Part + 

VI + 

Psychology on the Somme + 

I + 

All that had gone before was but a preparation for what now was to come. Until July 1 of 1916 the British armies were only getting ready for the big battles which were being planned for them by something greater than generalship⁠—by the fate which decides the doom of men. + 

The first battles by the Old Contemptibles, down from Mons and up by Ypres, were defensive actions of rearguards holding the enemy back by a thin wall of living flesh, while behind the New Armies of our race were being raised. + 

The battles of Festubert, Neuve Chapelle, Loos, and all minor attacks which led to little salients, were but experimental adventures in the science of slaughter, badly bungled in our laboratories. They had no meaning apart from providing those mistakes by which men learn; ghastly mistakes, burning more than the fingers of life’s children. They were only diversions of impatience in the monotonous routine of trench warfare by which our men strengthened the mud walls of their School of Courage, so that the new boys already coming out might learn their lessons without more grievous interruption than came from the daily visits of that Intruder to whom the fees were paid. In those two years it was France which fought the greatest battles, flinging her sons against the enemy’s ramparts in desperate, vain attempts to breach them. At Verdun, in the months that followed the first month of ’16, it was France which sustained the full weight of the German offensive on the western front and broke its human waves, until they were spent in a sea of blood, above which the French poilus, the “hairy ones,” stood panting and haggard, on their death-strewn rocks. The Germans had failed to deal a fatal blow at the heart of France. France held her head up still, bleeding from many wounds, but defiant still; and the German High Command, aghast at their own losses⁠—six hundred thousand casualties⁠—already conscious, icily, of a dwindling manpower which one day would be cut off at its source, rearranged their order of battle and shifted the balance of their weight eastward, to smash Russia. Somehow or other they must smash a way out by sledgehammer blows, left and right, west and east, from that ring of nations which girdled them. On the west they would stand now on the defensive, fairly sure of their strength, but well aware that it would be tried to the utmost by that enemy which, at the back of their brains (at the back of the narrow brains of those bald-headed vultures on the German General Staff), they most feared as their future peril⁠—England. They had been fools to let the British armies grow up and wax so strong. It was the folly of the madness by which they had flung the gauntlet down to the souls of proud peoples arrayed against them. + 

Our armies were now strong and trained and ready. We had about six hundred thousand bayonet-men in France and Flanders and in England, immense reserves to fill up the gaps that would be made in their ranks before the summer foliage turned to russet tints. + 

Our power in artillery had grown amazingly since the beginning of the year. Every month I had seen many new batteries arrive, with clean harness and yellow straps, and young gunners who were quick to get their targets. We were strong in “heavies,” twelve-inchers, 9.2’s, eight-inchers, 4.2’s, mostly howitzers, with the long-muzzled sixty-pounders terrible in their long range and destructiveness. Our aircraft had grown fast, squadron upon squadron, and our aviators had been trained in the school of General Trenchard, who sent them out over the German lines to learn how to fight, and how to scout, and how to die like little gentlemen. + 

For a time our flying-men had gone out on old-fashioned “buses”⁠—primitive machines which were an easy prey to the fast-flying Fokkers who waited for them behind a screen of cloud and then “stooped” on them like hawks sure of their prey. But to the airdrome near St.-Omer came later models, out of date a few weeks after their delivery, replaced by still more powerful types more perfectly equipped for fighting. Our knights-errant of the air were challenging the German champions on equal terms, and beating them back from the lines unless they flew in clusters. There were times when our flying-men gained an absolute supremacy by greater daring⁠—there was nothing they did not dare⁠—and by equal skill. As a rule, and by order, the Germain pilots flew with more caution, not wasting their strength in unequal contests. It was a sound policy, and enabled them to come back again in force and hold the field for a time by powerful concentrations. But in the battles of the Somme our airmen, at a heavy cost of life, kept the enemy down a while and blinded his eyes. + 

The planting of new airdromes between Albert and Amiens, the long trail down the roads of lorries packed with wings and the furniture of aircraft factories, gave the hint, to those who had eyes to see, that in this direction a merry hell was being prepared. + 

There were plain signs of massacre at hand all the way from the coast to the lines. At Etaples and other places near Boulogne hospital huts and tents were growing like mushrooms in the night. From casualty clearing stations near the front the wounded⁠—the human wreckage of routine warfare⁠—were being evacuated “in a hurry” to the base, and from the base to England. They were to be cleared out of the way so that all the wards might be empty for a new population of broken men, in enormous numbers. I went down to see this clearance, this tidying up. There was a sinister suggestion in the solitude that was being made for a multitude that was coming. + 

“We shall be very busy,” said the doctors. + 

“We must get all the rest we can now,” said the nurses. + 

“In a little while every bed will be filled,” said the matrons. + 

Outside one hut, with the sun on their faces, were four wounded Germans, Würtemburgers and Bavarians, too ill to move just then. Each of them had lost a leg under the surgeon’s knife. They were eating strawberries, and seemed at peace. I spoke to one of them. + 

“Wie befinden sie sich?” + 

“Ganz wohl; wir sind zufrieden mit unsere behandlung.” + 

I passed through the shell-shock wards and a yard where the “shell-shocks” sat about, dumb, or making queer, foolish noises, or staring with a look of animal fear in their eyes. From a padded room came a sound of singing. Some idiot of war was singing between bursts of laughter. It all seemed so funny to him, that war, so mad! + 

“We are clearing them out,” said the medical officer. “There will be many more soon.” + 

How soon? That was a question nobody could answer. It was the only secret, and even that was known in London, where little ladies in society were naming the date, “in confidence,” to men who were directly concerned with it⁠—having, as they knew, only a few more weeks, or days, of certain life. But I believe there were not many officers who would have surrendered deliberately all share in “The Great Push.” In spite of all the horror which these young officers knew it would involve, they had to be “in it” and could not endure the thought that all their friends and all their men should be there while they were “out of it.” A decent excuse for the safer side of it⁠—yes. A staff job, the Intelligence branch, any post behind the actual shambles⁠—and thank God for the luck. But not an absolute shirk. + 

Tents were being pitched in many camps of the Somme, rows and rows of bell tents and pavilions stained to a reddish brown. Small cities of them were growing up on the right of the road between Amiens and Albert⁠—at Dernancourt and Daours and Vaux-sous-Corbie. I thought they might be for troops in reserve until I saw large flags hoisted to tall staffs and men of the R.A.M.C. busy painting signs on large sheets stretched out on the grass. It was always the same sign⁠—the Sign of the Cross that was Red. + 

There was a vast traffic of lorries on the roads, and trains were traveling on light railways day and night to railroads just beyond shell-range. What was all the weight they carried? No need to ask. The “dumps” were being filled, piled up, with row upon row of shells, covered by tarpaulin or brushwood when they were all stacked. Enormous shells, some of them, like gigantic pigs without legs. Those were for the fifteen-inchers, or the 9.2’s. There was enough high-explosive force littered along those roads above the Somme to blow cities off the map. + 

“It does one good to see,” said a cheery fellow. “The people at home have been putting their backs into it. Thousands of girls have been packing those things. Well done, Munitions!” + 

I could take no joy in the sight, only a grim kind of satisfaction that at least when our men attacked they would have a power of artillery behind them. It might help them to smash through to a finish, if that were the only way to end this long-drawn suicide of nations. + 

My friend was shocked when I said: + 

“Curse all munitions!” + 

II + 

The British armies as a whole were not gloomy at the approach of that new phase of war which they called “The Great Push,” as though it were to be a glorified football-match. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to know the thoughts of vast masses of men moved by some sensational adventure. But a man would be a liar if he pretended that British troops went forward to the great attack with hangdog looks or any visible sign of fear in their souls. I think most of them were uplifted by the belief that the old days of trench warfare were over forever and that they would break the enemy’s lines by means of that enormous gun-power behind them, and get him “on the run.” There would be movement, excitement, triumphant victories⁠—and then the end of the war. In spite of all risks it would be enormously better than the routine of the trenches. They would be getting on with the job instead of standing still and being shot at by invisible earthmen. + 

