the German outposts over the way.

They told me how they had brought their trench-mortar up. It was an absolute record, and they were as proud and pleased as schoolboys who have won a game. They roared with laughter at the story of the senior officer chased by two Boches, and roared again when the captain sent round to the "chemist's shop" next door for some more soda-water and a bottle of whisky. They had found thousands of bottles of soda-water, and thousands of bombs and other things left behind in a hurry, including a complete change of woman's clothing, now being worn by one of our Tommies badly in need of clean linen.

"This dug-out is all right," said one of the younger officers, "but you come and see mine. It's absolutely priceless."

It was one of the best specimens of German architecture I have ever seen on a battlefield. It was not only panelled but papered. It was furnished elegantly with a washhand-stand and a gilded mirror and German coloured prints—and not all our shells could touch it, because of its depth below the ground. ... I saw the trench-mortar "stunt," which flung up volcanoes in the German ground by Kite Copse, and stood out in the snow with a party of men who had nothing between them and the enemy but a narrow stretch of shell-broken earth, and went away from the wood just as the enemy began shelling it again, and sat down under the bank with one of the officers when the enemy "bracketed" the road back with whiz-bangs, and stopped on the way to take a cup of tea in another dug-out, and to make friends with other men who were following up the enemy, and moving into German apartments for a night or so, before they go farther on, with that keen and spirited courage which is the only good thing in this war. They are mostly boys—I am a Rip Van Winkle to them—and with the heart of boyhood they take deadly risks lightly and make a good joke of a bad business, and are very frightened sometimes and make a joke of that, and are great soldiers though they were never meant for the trade. The enemy is falling back still, but these boys of ours are catching him up, and are quick in pursuit, in spite of the foul ground and the foul weather and the barrage of his guns.

VIII

WHY THE ENEMY WITHDREW

March 3

The weather is still favourable to the enemy in his plan of withdrawal. Yesterday there was over all the battlefields such a solid fog, after a night of frost which condensed the earth's moisture, that one could not see fifty yards ahead. Our airmen, if they had thought it worth while mounting, would have stared down into this white mist and seen nothing else. Our gunners had to fire "off the map" at a time when direct observation would have been most valuable. I do not remember to have seen anything so uncanny on this front as the effect of our men moving in this heavy wet darkness like legions of shadows looming up in a grey way, and then blotted out. The fog clung to them, dripped from the rims of their steel helmets, made their breath like steam. The shaggy coats of horses and mules plastered with heavy streaks of mud were all damp with little beads of moisture as white as hoar-frost.

Nothing so far in this German movement has been sensational except the fact itself. Fantastic stories about gas-shells, battles, and great slaughter in the capture of the enemy's positions are merely conjured up by people who know nothing of the truth.

The truth is simple and stark. The enemy decided to withdraw, and made his plans to withdraw with careful thought for detail in order to frustrate any preparations we might have made to deal him the famous knock-out blow and in order to save his man-power, not only by escaping this great slaughter which was drawing near upon him as the weeks passed, but by shortening his line and so liberating a number of divisions for offensive and defensive purposes. He timed this strategical withdrawal well. He made use of the hard frost for the movement of men and guns and material, and withdrew the last men from his strongholds on the old line just as the thaw set in, so that the ground lapsed into quagmire more fearful than before the days of the long frost, and pursuit for our men and our guns and our material was doubly difficult. He destroyed what he could not take away, and left very little behind. He fired many of his dug-outs, and left only a few snipers and a few machine-gunners in shell-holes and strong posts to hold up our patrols while the next body of rear-guard outposts fell back behind the barbed wire in front of the series of diagonal trench lines which defend the way to Bapaume. In Gommecourt our troops found only one living man, and he was half dead and quite blind. He had been wounded twenty-four hours previously by a bomb from one of our scouts and had crawled back into a dug-out. It is astounding, but, I believe, quite true, that he knew nothing about the abandonment of Gommecourt, even when it had been achieved. He would not believe it when our men told him. He had lain in his earth-hole wondering at the silence, believing himself deaf as well as blind, except that he could hear the crash of shells. He was frightened because he could hear no movement of his fellow-soldiers.

The German scheme is undoubtedly to delay our advance as much as possible and at the cheapest price to himself, so that much time may have elapsed (while his submarines are still at work, and his diplomats, and his propaganda) before we come up to him with all our weight of men and metal upon the real lines to which he is falling back. By belts of barbed wire between the lines of retirement, down past Loupart Wood, and then past Grevillers and Achiet, and outside Bapaume, as well as by strong bodies of picked troops holding on to these positions until the last moment before death or capture or escape, and by massing guns eastward of Bapaume in order to impede our pursuit by long-range fire from his "heavies," and to hold the pivot while his troops swing back in this slow and gradual way, he hopes to make things easy for himself and damnably difficult for us.

March 12

Loupart Wood, a high belt of trees, thick and black against the sky, is the storm-centre of the battle line on this part of the front. Our guns were busy with it, flinging shells into its network of naked branches. The shell-bursts were white against its blackness, and the chalky soil in front of it was tossed up in spraying fountains. From the enemy's side high explosives were dropping over Miraumont, and Irles was being heavily bombarded. It was like a day in the first battles of the Somme, and brought back to me old memories of frightfulness. Behind me were the Somme battlefields, one vast landscape of the abomination of desolation strewn still with the litter of great conflict, with thousands of unexploded shells lying squat in mud, and hideously tormented out of all semblance of earth's sweet beauty by millions of shell-holes and the yawning chasms of mine-craters, and the chaos of innumerable trenches dug deep and then smashed by the fury of heavy guns. That is an old picture which I have described, or failed to describe, a score of times when over this mangled earth, yard by yard, from one ruin to another, from one copse of broken woodland to another group of black gallows which were trees, our men went fighting, so that here is the graveyard of gallant youth, and the Field of Honour which is sacred to the soul of our race. It was the old picture, but into it came to-day as yesterday new men of ours who are carrying on the tale to whatever ending it may have. They came through mud and in mud and with mud. The heavy horses of the gunners and transport men were all whitened with the wet chalk to the ears. Mules were ridiculous, like amphibious creatures who had come up out of the slime to stare with wicked eyes at what men are doing with the earth's surface. Eight-inch guns were wallowing in bogs from which their shiny snouts thrust up, belching forth flame. Over the wide, white, barren stretch of hell which we call the battlefield their monstrous shells went howling after the full-throated roars which clouted one's ear-drums like blows from a hammer. And between the guns, and in front of the guns, and past the guns went our marching men, our mud men, with wet steel helmets, with gobs of mud on their faces, with clods of mud growing monstrously upon their boots at every step.

A grim old war, fantastic in its contrasts and in its stage properties! Once when I heard the chimes of midnight in Covent Garden and stood drinking at a coffee-stall by Paul's Church I never guessed I should find such a place of wayside refreshment, such a house on wheels, in the middle of Armageddon. But there it was to-day, a coffee-stall bang in the middle of the battlefield, and there, asking for a "mug o' thick," stood a crowd of English soldiers, worse scarecrows than the night birds of the London slums and more in need of warmth for body and soul. Not far away, well under shell-fire, was a London omnibus, and as a mate in evil days, a Tank.

The rain came down in a thick drizzle. Loupart Wood disappeared like a ghost picture. Irles was blotted out. Our eight-inch shells went howling out of a cotton-wool mist. Our men went marching with their steel hats down against the beat of the rain. It was a wintry scene again—but on the moist air there was a faint scent not of winter—a smell of wet earth sweeter than the acrid stench of the battlefields. It was the breath of spring coming with its promise of life. And with its promise of death.

The enemy is still holding out in Achiet-le-Petit and Bucquoy, though I believe his residence there is not for long. From what I saw to-day watching our bombardment of the line to which he has retreated, it seems certain that he will be compelled to leave in a hurry, just as he left Loupart Wood the night before last.