“If we once get the Germans in the open we shall go straight through them.” + 

That was the opinion of many young officers at that time, and for once they agreed with their generals. + 

It seemed to be a question of getting them in the open, and I confess that when I studied the trench maps and saw the enemy’s defensive earthworks thirty miles deep in one vast maze of trenches and redoubts and barbed wire and tunnels I was appalled at the task which lay before our men. They did not know what they were being asked to do. + 

They had not seen, then, those awful maps. + 

We were at the height and glory of our strength. Out of England had come the flower of our youth, and out of Scotland and Wales and Canada and Australia and New Zealand. Even out of Ireland, with the 16th Division of the south and west, and the 36th of Ulster. The New Armies were made up of all the volunteers who had answered the call to the colors, not waiting for the conscription by class, which followed later. They were the ardent ones, the young men from office, factory, shop, and field, university and public school. The best of our intelligence were there, the noblest of our manhood, the strength of our heart, the beauty of our soul, in those battalions which soon were to be flung into explosive fires. + 

III + 

In the month of May a new type of manhood was filling the old roads behind the front. + 

I saw them first in the little old town of St.-Pol, where always there was a coming and going of French and English soldiers. It was market-day and the Grande Place (not very grand) was crowded with booths and old ladies in black, and young girls with checkered aprons over their black frocks, and pigs and clucking fowls. Suddenly the people scattered, and there was a rumble and rattle of wheels as a long line of transport wagons came through the square. + 

“By Jove!⁠ ⁠… Australians!” + 

There was no mistaking them. Their slouch-hats told one at a glance, but without them I should have known. They had a distinctive type of their own, which marked them out from all other soldiers of ours along those roads of war. + 

They were hatchet-faced fellows who came riding through the little old market town; British unmistakably, yet not English, not Irish, nor Scottish, nor Canadian. They looked hard, with the hardness of a boyhood and a breeding away from cities or, at least, away from the softer training of our way of life. They had merry eyes (especially for the girls round the stalls), but resolute, clean-cut mouths, and they rode their horses with an easy grace in the saddle, as though born to riding, and drove their wagons with a recklessness among the little booths that was justified by half an inch between an iron axle and an old woman’s table of colored ribbons. + 

Those clean-shaven, suntanned, dust-covered men, who had come out of the hell of the Dardanelles and the burning drought of Egyptian sands, looked wonderfully fresh in France. Youth, keen as steel, with a flash in the eyes, with an utter carelessness of any peril ahead, came riding down the street. + 

They were glad to be there. Everything was new and good to them (though so old and stale to many of us), and after their adventures in the East they found it splendid to be in a civilized country, with water in the sky and in the fields, with green trees about them, and flowers in the grass, and white people who were friendly. + 

When they came up in the train from Marseilles they were all at the windows, drinking in the look of the French landscape, and one of their officers told me that again and again he heard the same words spoken by those lads of his. + 

“It’s a good country to fight for⁠ ⁠… It’s like being home again.” + 

At first they felt chilly in France, for the weather had been bad for them during the first weeks in April, when the wind had blown cold and rain-clouds had broken into sharp squalls. + 

Talking to the men, I saw them shiver a little and heard their teeth chatter, but they said they liked a moist climate with a bite in the wind, after all the blaze and glare of the Egyptian sun. + 

One of their pleasures in being there was the opportunity of buying sweets! “They can’t have too much of them,” said one of the officers, and the idea that those hard fellows, whose Homeric fighting qualities had been proved, should be enthusiastic for lollipops seemed to me an amusing touch of character. For tough as they were, and keen as they were, those Australian soldiers were but grown-up children with a wonderful simplicity of youth and the gift of laughter. + 

I saw them laughing when, for the first time, they tried on the gas-masks which none of us ever left behind when we went near the fighting-line. That horror of war on the western front was new to them. + 

Poison-gas was not one of the weapons used by the Turks, and the gas-masks seemed a joke to the groups of Australians trying on the headgear in the fields, and changing themselves into obscene specters⁠ ⁠… But one man watching them gave a shudder and said, “It’s a pity such splendid boys should have to risk this foul way of death.” They did not hear his words, and we heard their laughter again. + 

On that first day of their arrival I stood in a courtyard with a young officer whose gray eyes had a fine, clear light, which showed the spirit of the man, and as we talked he pointed out some of the boys who passed in and out of an old barn. One of them had done fine work on the Peninsula, contemptuous of all risks. Another had gone out under heavy fire to bring in a wounded friend⁠ ⁠… “Oh, they are great lads!” said the captain of the company. “But now they want to get at the Germans and finish the job quickly. Give them a fair chance and they’ll go far.” + 

They went far, from that time to the end, and fought with a simple, terrible courage. + 

They had none of the discipline imposed upon our men by Regular traditions. They were gipsy fellows, with none but the gipsy law in their hearts, intolerant of restraint, with no respect for rank or caste unless it carried strength with it, difficult to handle behind the lines, quick-tempered, foul-mouthed, primitive men, but lovable, human, generous souls when their bayonets were not red with blood. Their discipline in battle was the best. They wanted to get to a place ahead. They would fight the devils of hell to get there. + 

The New-Zealanders followed them, with rosy cheeks like English boys of Kent, and more gentle manners than the other “Anzacs,” and the same courage. They went far, too, and set the pace awhile in the last lap. But that, in the summer of ’16, was far away. + 

In those last days of June, before the big battles began, the countryside of the Somme valley was filled with splendor. The mustard seed had spread a yellow carpet in many meadows so that they were Fields of the Cloth of Gold, and clumps of red clover grew like flowers of blood. The hedges about the villages of Picardy were white with elderflower and drenched with scent. It was haymaking time and French women and children were tossing the hay on wooden pitchforks during hot days which came between heavy rains. Our men were marching through that beauty, and were conscious of it, I think, and glad of life. + 

IV + 

Boulogne was a port through which all our youth passed between England and the long, straight road which led to No Man’s Land. The seven-day-leave men were coming back by every tide, and all other leave was canceled. + 

New “drafts” were pouring through the port by tens of thousands⁠—all manner of men of all our breed marching in long columns from the quayside, where they had orders yelled at them through megaphones by A.P.M.’s, R.T.O.’s, A.M.L.O.’s, and other blue tabbed officers who dealt with them as cattle for the slaughterhouses. I watched them landing from the transports which came in so densely crowded with the human freight that the men were wedged together on the decks like herrings in barrels. They crossed from one boat to another to reach the gangways, and one by one, interminably as it seemed, with rifle gripped and pack hunched, and steel hat clattering like a tinker’s kettle, came down the inclined plank and lurched ashore. They were English lads from every country; Scots, Irish, Welsh, of every regiment; Australians, New-Zealanders, South Africans, Canadians, West Indian negroes of the Garrison Artillery; Sikhs, Pathans, and Dogras of the Indian Cavalry. Some of them had been sick and there was a greenish pallor on their faces. Most of them were deeply tanned. Many of them stepped on the quayside of France for the first time after months of training, and I could tell those, sometimes, by the furtive look they gave at the crowded scene about them, and by a sudden glint in their eyes, a faint reflection of the emotion that was in them, because this was another stage on their adventure of war, and the drawbridge was down at last between them and the enemy. That was all, just that look, and lips tightened now grimly, and the pack hunched higher. Then they fell in by number and marched away, with Redcaps to guard them, across the bridge, into the town of Boulogne and beyond to the great camp near Etaples (and near the hospital, so that German aircraft had a good argument for smashing Red Cross huts), where some of them would wait until somebody said, “You’re wanted.” They were wanted in droves as soon as the fighting began on the first day of July. + 

The bun shops in Boulogne were filled with nurses, V.A.D.’s, all kinds of girls in uniforms which glinted with shoulder-straps and buttons. They ate large quantities of buns at odd hours of mornings and afternoons. Flying-men and officers of all kinds waiting for trains crowded the Folkestone Hotel and restaurants, where they spent two hours over luncheon and three hours over dinner, drinking red wine, talking “shop”⁠—the shop of trench-mortar units, machine-gun sections, cavalry squadrons, air-fighting, gas schools, and anti-gas schools. Regular inhabitants of Boulogne, officers at the base, passed to inner rooms with French ladies of dangerous appearance, and the transients envied them and said: “Those fellows have all the luck! What’s their secret? How do they arrange these cushie jobs?” From open windows came the music of gramophones. Through half-drawn curtains there were glimpses of khaki tunics and Sam Brown belts in juxtaposition with silk blouses and coiled hair and white arms. Opposite the Folkestone there was a park of ambulances driven by “Scottish women,” who were always on the move from one part of the town to the other. Motorcars came hooting with staff-officers, all aglow in red tabs and armbands, thirsty for little cocktails after a dusty drive. Everywhere in the streets and on the esplanade there was incessant saluting. The arms of men were never still. It was like the St. Vitus disease. Tommies and Jocks saluted every subaltern with an automatic gesture of convulsive energy. Every subaltern acknowledged these movements and in turn saluted a multitude of majors, colonels, and generals. The thing became farcical, a monstrous absurdity of human relationship, yet pleasing to the vanity of men lifted up above the lowest caste. It seemed to me an intensification of the snob instinct in the soul of man. Only the Australians stood out against it, and went by all officers except their own with a careless slouch and a look of “To hell with all that handwagging.” + 

Seated on high stools in the Folkestone, our young officers clinked their cocktails, and then whispered together. + 

“When’s it coming?” + 

“In a few days⁠ ⁠… I’m for the Gommecourt sector.” + 

“Do you think we shall get through?” + 

“Not a doubt of it. The cavalry are massing for a great drive. As soon as we make the gap they’ll ride into the blue.” + 

“By God!⁠ ⁠… There’ll be some slaughter!” + 

“I think the old Boche will crack this time.” + 

“Well, cheerio!” + 

There was a sense of enormous drama at hand, and the excitement of it in boys’ hearts drugged all doubt and fears. It was only the older men, and the introspective, who suffered from the torture of apprehension. Even timid fellows in the ranks were, I imagine, strengthened and exalted by the communal courage of their company or battalion, for courage as well as fear is infectious, and the psychology of the crowd uplifts the individual to immense heights of daring when alone he would be terror-stricken. The public-school spirit of pride in name and tradition was in each battalion of the New Army, extended later to the division, which became the unit of esprit de corps. They must not “let the battalion down.” They would do their damnedest to get farther than any other crowd, to bag more prisoners, to gain more “kudos.” There was rivalry even among the platoons and the companies. “A” Company would show “B” Company the way to go! Their sergeant-major was a great fellow! Their platoon commanders were fine kids! With anything like a chance⁠— + 

In that spirit, as far as I, an outsider could see and hear, did our battalions of boys march forward to “The Great Push,” whistling, singing, jesting, until their lips were dry and their throats parched in the dust, and even the merriest jesters of all were silent under the weight of their packs and rifles. So they moved up day by day, through the beauty of that June in France, thousands of men, hundreds of thousands to the edge of the battlefields of the Somme, where the enemy was intrenched in fortress positions and where already, before the last days of June, gunfire was flaming over a vast sweep of country. + 

V + 

On the 1st of July, 1916, began those prodigious battles which only lulled down at times during two and a half years more, when our British armies fought with desperate sacrificial valor beyond all previous reckoning; when the flower of our youth was cast into that furnace month after month, recklessly, with prodigal, spendthrift haste; when those boys were mown down in swaths by machine-guns, blown to bits by shellfire, gassed in thousands, until all that country became a graveyard; when they went forward to new assaults or fell back in rearguard actions with a certain knowledge that they had in their first attack no more than one chance in five of escape, next time one chance in four, then one chance in three, one chance in two, and after that no chance at all, on the line of averages, as worked out by their experience of luck. More boys came out to take their places, and more, and more, conscripts following volunteers, younger brothers following elder brothers. Never did they revolt from the orders that came to them. Never a battalion broke into mutiny against inevitable martyrdom. They were obedient to the command above them. Their discipline did not break. However profound was the despair of the individual, and it was, I know, deep as the wells of human tragedy in many hearts, the mass moved as it was directed, backward or forward, this way and that, from one shambles to another, in mud and in blood, with the same massed valor as that which uplifted them before that first day of July with an intensified pride in the fame of their divisions, with a more eager desire for public knowledge of their deeds, with a loathing of war’s misery, with a sense of its supreme folly, yet with a refusal in their souls to acknowledge defeat or to stop this side of victory. In each battle there were officers and men who risked death deliberately, and in a kind of ecstasy did acts of superhuman courage; and because of the number of these feats the record of them is monotonous, dull, familiar. The mass followed their lead, and even poor coward-hearts, of whom there were many, as in all armies, had courage enough, as a rule, to get as far as the center of the fury before their knees gave way or they dropped dead. + 

Each wave of boyhood that came out from England brought a new mass of physical and spiritual valor as great as that which was spent, and in the end it was an irresistible tide which broke down the last barriers and swept through in a rush to victory, which we gained at the cost of nearly a million dead, and a high sum of living agony, and all our wealth, and a spiritual bankruptcy worse than material loss, so that now England is for a time sick to death and drained of her old pride and power. + 

VI + 

I remember, as though it were yesterday in vividness and a hundred years ago in time, the bombardment which preceded the battles of the Somme. With a group of officers I stood on the high ground above Albert, looking over to Gommecourt and Thièpval and La Boisselle, on the left side of the German salient, and then, by crossing the road, to Fricourt, Mametz, and Montauban on the southern side. From Albert westward past Thièpval Wood ran the little river of the Ancre, and on the German side the ground rose steeply to Usna Hill by La Boisselle, and to Thièpval Château above the wood. It was a formidable defensive position, one fortress girdled by line after line of trenches, and earthwork redoubts, and deep tunnels, and dugouts in which the German troops could live below ground until the moment of attack. The length of our front of assault was about twenty miles round the side of the salient to the village of Bray, on the Somme, where the French joined us and continued the battle. + 

From where we stood we could see a wide panorama of the German positions, and beyond, now and then, when the smoke of shellfire drifted, I caught glimpses of green fields and flower patches beyond the trench lines, and church spires beyond the range of guns rising above clumps of trees in summer foliage. Immediately below, in the foreground, was the village of Albert, not much ruined then, with its redbrick church and tower from which there hung, head downward, the Golden Virgin with her Babe outstretched as though as a peace-offering over all this strife. That leaning statue, which I had often passed on the way to the trenches, was now revealed brightly with a golden glamour, as sheets of flame burst through a heavy veil of smoke over the valley. In a field close by some troops were being ticketed with yellow labels fastened to their backs. It was to distinguish them so that artillery observers might know them from the enemy when their turn came to go into the battleground. Something in the sight of those yellow tickets made me feel sick.⁠ ⁠… Away behind, a French farmer was cutting his grass with a long scythe, in steady, sweeping strokes. Only now and then did he stand to look over at the most frightful picture of battle ever seen until then by human eyes. I wondered, and wonder still, what thoughts were passing through that old brain to keep him at his work, quietly, steadily, on the edge of hell. For there, quite close and clear, was hell, of man’s making, produced by chemists and scientists, after centuries in search of knowledge. There were the fires of hate, produced out of the passion of humanity after a thousand years of Christendom and of progress in the arts of beauty. There was the devil-worship of our poor, damned human race, where the most civilized nations of the world were on each side of the bonfires. It was worth watching by a human ant. + 