As I went over the battlefields to-day it was made visible to me that the enemy has suffered most devilish torments in the ground from which he is now retreating. All north of Courcelette, up by Miraumont and Pys, and below Loupart Wood, this wild chaos—all so upturned by shell-fire that one's gorge rises at the sight of such obscene mangling of our mother earth—is strewn with bodies of dead German soldiers. They lie grey wet lumps of death over a great stretch of ground, many of them half buried by their comrades or by high explosives. Most of them are stark above the soil with their eye-sockets to the sky. I stood to-day in a ravine to which the Regina Trench leads between Pys and Miraumont, and not any morbid vision of an absinthe-maddened dream of hell could be more fearful than what I stared at standing there, with the rain beating on me across the battlefield, and the roar of guns on every side, and the long rushing whistles of heavy shells in flight over Loupart Wood. The place was a shambles of German troops. They had had machine-gun emplacements here, and deep dug-outs under cover of earth-banks. But our guns had found them out and poured fire upon them. All this garrison had been killed and cut to pieces before or after death. Their bodies or their fragments lay in every shape and shapelessness of death, in puddles of broken trenches or on the edge of deep ponds in shell-craters. The water was vivid green about them, or red as blood, with the colour of high-explosive gases. Mask-like faces, with holes for eyes, seemed to stare back at me as I stared at them, not with any curiosity in this sight of death—for it is not new to me—but counting their numbers and reckoning the sum of all these things who a little time ago were living men. Some of our dead lay among them, but out of 850 lying hereabouts, 700 were German soldiers.

Our gun-fire, continued to-day as yesterday, leaves nothing alive or whole when it is concentrated on a place like this, deliberate in smashing it. Here it had flung up machine-gun emplacements and made rubbish-heaps of their casemates and guns. It had broken hundreds of rifles into matchwood, and flung up the kit of men from deep dug-outs, littering earth with their pouches and helmets and bits of clothing. Where I stood was only one patch of ground on a wide battlefield. It is all like that, though elsewhere the dead are not so thickly clustered. For miles it is all pitted with ten-feet craters intermingling and leaving not a yard of earth untouched. It is one great obscenity, killing for all time the legend of war's glory and romance. Over it to-day went a brave man on his mission. He was not a soldier, though he had a steel hat on his head and a khaki uniform. He was a padre who, with a fellow-officer and a few men, is following up the fighting men, burying those who fall, our own and the enemy's. He collects their identity discs and marks their graves. For weeks he has done this, and, though he is sickened, he goes on with a grim zeal, searching out the new dead, directing the digging of new graves, covering up Germans who lie so thick. He waved his hand to me as he went up to Loupart Wood, and I saluted him as a man of fine enthusiasm and good courage in the abomination of desolation which is our battle-ground.

The secret of the German retreat is here on this ground. To save themselves from another such shambles they are falling back to new lines, where they hope to be safer from our massed artillery. But as I saw to-day our gun-fire is following them closely and forcing them back at a harder pace, and killing them as they go. The horror of war is still close at their heels, and will never end till the war ends, though that may be long, O Lord! from now.

IX

THE AUSTRALIANS ENTER BAPAUME

March 17

To-day quite early in the morning our Australian troops entered Bapaume. Achiet-le-Petit and Biefvillers also fell into our hands and the enemy is in retreat across the plains below the Bapaume Ridge.

I had the honour of going into Bapaume myself this morning, and the luck to come out again, and now, sitting down to tell the history of this day—one of the great days in this war—I feel something of the old thrill that came to all of us when the enemy fell back from the Marne and retreated to the Aisne.

Bapaume is ours after a short, sharp fight with its last rear-guard post. I don't know how much this will mean to people at home, to whom the town is just a name, familiar only because of its repetition in dispatches. To us out here it means enormous things—above all, the completion or result of a great series of battles, in which many of our best gave their lives so that our troops could attain the ridge across which they went to-day, and hold the town which is the gateway to the plains beyond. For this the Canadians fought through Courcelette, where many of their poor bodies lie even now in the broken ground. For this the Australians struggled with most grim heroism on the high plateau of Pozières, which bears upon every yard of its soil the signs of the most frightful strife that mankind has known in all the history of warfare. For another stage on the road to Bapaume London regiments went up to Eaucourt-l'Abbaye, and the Gordons stormed the white mound of the Butte de Warlencourt. For the capture of Bapaume our patrols with machine-guns and trench-mortars, and our gunners with their batteries, have pushed on through the day and night during recent weeks, gaining La Barque and Ligny and Thilloy, not sleeping night after night, not resting, so that beards have grown on young chins, and the eyes of these men look glazed and dead except for the fire that lights up in them when there is another bit of work to do. For this, thousands of British soldiers have laboured like ants—it is all like a monstrous ant-heap in commotion—carrying up material of war, building roads over quagmires, laying down railroads under shell-fire, plugging up shell-craters with bricks and stone so that the horse transport can follow, and the guns get forward and the way be made smooth for the fall of Bapaume.... So Bapaume is ours. Years ago, and months ago, and weeks ago, I have travelled the road towards Bapaume from Amiens to Albert, from that city of the Falling Virgin, past the vast mine-crater of La Boisselle to Pozières and beyond, and always I and comrades of mine have glanced sideways and smiled grimly at the milestones which said so many kilometres to Bapaume—and yet a world of strife to go. Now those stones will not stare up at us with irony. There is no longer a point on the road where one has to halt lest one should die. To-day I walked past the milestones—ten, seven, four, three, one—and then into Bapaume, and did not die, though to tell the truth death missed me only a yard or two. I have had many strange and memorable walks in war, but none more wonderful than this, for really it was a strange way this road to Bapaume, with all the tragedy and all the courage of this warfare, and all the ugly spirit of it on every side. I walked through the highway of our greatest battles up from Pozières, past Courcelette, with Martinpuich to the right, past the ruins of Destremont Farm, and into the ruins of Le Sars. Thence the road struck straight towards Bapaume, with the grey pyramid of the Butte de Warlencourt on one side and the frightful turmoil of Warlencourt village on the other. I did not walk alone along this way through the litter of many battles, through its muck and stench and corruption under a fair blue sky, with wisps of white cloud above and the glitter of spring sunshine over all the white leprous landscape of these fields. Australian soldiers were going the same way—towards Bapaume. Some of them wore sprigs of shamrock in their buttonholes, and I remembered it was St. Patrick's Day. Some of them were gunners, and some were pioneers, and some were Generals and high officers, and they had the look of victory upon them and were talking cheerily about the great news of the day. It was in the neighbourhood of a haunted-looking place called "La Coupe-gueule," which means Cut-throat, once I imagine a farmstead or estaminet, that the road became the scene of very recent warfare—a few hours old or a few minutes. One is very quick to read how old the signs are by the look of the earth, by smells and sounds, by little, sure, alarming signs. Dead horses lay about—newly dead. Shell-craters with clean sides pock-marked the earth ten feet deep. Aeroplanes had crashed down, one of them a few minutes ago. A car came along and I saw a young pilot lying back wounded, with another officer smoking a cigarette, grave-eyed and pallid. Pools of red mud were on either side of the road, or in the middle of it. Everywhere in neighbouring ground hidden batteries were firing ceaselessly, the long sixty-pounders making sharp reports that stunned one's ears, the field-guns firing rapidly with sharp knocks. Up in the blue sky there was other gunning. Flights of our aeroplanes were up singing with a loud, deep, humming music as of monstrous bees. Our "Archies" were strafing a German plane, venturesome over our country. High up in the blue was the rattle of machine-gun fire. Down from Bapaume came a procession of stretcher-bearers with wounded comrades shoulder high, borne like heroes, slowly and with unconscious dignity, by these tall men in steel helmets. The enemy had ruined the road in several places with enormous craters, to stop our progress. They were twenty yards across, and very deep, and fearful pitfalls in the dark. Past the ruins of La Barque, past the ruins of Ligny-Thilloy and Thilloy, went the road to Bapaume. Behind me now on the left was Loupart Wood, the storm-centre of strife when I went up to it a few days ago, and Grevillers beside it, smashed to death, and then presently and quite suddenly I came into sight of Bapaume. It was only a few hundred yards away, and I could see every detail of its streets and houses. A street along the Bapaume road went straight into the town, and then went sharply at right angles, so that all the length of Bapaume lay in front of me. The sun was upon it, shining very bright and clear upon its houses. It was a sun-picture of destruction. Bapaume was still standing, but broken and burnt.

In the middle of Bapaume stood the remnant of the old clock-tower, a tower of brown brick, like the houses about it, but broken off at the top, only two-thirds of its former height, and without the clock which used to tell us the time miles away when we gazed through telescopes from distant observation-posts, when we still had miles to go on the way to Bapaume. On the right of the old tower the town was burning, not in flames when I entered, but with volumes of white smoke issuing slowly from a row of red villas already gutted by fires lighted before the Germans left.

A Colonel came riding out of Bapaume. He was carrying a big German beer-jug, and showed me his trophy, leaning down over his saddle to let me read the words:

Zum Feldgrauen Hilfe

"Is it pretty easy to get into Bapaume?" I asked.

"Barring the heavy stuff," he said. "They're putting over shells at the rate of two or three a minute."

They were, and it was not pleasant, this walk into Bapaume, though very interesting.

It was when I came to an old farmhouse and inn—the shell of a place—on the left of the road (Duhamel-Equarriseur, Telephone No. 30) that I knew the full menace of this hour was above and about. The enemy was firing a great number of shells into Bapaume. They came towards us with that rushing, howling noise which gives one a great fear of instant death, and burst with crashes among the neighbouring houses. They were high explosives, but shrapnel was bursting high, with thunderclaps, which left behind greenish clouds and scattered bullets down. I went through the outer defences of Bapaume, walking with a General who was on his way to the town, and who pointed out the strength of the place. Lord! It was still horribly strong, and would have cost us many lives to take by assault. Three belts of wire, very thick, stood solid and strong, in a wide curve all round the town. The enemy had dug trenches quite recently, so that the earth was fresh and brown, and dug them well and perfectly. Only here and there had they been broken by our shell-fire, though some of the dug-outs had been blown in.

Just outside Bapaume, on the south-east side, is an old citadel built centuries ago and now overgrown with fir-trees which would have given a great field of fire to German machine-gunners, and I went afterwards into snipers' posts, and stood at the entrance of tunnels and bomb-proof shelters, not going down or touching any of the litter about because of the danger lurking there in dark entries and in innocent-looking wires and implements. There was a great litter everywhere, for the German soldiers had left behind large numbers of long-handled bombs and thousands of cartridges, and many tools and implements.

Before getting into Bapaume I crossed the railway line from Arras, through Biefvillers, which was now on fire. They had torn up the rails here, but there was still the track, and the signal-boxes and signs in German.

Im Bahnhof
Nur 10 Km.

That is to say, the speed of trains was to be only 10 kilometres an hour into the station.

Another signboard directed the way for "Vieh" and "Pferde" (cattle and horses), and everywhere there were notice-boards to trenches and dug-outs:

Nach 1 Stellung
Für zwei Offizieren

As I entered Bapaume I noticed first, if my memory serves, the Hôtel de Commerce, with "garage" painted on a shell-broken wall, and immediately facing me an old wooden house with a shoot for flour. Many of the houses had collapsed as though built of cards, with all their roofs level with the ground. Others were cut in half, showing all their rooms and landings, and others were gutted in ways familiar to English people after Zeppelin raids. Higher up on the right, as I have said, rows of red-brick villas were burnt out, and smoke was rising in steady volumes from this quarter of the town. The church, a white stone building, was also smouldering. There were no Germans in the town, unless men are still hiding there. The only living inhabitant was a little kitten which ran across the square and was captured by our patrols, who now have it as a pet.

There were other men living early in the morning, but they are now dead. It was a company of German machine-gunners who held out as the last rear-guard. They fired heavily at our men, but were quickly overpowered. The first message that came back from the entering troops was laconic:

"While entering Bapaume we came across a party the whole of which was accounted for. The mopping-up of Bapaume is now complete."

I did not stay very long in the town. It was not a health resort. High explosives were crumping every part of the town, and the buildings were falling. Pip-squeaks were flung about horribly, and when I came out with the General and another officer a flush of them came yelling at us and burst very close, flinging up the ground only a few yards away. The roadway of "pavé" had been hurled up in huge chumps of stone, and shrapnel was again breaking to the right of us. I struck across country eastwards to see the promised land, and on the way to the near ridge turned and stared back at Bapaume in the glow of the sunset. Ours at last!

The fires were still burning in the other villages, and it was such a scene of war as I saw first when Dixmude was a flaming torch and Pervyse was alight in the beginning of the world-conflict.... At about half-past nine that night the enemy fired several quick rounds from his field-batteries. Then there was a strange silence, unbroken by any shell-fire. The Germans had fired their last shot in the battles of the Somme.

X

THE RESCUE OF PÉRONNE

March 18

To-day at 7 A.M. a battalion of the Royal Warwicks of the 48th Division entered Péronne.

Standing alone that statement would be sensational enough. The French fought for Péronne desperately through more than two years of war, and now it is the luck of the British troops to enter it, as yesterday we entered Bapaume, after a short action with the enemy's rear-guards. But the news does not stand alone. The whole of the old German line south of Arras, strong as one vast fortress, built by the labour of millions of men, dug and tunnelled and cemented and timbered, with thousands of machine-gun redoubts, with an immense maze of trenches, protected by forests of barbed wire, had slipped away as though by a landslide, and the enemy is in rapid retreat to new lines some miles away. As he goes he is laying fire and waste to the countryside. North-east of Bapaume, into which I went yesterday with our troops, and west of Péronne, scores of villages are burning. One of them, larger than a village, the town of Athies, is a flaming torch visible for miles around. Others are smouldering ruins, from which volumes of smoke are rolling up into the clear blue sky. Of all this great tract of France, which the enemy has been forced to abandon to avoid the menace of combined attack, there is no beauty left, and no homesteads, nor farms, but only black ruins and devastation everywhere. The enemy is adopting the full cruelty of war's malignancy. He has fouled the wells in his wake, so that if our soldiers' horses should drink there they will die. Over the water-ways he has burnt his bridges. Cross-roads have been mined, opening up enormous craters like those I saw yesterday outside Bapaume. High-explosive traps have been placed in the way of our patrols, to scatter them in fragments if they lack caution.

It is impossible to give our exact line at the present moment. We have no exact line. Village after village has fallen into our hands since midday yesterday. Our cavalry patrols are over the hills and far away. Our infantry patrols are pushing forward unto new territory, so that only aeroplanes know the exact whereabouts. As one aviator has reported:

"Our men are lighting fires and taking their dinners at places off the map. They are going into pubs which have been burnt out to find beer which is not there."

North and east of Bapaume our patrols have gone beyond the villages of Rocquenes, Bancourt, Favreuil, and Sapignies. Intelligence officers riding out on bicycles to these places were scared to find themselves so lonely, and believed that the enemy must be close at hand. But the enemy was still farther off. Our cavalry, working up past Logeast Wood, penetrated east of Acheit-le-Grand and turned the German line of Behagnies-Ytres.

Much farther south, in the neighbourhood of Nesle, French and British cavalry patrols came into touch to-day, and one of our aviators reports that he saw French civilians waving flags and cheering them.

The Germans have a cavalry screen behind their rear-guards. They were seen yesterday north of Bapaume and southwards beyond Roye. And some of them were chased by a British airman at a place called Ennemain. He swooped low like an albatross, and brought a man off his horse by a machine-gun bullet. Others stampeded from this terrible bird.