I remember the noise of our guns as all our batteries took their parts in a vast orchestra of drumfire. The tumult of the field-guns merged into thunderous waves. Behind me a fifteen-inch “Grandmother” fired single strokes, and each one was an enormous shock. Shells were rushing through the air like droves of giant birds with beating wings and with strange wailings. The German lines were in eruption. Their earthworks were being tossed up, and fountains of earth sprang up between columns of smoke, black columns and white, which stood rigid for a few seconds and then sank into the banks of fog. Flames gushed up red and angry, rending those banks of mist with strokes of lightning. In their light I saw trees falling, branches tossed like twigs, black things hurtling through space. In the night before the battle, when that bombardment had lasted several days and nights, the fury was intensified. Red flames darted hither and thither like little red devils as our trench mortars got to work. Above the slogging of the guns there were louder, earthshaking noises, and volcanoes of earth and fire spouted as high as the clouds. One convulsion of this kind happened above Usna Hill, with a long, terrifying roar and a monstrous gush of flame. + 

“What is that?” asked someone. + 

“It must be the mine we charged at La Boisselle. The biggest that has ever been.” + 

It was a good guess. When, later in the battle, I stood by the crater of that mine and looked into its gulf I wondered how many Germans had been hurled into eternity when the earth had opened. The grave was big enough for a battalion of men with horses and wagons, below the chalk of the crater’s lips. Often on the way to Bapaume I stepped off the road to look into that white gulf, remembering the moment when I saw the gust of flame that rent the earth about it. + 

VII + 

There was the illusion of victory on that first day of the Somme battles, on the right of the line by Fricourt, and it was not until a day or two later that certain awful rumors I had heard from wounded men and officers who had attacked on the left up by Gommecourt, Thièpval, and Serre were confirmed by certain knowledge of tragic disaster on that side of the battle-line. + 

The illusion of victory, with all the price and pain of it, came to me when I saw the German rockets rising beyond the villages of Mametz and Montauban and our barrage fire lifting to a range beyond the first lines of German trenches, and our support troops moving forward in masses to captured ground. We had broken through! By the heroic assault of our English and Scottish troops. West Yorks, Yorks and Lancs, Lincolns, Durhams, Northumberland Fusiliers, Norfolks and Berkshires, Liverpools, Manchesters, Gordons, and Royal Scots, all those splendid men I had seen marching to their lines. We had smashed through the ramparts of the German fortress, through that maze of earthworks and tunnels which had appalled me when I saw them on the maps, and over which I had gazed from time to time from our front-line trenches when those places seemed impregnable. I saw crowds of prisoners coming back under escort, fifteen hundred had been counted in the first day, and they had the look of a defeated army. Our lightly wounded men, thousands of them, were shouting and laughing as they came down behind the lines, wearing German caps and helmets. From Amiens civilians straggled out along the roads as far as they were allowed by military police, and waved hands and cheered those boys of ours. “Vive l’Angleterre!” cried old men, raising their hats. Old women wept at the sight of those gay wounded, the lightly touched, glad of escape, rejoicing in their luck and in the glory of life which was theirs still and cried out to them with shrill words of praise and exultation. + 

“Nous les aurons les sales Boches! Ah, ils sont foutus, ces bandits! C’est la victoire, grâce à vous, petits soldats anglais!” + 

Victory! The spirit of victory in the hearts of fighting men, and of women excited by the sight of those bandaged heads, those bare, brawny arms splashed with blood, those laughing heroes. + 

It looked like victory, in those days, as war correspondents, we were not so expert in balancing the profit and loss as afterward we became. When I went into Fricourt on the third day of battle, after the last Germans, who had clung on to its ruins, had been cleared out by the Yorkshires and Lincolns of the 21st Division, that division which had been so humiliated at Loos and now was wonderful in courage, and when the Manchesters and Gordons of the 30th Division had captured Montauban and repulsed fierce counterattacks. + 

It looked like victory, because of the German dead that lay there in their battered trenches and the filth and stench of death over all that mangled ground, and the enormous destruction wrought by our guns, and the fury of fire which we were still pouring over the enemy’s lines from batteries which had moved forward. + 

I went down flights of steps into German dugouts, astonished by their depth and strength. Our men did not build like this. This German industry was a rebuke to us, yet we had captured their work and the dead bodies of their laborers lay in those dark caverns, killed by our bombers, who had flung down hand-grenades. I drew back from those fat corpses. They looked monstrous, lying there crumpled up, amid a foul litter of clothes, stick-bombs, old boots, and bottles. Groups of dead lay in ditches which had once been trenches, flung into chaos by that bombardment I had seen. They had been bayoneted. I remember one man, an elderly fellow sitting up with his back to a bit of earth with his hands half raised. He was smiling a little, though he had been stabbed through the belly and was stone dead.⁠ ⁠… Victory!⁠ ⁠… some of the German dead were young boys, too young to be killed for old men’s crimes, and others might have been old or young. One could not tell, because they had no faces, and were just masses of raw flesh in rags and uniforms. Legs and arms lay separate, without any bodies thereabouts. + 

Outside Montauban there was a heap of our own dead. Young Gordons and Manchesters of the 30th Division, they had been caught by blasts of machine-gun fire, but our dead seemed scarce in the places where I walked. + 

Victory?⁠ ⁠… Well, we had gained some ground, and many prisoners, and here and there some guns. But as I stood by Montauban I saw that our line was a sharp salient looped round Mametz village and then dipping sharply southward to Fricourt. O God! had we only made another salient after all that monstrous effort? To the left there was fury at La Boisselle, where a few broken trees stood black on the skyline on a chalky ridge. Storms of German shrapnel were bursting there, and machine-guns were firing in spasms. In Contalmaison, round a château which stood high above ruined houses, shells were bursting with thunderclaps, our shells. German gunners in invisible batteries were sweeping our lines with barrage fire, it roamed up and down this side of Montauban Wood, just ahead of me, and now and then shells smashed among the houses and barns of Fricourt, and over Mametz there was suddenly a hurricane of “hate.” Our men were working like ants in those muck heaps, a battalion moved up toward Boisselle. From a ridge above Fricourt, where once I had seen a tall crucifix between two trees, which our men called the “Poodles,” a body of men came down and shrapnel burst among them and they fell and disappeared in tall grass. Stretcher bearers came slowly through Fricourt village with living burdens. Some of them were German soldiers carrying our wounded and their own. Walking wounded hobbled slowly with their arms round each other’s shoulders, Germans and English together. A boy in a steel hat stopped me and held up a bloody hand. “A bit of luck!” he said. “I’m off, after eighteen months of it.” + 

German prisoners came down with a few English soldiers as their escort. I saw distant groups of them, and a shell smashed into one group and scattered it. The living ran, leaving their dead. Ambulances driven by daring fellows drove to the far edge of Fricourt, not a healthy place, and loaded up with wounded from a dressing station in a tunnel there. + 

It was a wonderful picture of war in all its filth and shambles. But was it Victory?⁠ ⁠… I knew then that it was only a breach in the German bastion, and that on the left, Gommecourt way, there had been black tragedy. + 

VIII + 

On the left, where the 8th and 10th Corps were directing operations, the assault had been delivered by the 4th, 29th, 36th, 49th, 32nd, 8th, and 56th Divisions. + 

The positions in front of them were Gommecourt and Beaumont Hamel on the left side of the River Ancre, and Thièpval Wood on the right side of the Ancre leading up to Thièpval Château on the crest of the cliff. These were the hardest positions to attack, because of the rising ground and the immense strength of the enemy’s earthworks and tunneled defenses. But our generals were confident that the gun power at their disposal was sufficient to smash down that defensive system and make an easy way through for the infantry. They were wrong. In spite of that tornado of shellfire which I had seen tearing up the earth, many tunnels were still unbroken, and out of them came masses of German machine-gunners and riflemen, when our infantry rose from their own trenches on that morning of July 1st. + 

Our guns had shifted their barrage forward at that moment, farther ahead of the infantry than was afterward allowed, the men being trained to follow close to the lines of bursting shells, trained to expect a number of casualties from their own guns⁠—it needs some training⁠—in order to secure the general safety gained by keeping the enemy below ground until our bayonets were round his dugouts. + 