This morning our troops were through Eterpigny beyond Barleux, and found the villages of Misery and Marchelepot. There was some fighting last night and this morning in the neighbourhood of Péronne. The enemy had snipers and machine-gunners about, and kept some of their batteries back until the last possible moment, flinging 5·9's and smaller shells over our side of the lines, and firing heavily until about ten o'clock. Then the gun-fire ceased, and there was not a shot. His guns were going back along the dark roads, his rear-guards moved away, leaving behind them their great defensive works of the Bapaume Ridge, and burning villages.

March 19

Refusing to give battle, the enemy has retired still farther over open country east of Bapaume, and our cavalry patrols are in touch with his mounted rear-guards. The exact location is vague, as the movement continues, and our cavalry is in small units, moving cautiously between a large number of burning villages, which are everywhere alight. Small parties of the enemy were encountered last night in the open near Ytres and Berthincourt, and some snipers in an omnibus opened fire upon a cavalry patrol, and were scattered by an aeroplane which swooped low, sweeping them with machine-gun bullets.

South of the Somme our cavalry got in touch with German cavalry at Rouy and with German cyclists at Potte. All the bridges have been destroyed to cover the enemy's retreat, as at Rouy and Breuil, and all the wells have been filled with filth and rubbish.

It is a most extraordinary experience to follow up through this abandoned country from which the enemy has fled, as I have found to-day in tramping through the district of Péronne and into that deserted and destroyed town. A few weeks ago I went a journey to the new lines we had taken over from the French south of the Somme. Then it was under the full blast of shell-fire, and not a day passed without the enemy flinging high explosives into the ruined villages of Herbécourt, Estrées, Flaucourt, and Biaches. From Mont-St.-Quentin, on the flank of Péronne, he had the observation of all our ground, so that it was horrible to see that hill staring down on one, and by daylight in the open country one moved always under the menace of death. To-day that menace had gone. The evil spell had lifted, and we moved freely in the sight of Mont-St.-Quentin, unafraid and with a strange sense of safety. He had gone from there yesterday morning, and, at the same time, had crept away from the trenches at Biaches, and across his wooden bridges to Péronne, and out of this town to the open country, hurrying through the night to escape from our pursuit.

I went down into Biaches, a wild chaos of trenches and dug-outs and ruin, and passed through the front line held by our troops until about 6.30 yesterday morning, and went with difficulty through the German barbed wire still uncut, so that we were tangled and caught in it. Then I passed into the old German lines, and went across the wooden causeway built by them over the marshes down to the bank of the Somme. On the other side of the river loop I saw for the first time Péronne, taken by the enemy in the autumn of 1914, and fought for furiously by the French, who regained it for a while and lost it again. It was dead quiet over there. No shell burst over it, but a little smoke rolled above its houses. From that distance, the broad river's width, it did not look much destroyed. It was only afterwards that I saw how much. Several wooden bridges spanned the Somme, and I tried two of these to get across, but there were great gaps which I could not jump. Before leaving the enemy had broken them and tried to hide the damage from the view of our airmen by putting up straw screens. All the trees in the marshes had been slashed by our shell-fire. Empty barrels floated in the water with broken boats, and the old barge, called Notre Dame d'Amiens, was blown in half. Snipers' posts had been built, outfacing our lines, and German ammunition and bombs and coiled wire and a great litter of timber lay about.

I managed at last to get into Péronne by a wide curve through the Faubourg de Paris, over the piled stones of a broken bridge with planks across the gaps put there by our soldiers so that the enemy could be followed in pursuit. He had been careful to check us as long as possible, though it was not very long, for an hour after his going the Royal Warwicks and some Londoners marched unto the Grande Place. Down the Faubourg de Paris all the trees had been cut down, so that they had crashed across the street, making a great barricade. Before going, firebrands had been at work, setting alight all the houses not already smashed by shell-fire. They were burning, when I passed them, so fiercely that the hot breath of the flames was upon my face. Even now it was possible to see that Péronne had once been a little town of old-world dignity and charm. Frontages of some of these gutted houses were richly carved in Renaissance style, among them being the ruins of the Palais de Justice and the Hôtel de Ville and the Maison Municipale. Here and there along the Rue St.-Fursy and in the Grande Place was an old French mansion built before the Revolution, now just a skeleton of broken brickwork and timber. Though many houses were still standing enough to see they were houses, there was hardly one that had escaped the wrath of war. It was pitiful to see here and there old signs, showing the life of the town in peace, such as the "Librairie Nouvelle," the "Teinturerie Parisienne" belonging to Mme. Poitevineau, the Notary's house, full of legal books and papers scattered on a charred floor beneath a gaping roof, a shop for "articles de chasse" kept by one Monsieur Bourdin. Those signboards, reminding one of Péronne before the war, were side by side with other signboards showing the way of German life until 6.30 yesterday morning. At the entrance to the town is a notice: "Durchgang bei Tage streng Verboten."

Most houses are labelled, "Keller für 60 Mann." At the entrance to a dug-out below the town hall is the notice, "Verwundete und Kranke" (For wounded and sick). The only inhabitants of the Grande Place were a big black cat, looking sick and sorry for itself, and a dummy figure dressed as a French Zouave, sprawling below the pedestal of a statue to Catherine de Poix, heroine of the siege of 1870. The statue had been taken away, like that of Faidherbe in the square of Bapaume. On top of the pedestal had been laid the dummy figure in French uniform, but our soldiers removed it. Péronne was a dead town, like Ypres, like Bapaume, like all those villages in the wake of the German retreat. Over its old fortifications, built by Vauban, and over its marshes wild duck are flying.

PART II

ON THE TRAIL OF THE ENEMY

I

THE MAKING OF NO MAN'S LAND

March 21

For several days now I have been going with our advancing troops into towns, villages, and country abandoned by the enemy in his retreat. It has been a strange adventure, fantastic as a dream, yet with the tragedy of reality. The fantasy is in crossing over No Man's Land into the German lines, getting through his wire, and passing through trenches inhabited by his soldiers until a day or two ago, travelling over roads and fields down which his guns and transport went, and going into streets and houses in which there are signs of his recent occupation. He has ruined all his roads, opening vast craters in them, and broken all his bridges, but our men have been wonderfully quick in making a way over these gaps, and this morning I motored over the German trenches at Roye, zigzagging over this maze of ditches and dug-outs by bridges of planks before getting to the roads behind his line.

After passing the area of shell-fire on our side and his, the field of shell-craters, the smashed barns and houses and churches, the tattered tree-trunks, the wide belts of barbed wire, one comes to country where grass grows again, and where the fields are smooth and rolling, and where the woods will be clothed with foliage when spring comes to the world again—country strange and beautiful to a man like myself, who has been wandering through all the filth and frightfulness of the Somme battlefields. German sentry-boxes still stand at the cross-roads. German notice-boards stare at one from cottage walls, or where the villages begin. Thousands of coils of barbed wire lie about in heaps, for the enemy relied a great deal upon this means of defence, and in many places are piles of shells which he has not removed. Gun-pits and machine-gun emplacements, screens to hide his roads from view, observation-posts built in tall trees, remain as signs of his military life a mile or two back from his front lines, but behind the trenches are the towns and villages in which he had his rest billets, and it is in these places that one sees the spirit and temper of the men whom we are fighting. The enemy has spared nothing on the way of his retreat. He has destroyed every village in his abandonment with a systematic and detailed destruction. Not only in Bapaume and in Péronne has he blown up, or burnt, all the houses which were untouched by shell-fire, but in scores of villages he has laid waste the cottages of the peasants, and all their farms and all their orchards. At Réthonvillers this morning, to name only one village out of many, I saw how each house was marked with a white cross before it was gutted with fire. The Cross of Christ was used to mark the work of the Devil.

In Bapaume and Péronne, in Roye and Nesle and Liancourt, and all these places over a wide area, German soldiers not only blew out the fronts of houses, but with picks and axes smashed mirrors and furniture and picture-frames. As a friend of mine said, a cheap-jack would not give fourpence for anything left in Péronne, and that is true, also, of Bapaume. There is nothing but filth in those two towns; family portraits have been kicked into the gutters. I saw a picture of three children in Bapaume, and it was smeared with filth in the writing of a dirty word. The black bonnets of old women who once lived in those houses lie about the rubbish-heaps, and by some strange, pitiful freak are almost the only signs left of the inhabitants who lived here before the Germans wrecked their houses. The enemy has left nothing that would be good for dwelling or for food. Into the wells he has pitched filth so that the people may not drink.

But that is not the greatest tragedy I have seen. The ruins of houses are bad to see when done deliberately, even when shell-fire has spared them in the war zone. But worse than that is the ruin of women and children and living flesh. I saw that ruin to-day in Roye and Nesle. I was at first rejoiced to see how the first inhabitants were liberated after being so long in hostile lines. I approached them with a queer sense of excitement, eager to speak with them, but instantly when I saw those women and children in the streets, and staring at me out of windows, I was struck with a chill of horror. The women's faces were dead faces, sallow and mask-like, and branded with the memory of great agonies. The children were white and thin—so thin that their cheek-bones protruded. Hunger and fear had been with them too long.

The Mayor of Nesle told me that after the first entry of the Germans on August 29, 1914, and after the first brutalities, the soldiers had behaved well, generally speaking. They were well disciplined, and lived on good terms with the people, as far as possible. Probably he tells the truth fairly, and I believe him. But the women with whom I spoke were passionate and hysterical, and told me other stories. I believe them too. Because these women, who are French, had to live with the men who were killing their husbands and brothers, and that is a great horror. They had to submit to the daily moods of men who were sometimes sulky and sometimes drunk. The officers were often drunk. They had to see their children go hungry, for though the Germans gave them potatoes, sometimes they took away the hens, so that there were no eggs, and the cows, so that there was no milk, and the children suffered and were thin. On October 5, 1914, the Kaiser came to Nesle with an escort of five motor-cars, and the soldiers lined the square and cheered him; but the women and children stared and were silent, and hated those white-haired men with the spiked hats. During the battles of the Somme many wounded passed through the town, and others came with awful stories of slaughter and fierce words against the English. Once twenty men of the 173rd Regiment came in. They were half mad, weeping and cursing, and said they were the sole survivors of their regiment.

Then, quite recently, there came the rumour of a German retreat. On Thursday, March 15, the German commandant sent for the Mayor and announced the news. He gave orders for all the inhabitants to leave their houses at 6.30, and to assemble in the streets, while certain houses and streets indicated were to be destroyed. The German commandant, whose name was Herwaardt, said he greatly regretted this necessity. The work was to be carried out by his Oberleutnant Baarth. The people wept at the destruction of their homes, though the houses in the centre of Nesle were spared. But they were comforted by the promise of liberation. For a week previously the enemy had been withdrawing his stores. The garrison consisted of about 800 to 1000 men of the 38th Regiment of Chasseurs and Cyclists. The gunners were the last to leave, and went away at midnight with the rear-guard of infantry. By half-past seven in the morning there was not a German soldier left in Nesle, and at half-past nine a British patrol entered, and the women and children surrounded our men, laughing and weeping. To-day they were being fed by British soldiers, and were waiting round the field-kitchens with wistful eyes.

II

THE LETTER OF THE LAW

March 23

On both sides cavalry patrols are scouting in the woods and villages, and for a few days at least the situation has been extraordinarily like those early days of the war in October of 1914, when our cavalry was operating in Flanders, feeling forward cautiously to test the enemy's strength. For the first time since those days German Uhlans have again been seen on the Western Front. They have been seen moving about the woods and on the skyline.

Little parties of them are in hiding behind the broken walls of villages destroyed in the German retreat. Now and again they bump into our advanced posts and then bolt away, not seeking a fight. These are the manœuvres of open warfare not seen on our Front since the trenches closed us in. Our cavalry patrols are working in the same way. Yesterday one of them encountered some of the enemy on the road to St.-Quentin and very close to that town, where fires are still burning. Our mounted men were suddenly called to a halt by a sharp fusillade of rifle and machine-gun bullets. The enemy this time was unmounted and entrenched, and after reconnoitring this position our patrol galloped back.

It is difficult to know always the exact whereabouts of the enemy's advanced posts, as they were scattered about the countryside without any definite trench line, so that officers of corps and divisional staffs who are going out to examine the lie of the land, with a secret hope of finding an adventure on the way, are taking out revolvers, which have long been idle. I found a young staff officer to-day fastening his holster to his belt before starting out on his morning's expedition, and he slapped it and laughed, and said, "I haven't done this for over two years. It is quite like old times." It brings back reminiscences to me also of old days, when with two comrades I moved about the roads of war ignorant of the enemy's position and narrowly escaping his advance-guards. But, after all, it is no joke, and I should hate to get into the middle of an enemy patrol somewhere in this country of burnt and abandoned villages, through which I have been wandering with tired eyes in the sight of all this destruction, so wanton, so brutal, and so ruthless.

For the enemy has adopted the letter of the law in that code of cruelty which governs war, and I can think of nothing more damnable than the horror which came to some hundreds of poor souls, mostly women and children and old stricken men in the village of Rouy-le-Petit above the Somme.

Many of them had been driven into this hamlet from neighbouring villages, which the Germans set on fire. Huddled in the streets of Rouy, they saw the smoke and flames rising from their homesteads, and they were terrorized and crushed. Presently the last German rear-guard went out from Rouy, not cheering and singing as they came in August of 1914, but silent and grim, conscience-stricken also, it seemed, so the French people have told me, because of the law which made them do the things they had done. They had been friendly with the villagers before they smashed their houses, and had been good to the children before breaking their bedsteads and making them homeless. They said again and again in self-excuse, "It is war; it is the order of our high officers! We are bound to do it."

The German guns rumbled through the street of Rouy, and went away with gunners and cyclists and infantry. Night came, and all the noise of distant artillery died down, and there was hardly the sound of a shot over all the country where for nearly three years there has been the ceaseless fire of artillery. Early next morning a British patrol entered the village, and the people crowded round, clasping the soldiers' hands and thanking God for deliverance, and telling of their hunger, which was near starving-point. Then the worst happened. Suddenly shells began to fall over the village, crashing through the roofs and flinging up the ground in the roadway. They were German shells fired by the German gunners who had left only a few hours before. They were not meant to kill the civilians who had been gathered at Rouy, all the women and children and old, weak men. They were meant to kill the British patrols, and so were lawful as an act of war. But one could not be done without the other, and there were civilians who were wounded in Rouy-le-Petit that day. Weeping and wailing, they rushed down into the cellars and took refuge there, while flights of shells followed and tore holes in rooms and walls, and filled the village with smoke and splinters. And that is the lawfulness of war and the horror of war.

When the enemy left he blew up all the cross-roads and made many mine-craters along the way of his retreat. They have scarcely checked us at all, and a tribute of praise is due to our infantry and our labour battalions, who have been repairing those roads with quick, untiring industry. To-day I have met with much traffic of war, French as well as British traffic, the men in blue marching by the men in brown through country where both armies meet. The French soldiers were marching with their bands and colours through the ruined villages, and I never saw more splendid men even in the early days of the war, when the great armies of France went forward with a kind of religious passion and flung back the Germans from the Marne. Our own men had no bands and no colours. There was not the same sense of drama as they passed, but these clean-shaven boys of ours, hardened by foul weather, by frost, and rain-storms, and blizzard, go forward into the great waste, which the enemy had left behind him, in their usual matter-of-fact way, whistling a tune or two, passing a whimsical word along the line, settling down to any old job that comes in a day's work, and finding as much comfort as they can at the end of a long day's march on the lee side of a shell-broken wall.