The Germans had been trained, too, to an act of amazing courage. Their discipline, that immense power of discipline which dominates men in the mass, was strong enough to make them obey the order to rush through that barrage of ours, that advancing wall of explosion and, if they lived through it, to face our men in the open with massed machine-gun fire. So they did; and as English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh battalions of our assaulting divisions trudged forward over what had been No Man’s Land, machine-gun bullets sprayed upon them, and they fell like grass to the scythe. Line after line of men followed them, and each line crumpled, and only small groups and single figures, seeking comradeship, hurried forward. German machine-gunners were bayoneted as their thumbs were still pressed to their triggers. In German front-line trenches at the bottom of Thièpval Wood, outside Beaumont Hamel and on the edge of Gommecourt Park, the field-gray men who came out of their dugouts fought fiercely with stick-bombs and rifles, and our officers and men, in places where they had strength enough, clubbed them to death, stuck them with bayonets, and blew their brains out with revolvers at short range. Then those English and Irish and Scottish troops, grievously weak because of all the dead and wounded behind them, struggled through to the second German line, from which there came a still fiercer rattle of machine-gun and rifle-fire. Some of them broke through that line, too, and went ahead in isolated parties across the wild crater land, over chasms and ditches and fallen trees, toward the highest ground, which had been their goal. Nothing was seen of them. They disappeared into clouds of smoke and flame. Gunner observers saw rockets go up in far places⁠—our rockets⁠—showing that outposts had penetrated into the German lines. Runners came back⁠—survivors of many predecessors who had fallen on the way⁠—with scribbled messages from company officers. One came from the Essex and King’s Own of the 4th Division, at a place called Pendant Copse, southeast of Serre. “For God’s sake send us bombs.” It was impossible to send them bombs. No men could get to them through the deep barrage of shellfire which was between them and our supporting troops. Many tried and died. + 

The Ulster men went forward toward Beaumont Hamel with a grim valor which was reckless of their losses. Beaumont Hamel was a German fortress. Machine-gun fire raked every yard of the Ulster way. Hundreds of the Irish fell. I met hundreds of them wounded⁠—tall, strong, powerful men, from Queen’s Island and Belfast factories, and Tyneside Irish and Tyneside Scots. + 

“They gave us no chance,” said one of them⁠—a sergeant-major. “They just murdered us.” + 

But bunches of them went right into the heart of the German positions, and then found behind them crowds of Germans who had come up out of their tunnels and flung bombs at them. Only a few came back alive in the darkness. + 

Into Thièpval Wood men of ours smashed their way through the German trenches, not counting those who fell, and killing any German who stood in their way. Inside that wood of dead trees and charred branches they reformed, astonished at the fewness of their numbers. Germans coming up from holes in the earth attacked them, and they held firm and took two hundred prisoners. Other Germans came closing in like wolves, in packs, and to a German officer who said, “Surrender!” our men shouted, “No surrender!” and fought in Thièpval Wood until most were dead and only a few wounded crawled out to tell that tale. + 

The Londoners of the 56th Division had no luck at all. Theirs was the worst luck because, by a desperate courage in assault, they did break through the German lines at Gommecourt. Their left was held by the London Rifle Brigade. The Rangers and the Queen Victoria Rifles⁠—the old “Vics”⁠—formed their center. Their right was made up by the London Scottish, and behind came the Queen’s Westminsters and the Kensingtons, who were to advance through their comrades to a farther objective. Across a wide No Man’s Land they suffered from the bursting of heavy crumps, and many fell. But they escaped annihilation by machine-gun fire and stormed through the upheaved earth into Gommecourt Park, killing many Germans and sending back batches of prisoners. They had done what they had been asked to do, and started building up barricades of earth and sandbags, and then found they were in a deathtrap. There were no troops on their right or left. They had thrust out into a salient, which presently the enemy saw. The German gunners, with deadly skill, boxed it round with shellfire, so that the Londoners were enclosed by explosive walls, and then very slowly and carefully drew a line of bursting shells up and down, up and down that captured ground, ravaging its earth anew and smashing the life that crouched there⁠—London life. + 

I have written elsewhere (in The Battles of the Somme) how young officers and small bodies of these London men held the barricades against German attacks while others tried to break a way back through that murderous shellfire, and how groups of lads who set out on that adventure to their old lines were shattered so that only a few from each group crawled back alive, wounded or unwounded. + 

At the end of the day the Germans acted with chivalry, which I was not allowed to tell at the time. The general of the London Division (Philip Howell) told me that the enemy sent over a message by a low-flying airplane, proposing a truce while the stretcher-bearers worked, and offering the service of their own men in that work of mercy. This offer was accepted without reference to G.H.Q., and German stretcher-bearers helped to carry our wounded to a point where they could be reached. + 

Many, in spite of that, remained lying out in No Man’s Land, some for three or four days and nights. I met one man who lay out there wounded, with a group of comrades more badly hurt than he was, until July 6th. At night he crawled over to the bodies of the dead and took their water-bottles and “iron” rations, and so brought drink and food to his stricken friends. Then at last he made his way through roving shells to our lines and even then asked to lead the stretcher-bearers who volunteered on a search-party for his “pals.” + 

“Physical courage was very common in the war,” said a friend of mine who saw nothing of war. “It is proved that physical courage is the commonest quality of mankind, as moral courage is the rarest.” But that soldier’s courage was spiritual, and there were many like him in the battles of the Somme and in other later battles as tragic as those. + 

IX + 

I have told how, before “The Big Push,” as we called the beginning of these battles, little towns of tents were built under the sign of the Red Cross. For a time they were inhabited only by medical officers, nurses, and orderlies, busily getting ready for a sudden invasion, and spending their surplus energy, which seemed inexhaustible, on the decoration of their camps by chalk-lined paths, red crosses painted on canvas or built up in red and white chalk on leveled earth, and flowers planted outside the tents⁠—all very pretty and picturesque in the sunshine and the breezes over the valley of the Somme. + 

On the morning of battle the doctors, nurses, and orderlies waited for their patients and said, “Now we shan’t be long!” They were merry and bright with that wonderful cheerfulness which enabled them to face the tragedy of mangled manhood without horror, and almost, it seemed, without pity, because it was their work, and they were there to heal what might be healed. It was with a rush that their first cases came, and the M.O.’s whistled and said, “Ye gods! how many more?” Many more. The tide did not slacken. It became a spate brought down by waves of ambulances. Three thousand wounded came to Daours on the Somme, three thousand to Corbie, thousands to Dernancourt, Heilly, Puchevillers, Toutencourt, and many other “clearing stations.” + 

At Daours the tents were filled to overflowing, until there was no more room. The wounded were laid down on the grass to wait their turn for the surgeon’s knife. Some of them crawled over to haycocks and covered themselves with hay and went to sleep, as I saw them sleeping there, like dead men. Here and there shell-shocked boys sat weeping or moaning, and shaking with an ague. Most of the wounded were quiet and did not give any groan or moan. The lightly wounded sat in groups, telling their adventures, cursing the German machine-gunners. Young officers spoke in a different way, and with that sporting spirit which they had learned in public schools praised their enemy. + 

“The machine-gunners are wonderful fellows⁠—topping. Fight until they’re killed. They gave us hell.” + 

Each man among those thousands of wounded had escaped death a dozen times or more by the merest flukes of luck. It was this luck of theirs which they hugged with a kind of laughing excitement. + 

“It’s a marvel I’m here! That shell burst all round me. Killed six of my pals. I’ve got through with a blighty wound. No bones broken⁠ ⁠… God! What luck!” + 

The death of other men did not grieve them. They could not waste this sense of luck in pity. The escape of their own individuality, this possession of life, was a glorious thought. They were alive! What luck! What luck! + 

We called the hospital at Corbie the “Butcher’s Shop.” It was in a pretty spot in that little town with a big church whose tall white towers looked down a broad sweep of the Somme, so that for miles they were a landmark behind the battlefields. Behind the lines during those first battles, but later, in 1918, when the enemy came nearly to the gates of Amiens, a stronghold of the Australians, who garrisoned it and sniped pigeons for their pots off the top of the towers, and took no great notice of “whizzbangs” which broke through the roofs of cottages and barns. It was a safe, snug place in July of ’16, but that Butcher’s Shop at a corner of the square was not a pretty spot. After a visit there I had to wipe cold sweat from my forehead, and found myself trembling in a queer way. It was the medical officer⁠—a colonel⁠—who called it that name. “This is our Butcher’s Shop,” he said, cheerily. “Come and have a look at my cases. They’re the worst possible; stomach wounds, compound fractures, and all that. We lop off limbs here all day long, and all night. You’ve no idea!” + 

I had no idea, but I did not wish to see its reality. The M.O. could not understand my reluctance to see his show. He put it down to my desire to save his time⁠—and explained that he was going the rounds and would take it as a favor if I would walk with him. I yielded weakly, and cursed myself for not taking to flight. Yet, I argued, what men are brave enough to suffer I ought to have the courage to see⁠ ⁠… I saw and sickened. + 

These were the victims of “Victory” and the red fruit of war’s harvest-fields. A new batch of “cases” had just arrived. More were being brought in on stretchers. They were laid down in rows on the floorboards. The colonel bent down to some of them and drew their blankets back, and now and then felt a man’s pulse. Most of them were unconscious, breathing with the hard snuffle of dying men. Their skin was already darkening to the death-tint, which is not white. They were all plastered with a gray clay and this mud on their faces was, in some cases, mixed with thick clots of blood, making a hard incrustation from scalp to chin. + 

“That fellow won’t last long,” said the M.O., rising from a stretcher. “Hardly a heartbeat left in him. Sure to die on the operating-table if he gets as far as that⁠ ⁠… Step back against the wall a minute, will you?” + 

We flattened ourselves against the passage wall while ambulance-men brought in a line of stretchers. No sound came from most of those bundles under the blankets, but from one came a long, agonizing wail, the cry of an animal in torture. + 

“Come through the wards,” said the colonel. “They’re pretty bright, though we could do with more space and light.” + 

In one long, narrow room there were about thirty beds, and in each bed lay a young British soldier, or part of a young British soldier. There was not much left of one of them. Both his legs had been amputated to the thigh, and both his arms to the shoulder-blades. + 

“Remarkable man, that,” said the colonel. “Simply refuses to die. His vitality is so tremendous that it is putting up a terrific fight against mortality⁠ ⁠… There’s another case of the same kind; one leg gone and the other going, and one arm. Deliberate refusal to give in. ‘You’re not going to kill me, doctor,’ he said. ‘I’m going to stick it through.’ What spirit, eh?” + 

I spoke to that man. He was quite conscious, with bright eyes. His right leg was uncovered, and supported on a board hung from the ceiling. Its flesh was like that of a chicken badly carved-white, flabby, and in tatters. He thought I was a surgeon, and spoke to me pleadingly: + 

“I guess you can save that leg, sir. It’s doing fine. I should hate to lose it.” + 

I murmured something about a chance for it, and the M.O. broke in cheerfully. + 

“You won’t lose it if I can help it. How’s your pulse?⁠ ⁠… Oh, not bad. Keep cheerful and we’ll pull you through.” The man smiled gallantly. + 

“Bound to come off,” said the doctor as we passed to another bed. “Gas gangrene. That’s the thing that does us down.” + 

In bed after bed I saw men of ours, very young men, who had been lopped of limbs a few hours ago or a few minutes, some of them unconscious, some of them strangely and terribly conscious, with a look in their eyes as though staring at the death which sat near to them, and edged nearer. + 

“Yes,” said the M.O., “they look bad, some of ’em, but youth is on their side. I dare say seventy-five percent will get through. If it wasn’t for gas gangrene⁠—” + 

He jerked his head to a boy sitting up in bed, smiling at the nurse who felt his pulse. + 

“Looks fairly fit after the knife, doesn’t he? But we shall have to cut higher up. The gas again. I’m afraid he’ll be dead before tomorrow. Come into the operating-theater. It’s very well equipped.” + 

I refused that invitation. I walked stiffly out of the Butcher’s Shop of Corbie past the man who had lost both arms and both legs, that vital trunk, past rows of men lying under blankets, past a stench of mud and blood and anesthetics, to the fresh air of the gateway, where a column of ambulances had just arrived with a new harvest from the fields of the Somme. + 

“Come in again, any time!” shouted out the cheery colonel, waving his hand. + 

I never went again, though I saw many other Butcher’s Shops in the years that followed, where there was a great carving of human flesh which was of our boyhood, while the old men directed their sacrifice, and the profiteers grew rich, and the fires of hate were stoked up at patriotic banquets and in editorial chairs. + 

X + 

The failure on the left hardly balanced by the partial success on the right caused a sudden pause in the operations, camouflaged by small attacks on minor positions around and above Fricourt and Mametz. The Lincolns and others went over to Fricourt Wood and routed out German machine-gunners. The West Yorks attacked the sunken road at Fricourt. The Dorsets, Manchesters, Highland Light Infantry, Lancashire Fusiliers, and Borderers of the 32nd Division were in possession of La Boisselle and clearing out communication trenches to which the Germans were hanging on with desperate valor. The 21st Division⁠—Northumberland Fusiliers, Durhams, Yorkshires⁠—were making a flanking attack on Contalmaison, but weakened after their heavy losses on the first day of battle. The fighting for a time was local, in small copses⁠—Lozenge Wood, Peak Wood, Caterpillar Wood, Acid Drop Copse⁠—where English and German troops fought ferociously for yards of ground, hummocks of earth, ditches. + 

G.H.Q. had been shocked by the disaster on the left and the failure of all the big hopes they had held for a breakthrough on both sides of the German positions. Rumors came to us that the Commander-in-Chief had decided to restrict future operations to minor actions for strengthening the line and to abandon the great offensive. It was believed by officers I met that Sir Henry Rawlinson was arguing, persuading, in favor of continued assaults on the grand scale. + 

Whatever division of opinion existed in the High Command I do not know; it was visible to all of us that for some days there were uncertainty of direction, hesitation, conflicting orders. On July 7th the 17th Division, under General Pilcher, attacked Contalmaison, and a whole battalion of the Prussian Guard hurried up from Valenciennes and, thrown on to the battlefield without maps or guidance, walked into the barrage which covered the advance of our men and were almost annihilated. But although some bodies of our men entered Contalmaison, in an attack which I was able to see, they were smashed out of it again by storms of fire followed by masses of men who poured out from Mametz Wood. The Welsh were attacking Mametz Wood. + 

They were handled, as Marbot said of his men in a Napoleonic battle, “like turnips.” Battalion commanders received orders in direct conflict with one another. Bodies of Welshmen were advanced, and then retired, and left to lie nakedly without cover, under dreadful fire. The 17th Division, under General Pilcher, did not attack at the expected time. There was no coordination of divisions; no knowledge among battalion officers of the strategy or tactics of a battle in which their men were involved. + 

“Goodness knows what’s happening,” said an officer I met near Mametz. He had been waiting all night and half a day with a body of troops who had expected to go forward, and were still hanging about under harassing fire. + 

On July 9th Contalmaison was taken. I saw that attack very clearly, so clearly that I could almost count the bricks in the old château set in a little wood, and saw the left-hand tower knocked off by the direct hit of a fifteen-inch shell. At four o’clock in the afternoon our guns concentrated on the village, and under the cover of that fire our men advanced on three sides of it, hemmed it in, and captured it with the garrison of the 122nd Bavarian Regiment, who had suffered the agonies of hell inside its ruins. Now our men stayed in the ruins, and this time German shells smashed into the château and the cottages and left nothing but rubbish heaps of brick through which a few days later I went walking with the smell of death in my nostrils. Our men were now being shelled in that place. + 