III

THE ABANDONED COUNTRY

March 24

After long days of tiring adventure in the wake of the German rear-guards, following through places only just evacuated, and tramping through the great ruin they have left behind them, I have tried to give some idea of the tragic drama of it all, the uncanny quietude of the abandoned country, the frightful wreckage of towns and villages destroyed, not by shell-fire, but by picks and axes and firebrands, the deep mine-craters blown under roads, the broken bridges across the Somme, the crowds of starved civilians surrounding our patrols in market squares where they had been herded while their homes were in flames around them, the little bodies of British troops advancing through barbed-wire entanglements into fortress positions like Bapaume and Péronne, and our cavalry patrols feeling their way forward into unknown country where the enemy's rear-guards are in hiding.

That, in a few lines, is the historical picture of this strange new phase of warfare in which we have been pushing forward during the past two weeks. But through it all, to me, an onlooker of these things, there has been one special theme of interest. It is the revelation of the German way of life behind his lines—these abundant lines—his military methods of defence and observation and organization, and the domestic arrangements by which he has tried to make himself comfortable in the field of war. Along every step of the way by which he has retreated there are relics which show us exactly how our enemies lived and fought when they were hidden from us across No Man's Land, and their philosophy of life in war. All that is worth a little study.

Everywhere—outside Bapaume and Péronne and Chaulnes, and all those deserted places near the front lines—one ugly thing stares one in the face: German barbed wire. It is heavier, stronger stuff than ours or the French, with great cross-pieces of iron, and he has used amazing quantities of it in deep wide belts in three lines of defence before his trench systems, and in all sorts of odd places, by bridges and roads and villages even far behind the trenches, to prevent any sudden rush of hostile infantry or to tear our cavalry to pieces should we break his lines and get through. His trenches were deeply dug, and along the whole line from which he has now retreated they are provided with great concreted and timbered dug-outs leading into an elaborate system of tunnelled galleries perfectly proof from shell-fire, and similar to those which I have described often enough in the Somme battlefields. As a builder of dug-outs the German soldier has no equal. But in addition to these trench systems he made behind his lines a series of strong posts cunningly concealed and commanding a wide field of fire with dominating observation over our side of the country.

I found such a place quite by accident yesterday. My car broke down by a little wood near Roye looking across to Damery and Bouchoir, and the woody, wired fields which till a week ago were No Man's Land. When I strolled into the wood I suddenly looked down an enormous sand-pit covering an acre or so, and saw that it was a concealed fortress of extraordinary strength and organization—an underground citadel for a garrison of at least 3000 men perfectly screened by the wood above. Into the sand-banks on every side of the vast pit were built hundreds of chambers leading deeper down into a maze of tunnels which ran right round the central arena. Before leaving the enemy had busied himself with an elaborate packing up, and had taken away most of his movable property, but the "fixtures" still remained, and a litter of mattresses stuffed with shavings, empty wine-bottles, candles which had burnt down on the last night in the old home, old socks and old boots and old clothes no longer good for active service, and just the usual relics which people leave behind when they change houses.

The officers' quarters were all timbered and panelled and papered, with glass windows and fancy curtains. They were furnished with bedsteads looted from French houses, and with mirrors, cabinets, washhand-stands, marble-top tables, and easy chairs. The cross-beams of the roofs were painted with allegorical devices and with legends such as "Gott mitt uns," "Furchtlos und treu," "In Treue fest."

Each room had an enamelled or iron stove, so that the place must have been snug and warm, and I noticed in several of them empty cages from which singing birds had flown when German officers opened the doors before their own flitting.

The men's quarters were hardly less comfortable, and the whole place was organized as a self-contained garrison, with carpenters' shops and blacksmiths' sheds, and a quartermaster's stores still crowded with bombs and aerial torpedoes—thousands of them, which the enemy had left behind in his hurry—and kitchens with great stoves and boilers, and a Red Cross establishment for first aid, and concrete bath-houses with shower-baths and cigar-racks for officers, who smoke before and after bathing. Outside the artillery officers' headquarters was a board painted in white letters, with the following couplet:

Schnell und gut ist unser Schuss
Deutscher Artilleristen Gruss.
(Quick and good is our shooting
Of the German gunners' greeting.)

Shell-craters in the open arena showed the French gunners had returned the greeting, and that the garrison of this citadel had done well to arrange their life mainly as a subterranean existence. But at times when the French guns were quiet and when the French sun was shining they had built alfresco corners with garden seats and tables, round which enormous stacks of wine-bottles were littered, showing, as I have seen in all these abandoned places, the enormous quantity of drink consumed by German officers in their lighter moments.

This citadel in the wood is only one out of similar strong points all along the lines now abandoned by the enemy. Péronne, with Mont-St.-Quentin on its flank, and with the Somme winding around it, and with forests of barbed wire in the marshes below it, could be called impregnable if any place may defy great armies. It was wonderfully fortified with great industry and great skill for over two years, and walking into these places now, marvelling at their strength, I can only ask one question, which certainly the enemy will find it hard to answer. Why has he abandoned such formidable strongholds? It seems to me that there is only one answer. It is because they had to go and not because they wanted to go. It was because they have no longer the strength to hold their old line against the growing gun-power and the growing man-power of the British Armies, and have been compelled to attempt a new strategy which will save their reserves and shorten their line.

Behind the lines the German officers and men lived comfortably in French billets, and organized amusements for battalions in rest. At Bapaume they had a little theatre with painted scenery. Two of the wings were among the few things left in the rubbish-heaps of that poor destroyed town, burnt and sacked by the Germans before they left, and when I went in there with our troops some Australian soldiers propped them up against the walls of a gutted house and inscribed upon them in white chalk the name "Maison de la Co-ee," inviting their comrades to walk up and see the finest show on earth. In Nesle the Germans turned the Café de Commerce into their casino, and played military bands, whose music did not cheer the hearts of wan women whose children were starving.

Strange fellows! Who knows what to make of them? The French people just liberated from their rule, which was a reign of terror in the severity of its official regulations, contradict themselves in expressing their white-hot hatred of the German character and their liking for the individual soldiers who were quartered on them.

"They were kind to the children ... but they burnt our houses."—"Karl was a nice boy. He cried when he went away.... But he helped to smash up the neighbours' furniture with an axe."—"The lieutenant was a good fellow ... but he carried out the orders of destruction."

A woman told me, with a quivering rage in her voice, that a German officer rode his horse into her room one day. Another woman showed me the cut down her hand and arm which she had received from a German soldier who tried to force his way into her house at night. Other stories have been told me by women white with passion.... Yet it is clear that, on the whole, the Germans behaved in a kindly, disciplined way until those last nights, when they laid waste so many villages and all that was in them.

IV

THE CURÉ OF VOYENNES

March 25

In the village of Voyennes, not far from Ham, and one of the few hamlets not utterly destroyed, because the people of the district were herded here while their own houses were being burnt, I went into the ruins of the church. It was easy to see how the flames had licked about its old stones, scorching them red, and how the high oak roof had come blazing down before the walls and pillars had given way. Everything had been licked down by flame except one figure on an encalcined fragment of wall. Only one hand of the Christ there had been burned, and the body hanging on the Cross was unscathed, like so many of those Calvaries which I have seen in shell-fired places.

But this place had not been touched by shell-fire, for it had been far beyond the range of French or British guns; it had been destroyed wilfully. The village around had been spared because of the large number of people driven into it from the neighbouring countryside, and when I called upon the priest who lives opposite the ruin of the church, where he served God and the people of his little parish, I heard the story of its burning.