Beyond La Boisselle, on the left of the Albert⁠–⁠Bapaume road, there had been a village called Ovillers. It was no longer there. Our guns has removed every trace of it, except as it lay in heaps of pounded brick. The Germans had a network of trenches about it, and in their ditches and their dugouts they fought like wolves. Our 12th Division was ordered to drive them out⁠—a division of English county troops, including the Sussex, Essex, Bedfords, and Middlesex⁠—and those country boys of ours fought their way among communication trenches, burrowed into tunnels, crouched below hummocks of earth and brick, and with bombs and bayonets and broken rifles, and boulders of stone, and German stick-bombs, and any weapon that would kill, gained yard by yard over the dead bodies of the enemy, or by the capture of small batches of cornered men, until after seventeen days of this one hundred and forty men of the 3rd Prussian Guard, the last of their garrison, without food or water, raised a signal of surrender, and came out with their hands up. Ovillers was a shambles, in a fight of primitive earthmen like human beasts. Yet our men were not beast-like. They came out from those places⁠—if they had the luck to come out⁠—apparently unchanged, without any mark of the beast on them, and when they cleansed themselves of mud and filth, boiled the lice out of their shirts, and assembled in a village street behind the lines, they whistled, laughed, gossiped, as though nothing had happened to their souls⁠—though something had really happened, as now we know. + 

It was not until July 14th that our High Command ordered another general attack after the local fighting which had been in progress since the first day of battle. Our field-batteries, and some of our “heavies,” had moved forward to places like Montauban and Contalmaison⁠—where German shells came searching for them all day long⁠—and new divisions had been brought up to relieve some of the men who had been fighting so hard and so long. It was to be an attack on the second German line of defense on the ridges by the village of Bazentin le Grand and Bazentin le Petit to Longueval on the right and Delville Wood. I went up in the night to see the bombardment and the beginning of the battle and the swirl of its backwash, and I remember now the darkness of villages behind the lines through which our cars crawled, until we reached the edge of the battlefields and saw the sky rent by incessant flames of gunfire, while red tongues of flames leaped up from burning villages. Longueval was on fire, and the two Bazentins, and another belt of land in France, so beautiful to see, even as I had seen it first between the sandbags of our parapets, was being delivered to the charcoal-burners. + 

I have described that night scene elsewhere, in all its deviltry, but one picture which I passed on the way to the battlefield could not then be told. Yet it was significant of the mentality of our High Command, as was afterward pointed out derisively by Sixte von Arnim. It proved the strange unreasoning optimism which still lingered in the breasts of old-fashioned generals in spite of what had happened on the left on the first day of July, and their study of trench maps, and their knowledge of German machine-guns. By an old millhouse called the Moulin Vivier, outside the village of Méaulte, were masses of cavalry⁠—Indian cavalry and Dragoons⁠—drawn up densely to leave a narrow passageway for field-guns and horse-transport moving through the village, which was in utter darkness. The Indians sat like statues on their horses, motionless, dead silent. Now and again there was a jangle of bits. Here and there a British soldier lit a cigarette and for a second the little flame of his match revealed a bronzed face or glinted on steel helmets. + 

Cavalry!⁠ ⁠… So even now there was a serious purpose behind the joke of English soldiers who had gone forward on the first day, shouting, “This way to the gap!” and in the conversation of some of those who actually did ride through Bazentin that day. + 

A troop or two made their way over the cratered ground and skirted Delville Wood; the Dragoon Guards charged a machine-gun in a cornfield, and killed the gunners. Germans rounded up by them clung to their stirrup leathers crying: “Pity! Pity!” The Indians lowered their lances, but took prisoners to show their chivalry. But it was nothing more than a beau geste. It was as futile and absurd as Don Quixote’s charge of the windmill. They were brought to a dead halt by the nature of the ground and machine-gun fire which killed their horses, and lay out that night with German shells searching for their bodies. + 

One of the most disappointed men in the army was on General Haldane’s staff. He was an old cavalry officer, and this major of the old, old school (belonging in spirit to the time of Charles Lever) was excited by the thought that there was to be a cavalry adventure. He was one of those who swore that if he had his chance he would “ride into the blue.” It was the chance he wanted and he nursed his way to it by delicate attentions to General Haldane. The general’s bed was not so comfortable as his. He changed places. He even went so far as to put a bunch of flowers on the general’s table in his dugout. + 

“You seem very attentive to me, major,” said the general, smelling a rat. + 

Then the major blurted out his desire. Could he lead a squadron round Delville Wood? Could he take that ride into the blue? He would give his soul to do it. + 

“Get on with your job,” said General Haldane. + 

That ride into the blue did not encourage the cavalry to the belief that they would be of real value in a warfare of trench lines and barbed wire, but for a long time later they were kept moving backward and forward between the edge of the battlefields and the back areas, to the great incumbrance of the roads, until they were “guyed” by the infantry, and irritable, so their officers told me, to the verge of mutiny. Their irritability was cured by dismounting them for a turn in the trenches, and I came across the Household Cavalry digging by the Coniston Steps, this side of Thièpval, and cursing their spadework. + 

In this book I will not tell again the narrative of that fighting in the summer and autumn of 1916, which I have written with many details of each day’s scene in my collected despatches called The Battles of the Somme. There is little that I can add to those word-pictures which I wrote day by day, after haunting experiences amid the ruin of those fields, except a summing-up of their effect upon the mentality of our men, and upon the Germans who were in the same “bloodbath,” as they called it, and a closer analysis of the direction and mechanism of our military machine. + 

Looking back upon those battles in the light of knowledge gained in the years that followed, it seems clear that our High Command was too prodigal in its expenditure of life in small sectional battles, and that the army corps and divisional staffs had not established an efficient system of communication with the fighting units under their control. It seemed to an outsider like myself that a number of separate battles were being fought without reference to one another in different parts of the field. It seemed as though our generals, after conferring with one another over telephones, said, “All right, tell So-and-so to have a go at Thièpval,” or, “Today we will send such-and-such a division to capture Delville Wood,” or, “We must get that line of trenches outside Bazentin.” Orders were drawn up on the basis of that decision and passed down to brigades, who read them as their sentence of death, and obeyed with or without protest, and sent three or four battalions to assault a place which was covered by German batteries round an arc of twenty miles, ready to open out a tempest of fire directly a rocket rose from their infantry, and to tear up the woods and earth in that neighborhood if our men gained ground. If the whole battle-line moved forward the German fire would have been dispersed, but in these separate attacks on places like Trones Wood and Delville Wood, and later on High Wood, it was a vast concentration of explosives which plowed up our men. + 

So it was that Delville Wood was captured and lost several times and became “Devil’s” Wood to men who lay there under the crash and fury of massed gunfire until a wretched remnant of what had been a glorious brigade of youth crawled out stricken and bleeding when relieved by another brigade ordered to take their turn in that devil’s cauldron, or to recapture it when German bombing-parties and machine-gunners had followed in the wake of fire, and had crouched again among the fallen trees, and in the shell-craters and ditches, with our dead and their dead to keep them company. In Delville Wood the South African Brigade of the 9th Division was cut to pieces, and I saw the survivors come out with few officers to lead them. + 

In Trones Wood, in Bernafay Wood, in Mametz Wood, there had been great slaughter of English troops and Welsh. The 18th Division and the 38th suffered horribly. In Delville Wood many battalions were slashed to pieces before these South Africans. And after that came High Wood⁠ ⁠… All that was left of High Wood in the autumn of 1916 was a thin row of branchless trees, but in July and August there were still glades under heavy foliage, until the branches were lopped off and the leaves scattered by our incessant fire. It was an important position, vital for the enemy’s defense, and our attack on the right flank of the Pozières Ridge, above Bazentin and Delville Wood, giving on the reverse slope a fine observation of the enemy’s lines above Martinpuich and Courcellette away to Bapaume. For that reason the Germans were ordered to hold it at all costs, and many German batteries had registered on it to blast our men out if they gained a foothold on our side of the slope or theirs. + 

So High Wood became another hell, on a day of great battle⁠—September 14, 1916⁠—when for the first time tanks were used, demoralizing the enemy in certain places, though they were too few in number to strike a paralyzing blow. The Londoners gained part of High Wood at frightful cost and then were blown out of it. Other divisions followed them and found the wood stuffed with machine-guns which they had to capture through hurricanes of bullets before they crouched in craters amid dead Germans and dead English, and then were blown out like the Londoners, under shellfire, in which no human life could stay for long. + 