It was a queer thing to me to sit to-day in that room of the French presbytery talking to the old Curé. Just a week before, on Sunday, at the very hour of my visit, which was at midday, that old church outside the window had become a blazing torch, and this priest, who loved it, had wept tears as hot as its flames, and in his heart was the fire of a great agony. He sat before me, a tall old man of the aristocratic type, with a finely chiselled face, but thin and gaunt, and as sallow as though he had been raised from the dead. If I could put down his words as he spoke them to me with passion in his clear, vivid French, with gestures of those transparent hands which gave a deeper meaning to his words, it would be a great story, revealing the agony of the French people behind the German lines. For the story of this village of Voyennes is just that of all the villages on the enemy's side of the barbed wire.

Here in a few little streets about an old church were the bodily suffering, the spiritual torture, the patient courage, the fight against despair, the brooding but hidden fears, which have been the life over a great tract of France since August 1914. "For a year," said M. le Curé Caron, "my people here have had not a morsel of meat and not a drop of wine, and only bad water in which the Germans put their filth. They gave us bread which was disgusting, and bad haricots and potatoes, and potatoes and haricots, and not enough even, so that the children became wan and the women weak. The American people sent us some food-stuffs, but the Germans took the best of them, and in any case we were always hungry. But those things do not matter, those physical things. It was the suffering of the spirit that mattered, and, monsieur, we suffered mentally so much that it almost destroyed our intelligence, it almost made us silly, so that even now we can hardly think or reason, for you will understand what it meant to us French people. We were slaves after the Germans came in and settled down upon us, and said, 'We are at home; all here is ours.' They ordered our men to work, and punished them with prison for any slight fault. They were the masters of our women, they put our young girls among their soldiers, they set themselves out deliberately at first to crush our spirit, to beat us by terror, to subdue us to their will by an iron rule. They failed, and they were astonished. 'We cannot understand you people,' they said; 'you are so proud, your women are so proud.' And that was true, sir. Some women, not worthy of the name of French women, were weak—it was inevitable, alas!—but for the most part they raised their heads and said, 'We are French, we will never give in to you, not after one year, nor two years, nor three years, nor four years.'

"The Germans asked constantly, 'When do you think the war will end?' We answered, 'Perhaps in five years, but in the end we will smash you,' and this made them very angry, so our people went about with their heads up, scornful, refusing to complain against any severity or any hardship.

"Secretly among ourselves it was different. We could get no news for months except lies. We knew nothing of what was happening. Starvation crept closer upon us. We were surrounded by the fires of hell. As you see, we are in the outer section of the great Somme battle line, and very close to it. For fifty hours at a time the roar of guns swept round us week after week, and month after month, and the sky blazed around us. We were afraid of the temper of the German officers after the defeat on the Marne, and after the battles of the Somme Germany was like a wounded tiger, fierce, desperate, cruel. Secretly, though our people kept brave faces, they feared what would happen if the Germans were forced to retreat. At last that happened, and after all we had endured the days of terror were hard to bear. From all the villages around, one by one, people were driven out, young women and men as old as sixty were taken away to work for Germany, and an orderly destruction began, which ended with the cutting down of our orchards and ruin everywhere. The Commandant before that was a good man and a gentleman, afraid of God and his conscience. He said, 'I do not approve of these things. The world will have a right to call us barbarians.' He asked for forgiveness because he had to obey orders, and I gave it him. An order came to take away all the bells of the churches and all the metalwork. I had already put my church bells in a loft, and I showed them to him, and said, 'There they are.' He was very sorry. This man was the only good German officer I have met, and it was because he had been fifteen years in America and had married an American wife and escaped from the spell of his country's philosophy. Then he went away. Last Sunday, a week ago, at this very hour when the people were all in their houses under strict orders, and already the country was on fire with burning villages, a group of soldiers came outside there with cans of petroleum, which they put into the church. Then they set fire to it, and watched my church burn in a great bonfire. At this very hour a week ago I watched it burn.... That night the Germans went away through Voyennes, and early in the morning, up in my attic, looking through a pair of glasses I saw four horsemen ride in. They were English soldiers, and our people rushed out to them. Soon afterwards came some Chasseurs d'Afrique, and the Colonel gave me the news of the outer world to which we now belong after our years of isolation and misery. Our agony had ended.... The Germans know they were beaten, monsieur; a Commandant of Ham said, 'We are lost.' After the battles of the Somme the men groaned and wept when they were sent off to the Front. 'God,' they cried, 'the horror of the French and English gun-fire; O Christ, save us!' During the battles of the Somme the wounded poured back, a thousand or more a day, and Ham was one great hospital of bleeding flesh. The German soldiers have bad food and not enough of it, and their people are starving as we starved. The German officers behaved to their men with their usual brutality. I have seen them beat the soldiers about the head while those men stood at attention, not daring to say a word, but as soon as the officers are out of the way, the men say, 'We will cut those fellows' throats after the war. We have been deceived! After the war we will make them pay.'"

So the Curé talked to me, and I have only given a few of his words, but what I have given is enough.

V

THE CHÂTEAU OF LIANCOURT

March 28

Day by day our soldiers push farther forward across the country which the Germans have laid waste, so that even when peace comes there will be no dwelling-places where there were once fine châteaux of France, and thriving little towns and hamlets clustering about old farmsteads, and great barns; nor any orchards, where for miles there was white blossom in the Aprils of many centuries, and ruddy fruit in all the autumns of the past.

These men of ours take all this desolation in a matter-of-fact way, as they take everything in this war, and pass almost without thought scenes more than usually fantastic in piled ruins, and it is only by some such phrase or two as "Did you ever see the like?" or "They've made a pretty mess of that!" that they express their astonishment in this wide belt of death which the enemy has left along his tracks. Secretly I think some of them are stirred with a sense of the sinister drama of it all, and are a little staggered by a ruthlessness of war beyond even their own earlier experience, which covers the battle of the Somme. All this is something new, something which seems unnecessary, something more devilish, and our men go poking about among the burnt houses and into the German underground defences searching among the rubbish and examining the relics of the old life there, as though to discover the secret of the men who have gone away, the secret of "Old Fritz" their enemy.

Sometimes they find messages written to them by the enemy in good English, but with dark meanings. In one German dug-out the other day an officer of ours found a note scribbled on the table.

"We are going away, Tommy dear, and leave some empty bottles of Rhein wine. It is the best wine in the world. Take care it is not the best for you."

"When are they coming?" was another note. "Enlist at once, Tommy my boy."

But those things do not explain. It is difficult to find any clue to the character of these German soldiers, who have left behind them proofs of wonderful labour and skill, and proofs of great sentiment and religious piety, and proofs of an ordered cruelty worse than anything seen in France since barbarous days. How can one explain?

Yesterday I went to a village called Liancourt. There is a big château there. Even now at a little distance it seems a place of old romance, with a strong, round tower and high peaked roofs, and great wings of dark old brick. In such a place Henri IV lived. It was centuries old when the Revolution made its heraldic shields meaningless, but until a year or two ago its walls were still hung with tapestries, and its halls were filled with Empire furniture, and its great vaulted cellars with wine. When the Germans came they made it a hospital for their wounded—their Red Cross is still painted on one of the sloping roofs—and though it was far behind their lines, surrounded it with barbed wire which is now red with rust, and built enormous dug-outs in its grounds in case French guns should ever come near. When the Germans went a few days ago they left but an empty shell. They stripped the walls of panelling and tapestry, they took all the clocks and pictures and furniture and carpets, and I wandered yesterday through scores of rooms empty of everything so that my footsteps echoed in them. The Château of Liancourt had been looted from attic to cellar. But quite close to the château the Germans have left the bodies of many of their soldiers, as all over this country, by roadsides and in fields, there are the graves of German dead. Here there was one of their cemeteries, strongly walled with heavy blocks of stone, each grave with its big wooden headpiece, with a stone chapel built for the burial service, and with a "Denkmal," or monument, in the centre of all these dead. It was a memorial put up by Hessian troops in July 1915 to the honour of men taken on the field of honour.

In this graveyard one sees the deep respect paid by the Germans to the dead—French dead as well as German dead.... But just a hundred yards away is another graveyard. It is the cemetery of the little church in the grounds of the château, and is full of vaults and tombs where lay the dust of French citizens, men, women, and children, who died before the horror of this war.

The vaults had been opened by pickaxes. The tombstones were split across and graves exposed. Into these little houses of the dead—a young girl had lain in one of them—rubbish had been flung. From one vault the coffin had been taken away.... The church had been a little gem, with a tall, pointed spire. Not by shell-fire, but by an explosive charge placed there the day before the Germans went away the spire had been flung down and one end of the church blown clean away. The face of its clock lay upon the rubbish-heap. The sanctuary had been opened and the reliquaries smashed. The statues of the saints had been overturned, and the vestments of the priest trampled and torn.

I went into the village of Crémery not far away. Here also the graves had been opened in the churchyard, and in the church the relics of saints had been looted—a queer kind of loot for German homes—and in the sacristy fine old books of prayer and music lay tattered on the floor.

I went again yesterday to the great area of destroyed villages which the enemy left behind him on his retreat to St.-Quentin, and from Holnon Wood, which our cavalry were the first to enter a few weeks ago, looked across the open country between our outposts and that old city whose cathedral rises as a grey mass above the last ridge, so near and so clear when the sunlight falls upon it that our men can see the tracery of the windows. It still stands unbroken and beautiful, though houses have been destroyed around it to clear the enemy's field of fire. German officers use its towers as observation-posts, and can see every movement of our men in the fields below.

"They snipe us with five-point-nines," said a young officer, smoking a cigarette, with his back to a broken wall in a heap of ruins. "They scatter 'em about on the off-chance of hitting some one, and you never can tell where they are likely to drop."

Some of them came whirring across to the Holnon Wood and down into the village of Francilly as I stood looking across to Savy Wood, but not close enough to hurt any one. It is the queerest thing to be in this part of our Front. Go a little too far down a road, mistake one village for another—and it is quite easy, for they all look alike in ruin—and if you are an absent-minded man you can get into the enemy's lines without realizing your danger. Yesterday only occasional shell-bursts and short spasms of machine-gun fire from the edge of Savy Wood came to prove that here masses of men are watching out to kill each other. Pigeons cooed in the woods. The ground at my feet was spangled with anemones, and the sunlight chased shadows across the fields of spring below the city, where soon the streets may be noisy with battle. Our men, living amidst ruin this side of St.-Quentin, have settled down to this life of open warfare as though they had known nothing else. Whether the tragedy of it all sinks into them I do not know, but they whistle music-hall tunes in the vast rubbish-heaps which were once old châteaux of France, and sleep and stack their rifles in ancient crypts among the coffins of French aristocrats who died before, or just a little after, the French Revolution, and find shelter from wind and rain in poor little sacristies filled with statues of saints adjoining churches wrecked by explosive charges before the German soldiers went their way.

One sees the strangest contrasts of life and death in all this countryside, as when yesterday I came across a Highlander playing his pipes in a wild and merry way on an avalanche of old red bricks which once formed part of the mansion of Caulaincourt, with many terraces lined with white statues of Greek goddesses now lying maimed and mutilated among the great rubbish-heaps.

By the roadside on my way I saw some English soldiers resting, and close to them was a marble tablet stuck up in a heap of earth. I read the words carved on the stone, and it told me that here was the heart of Anne-Joséphine Barandier, Marquise de Caulaincourt, who died in Paris on January 17, 1830.

Poor dead heart of Madame la Marquise! In a vault near by all the tablets of her family had been smashed, and the coffins laid bare, but there was no little niche to show where the lady's heart had been.

Outside in the churchyard there was a great tomb to the memory of the French soldiers who fell in 1871, and next to them the graves of German soldiers killed in this war, and a wooden cross to Second Lieutenant Nixon, of the Royal Flying Corps, killed here behind the German lines on July 19, 1915.

VI

THE OLD WOMEN OF TINCOURT

March 29

One scene on the roadside of war will remain sharp in my memory among all these scenes in the wilderness which the Germans have made behind them, through which I have been passing. It is because of the courage of old women who sat there on the way.

It was beyond Péronne, and through the open country where our cavalry patrols are working, and in the village of Tincourt. Up beyond Lagnicourt the guns yesterday were firing heavily, and sharp gusts of wind blew forward the noise of a greater and farther bombardment, deep and low. Quite close, the village of Roisel, taken by our troops the day before, was still smouldering, and all around for miles was the long black trail of war with hundreds of villages and farmsteads laid low by fire and dynamite before the Germans left them in retreat. But in Tincourt only the outer streets and the neighbouring, separate buildings had been destroyed. The main part of the village was still standing, though the enemy had shelled it a little the day before. When I came into it I saw that it was one of the few places left by the Germans, because it was a concentration camp of civilians driven in from other villages while they were being smashed.

The people were gathered about the roadway, about two hundred of them, sitting or standing among piles of bundles, like refugees in the old days of the war. There were many old, old women among them in black dresses and bonnets, and a group of young girls, of fifteen or so, and small boys and children in arms. They were looking down the road anxiously, and I found that they were waiting for British lorries and ambulances to take them away to safer country, beyond the reach of German shell-fire. They were people who had just been liberated from hostile rule. The grey tide of the German army had swept back from them, and they found themselves once again free people of France, with news of France, and of the world on the other side of the trenches and the wire which for two years and a half had shut them in with the enemy.

I spoke with the old women, these brave old grandmothers who were sitting homeless and houseless on their bundles in the midst of a ruined countryside, within reach of the guns. They were not weeping but smiling. They were not afraid but scornful of the perils through which they had passed.

They were thin because they had stinted for their grandchildren, and they had suffered great misery, but they held their old grey heads high, and said, "For our sons' sake we endured all things."

They are the grandmothers of the babes who know nothing of all this war, and one day will be told, and the mothers of men who have fought and died, and who fight and die with supreme self-sacrifice in the shambles of this war. They are women worthy of hero sons, themselves heroic. They were not passionate against the enemy, only contemptuous of him, and of his rule of them. They liked some of the German soldiers and made no accusations of individual brutality, but cursed the spirit which had laid waste their villages, and destroyed their houses and orchards, and taken away their young girls and all men to the age of fifty. They spoke with the dispassionate eloquence of people who have been in earthquakes and shipwrecks and tornadoes. German cruelty was natural, inevitable, and unarguable, and the soldiers who had done these things were the slaves of the fate which ordained their acts.

"I was taken to Roisel from my own village farther back," said one old lady. "They burnt my house and my neighbours' houses and drove us forward. Roisel was all in flames when we passed through. The fires came out of the houses, and the heat of them scorched us. Then we came to Tincourt, and yesterday they shelled us. The little ones were afraid. Our young girls were weeping and full of terror.

"You will understand that it is hard to see one's village destroyed, and to see one's sisters taken away, and not to know what is to happen next. For us old women it was not so bad. We are too old to weep, having wept too much. We thought of our sons who have died for France. We showed our scorn for the enemy by hiding our fear."

"They know they are beaten," said the old ladies. "They ask always for peace. They are afraid of the punishment which God holds in store for them for all this wickedness."

"Yes," said one of the old women, "they will be punished. What we have suffered they will suffer. All this"—she thrust up a skinny hand towards the ruined land behind her—"must be paid for."

"It is William who will pay," said another old woman, "with his head."

It was like the talk of the Greek Fates, the three old women who held the thread and spun the thread and snipped the thread—this talk of the old women of Tincourt, so passionless, so hard, so fair, so certain. But I marvelled at their courage, sitting there on their bundles, after tramping away from their blazing homesteads, waiting for British lorries to take them away from a place which, even then, was registered by German guns, with the young girls, and the babies who were born under hostile rule.

VII