The 7th Division was cut up there. The 33rd Division lost six thousand men in an advance against uncut wire in the wood, which they were told was already captured. + 

Hundreds of men were vomiting from the effect of gas-shells, choking and blinded. Behind, the transport wagons and horses were smashed to bits. + 

The divisional staffs were often ignorant of what was happening to the fighting-men when the attack was launched. Light signals, rockets, heliographing, were of small avail through the dust- and smoke-clouds. Forward observing officers crouching behind parapets, as I often saw them, and sometimes stood with them, watched fires burning, red rockets and green, gusts of flame, and bursting shells, and were doubtful what to make of it all. Telephone wires trailed across the ground for miles, were cut into short lengths by shrapnel and high explosive. Accidents happened as part of the inevitable blunders of war. It was all a vast tangle and complexity of strife. + 

On July 17th I stood in a tent by a staff-officer who was directing a group of heavy guns supporting the 3rd Division. He was tired, as I could see by the black lines under his eyes and tightly drawn lips. On a camp-table in front of him, upon which he leaned his elbows, there was a telephone apparatus, and the little bell kept ringing as we talked. Now and then a shell burst in the field outside the tent, and he raised his head and said: “They keep crumping about here. Hope they won’t tear this tent to ribbons.⁠ ⁠… That sounds like a gas-shell.” + 

Then he turned to the telephone again and listened to some voice speaking. + 

“Yes, I can hear you. Yes, go on. ‘Our men seen leaving High Wood.’ Yes. ‘Shelled by our artillery.’ Are you sure of that? I say, are you sure they were our men? Another message. Well, carry on. ‘Men digging on road from High Wood southeast to Longueval.’ Yes, I’ve got that. ‘They are our men and not Boches.’ Oh, hell!⁠ ⁠… Get off the line. Get off the line, can’t you?⁠ ⁠… ‘Our men and not Boches.’ Yes, I have that. ‘Heavily shelled by our guns.’ ” + 

The staff-officer tapped on the table with a lead-pencil a tattoo, while his forehead puckered. Then he spoke into the telephone again. + 

“Are you there, ‘Heavies’?⁠ ⁠… Well, don’t disturb those fellows for half an hour. After that I will give you new orders. Try and confirm if they are our men.” + 

He rang off and turned to me. + 

“That’s the trouble. Looks as if we had been pounding our own men like hell. Some damn fool reports ‘Boches.’ Gives the reference number. Asks for the ‘Heavies.’ Then some other fellow says: ‘Not Boches. For God’s sake cease fire!’ How is one to tell?” + 

I could not answer that question, but I hated the idea of our men sent forward to capture a road or a trench or a wood and then “pounded” by our guns. They had enough pounding from the enemy’s guns. There seemed a missing link in the system somewhere. Probably it was quite inevitable. + 

Over and over again the wounded swore to God that they had been shelled by our own guns. The Londoners said so from High Wood. The Australians said so from Mouquet Farm. The Scots said so from Longueval! They said: “Why the hell do we get murdered by British gunners? What’s the good of fighting if we’re slaughtered by our own side?” + 

In some cases they were mistaken. It was enfilade fire from German batteries. But often it happened according to the way of that telephone conversation in the tent by Bronfay Farm. + 

The difference between British soldiers and German soldiers crawling over shell-craters or crouching below the banks of a sunken road was no more than the difference between two tribes of ants. Our flying scouts, however low they flew, risking the Archies and machine-gun bullets, often mistook khaki for field gray, and came back with false reports which led to tragedy. + 

XI + 

People who read my war despatches will remember my first descriptions of the tanks and those of other correspondents. They caused a sensation, a sense of excitement, laughter which shook the nation because of the comicality, the grotesque surprise, the possibility of quicker victory, which caught hold of the imagination of people who heard for the first time of those new engines of war, so beast-like in appearance and performance. The vagueness of our descriptions was due to the censorship, which forbade, wisely enough, any technical and exact definition, so that we had to compare them to giant toads, mammoths, and prehistoric animals of all kinds. Our accounts did, however, reproduce the psychological effect of the tanks upon the British troops when these engines appeared for the first time to their astonished gaze on September 13th. Our soldiers roared with laughter, as I did, when they saw them lolloping up the roads. On the morning of the great battle of September 15th the presence of the tanks going into action excited all the troops along the front with a sense of comical relief in the midst of the grim and deadly business of attack. Men followed them, laughing and cheering. There was a wonderful thrill in the airman’s message, “Tank walking up the High Street of Flers with the British army cheering behind.” Wounded boys whom I met that morning grinned in spite of their wounds at our first word about the tanks. “Crikey!” said a cockney lad of the 47th Division. “I can’t help laughing every time I think of them tanks. I saw them stamping down German machine-guns as though they were wasps’ nests.” The adventures of Crème de Menthe, Cordon Rouge, and the Byng Boys, on both sides of the Bapaume road, when they smashed down barbed wire, climbed over trenches, sat on German redoubts, and received the surrender of German prisoners who held their hands up to these monsters and cried, “Kamerad!” were like fairytales of war by H. G. Wells. + 

Yet their romance had a sharp edge of reality as I saw in those battles of the Somme, and afterward, more grievously, in the Cambrai salient and Flanders, when the tanks were put out of action by direct hits of field-guns and nothing of humankind remained in them but the charred bones of their gallant crews. + 

Before the battle in September of ’16 I talked with the pilots of the first tanks, and although they were convinced of the value of these new engines of war and were out to prove it, they did not disguise from me nor from their own souls that they were going forth upon a perilous adventure with the odds of luck against them. I remember one young pilot⁠—a tiny fellow like a jockey, who took me on one side and said, “I want you to do me a favor,” and then scribbled down his mother’s address and asked me to write to her if “anything” happened to him. + 

He and other tank officers were anxious. They had not complete confidence in the steering and control of their engines. It was a difficult and clumsy kind of gear, which was apt to break down at a critical moment, as I saw when I rode in one on their field of maneuver. These first tanks were only experimental, and the tail arrangement was very weak. Worse than all mechanical troubles was the shortsighted policy of some authority at G.H.Q., who had insisted upon A.S.C. drivers being put to this job a few days before the battle, without proper training. + 

“It is mad and murderous,” said one of the officers, “These fellows may have pluck, all right⁠—I don’t doubt it⁠—but they don’t know their engines, nor the double steering trick, and they have never been under shellfire. It is asking for trouble.” + 

As it turned out, the A.S.C. drivers proved their pluck, for the most part, splendidly, but many tanks broke down before they reached the enemy’s lines, and in that action and later battles there were times when they bitterly disappointed the infantry commanders and the troops. + 

Individual tanks, commanded by gallant young officers and served by brave crews, did astounding feats, and some of these men came back dazed and deaf and dumb, after forty hours or more of fighting and maneuvering within steel walls, intensely hot, filled with the fumes of their engines, jolted and banged about over rough ground, and steering an uncertain course, after the loss of their “tails,” which had snapped at the spine. But there had not been anything like enough tanks to secure an annihilating surprise over the enemy as afterward was attained in the first battle of Cambrai; and the troops who had been buoyed up with the hope that at last the machine-gun evil was going to be scotched were disillusioned and dejected when they saw tanks ditched behind the lines or nowhere in sight when once again they had to trudge forward under the flail of machine-gun bullets from earthwork redoubts. It was a failure in generalship to give away our secret before it could be made effective. + 

I remember sitting in a mess of the Gordons in the village of Franvillers along the Albert road, and listening to a long monologue by a Gordon officer on the future of the tanks. He was a dreamer and visionary, and his fellow-officers laughed at him. + 

“A few tanks are no good,” he said. “Forty or fifty tanks are no good on a modern battlefront. We want hundreds of tanks, brought up secretly, fed with ammunition by tank carriers, bringing up field-guns and going into action without any preliminary barrage. They can smash through the enemy’s wire and get over his trenches before he is aware that an attack has been organized. Up to now all our offensives have been futile because of our preliminary advertisement by prolonged bombardment. The tanks can bring back surprise to modern warfare, but we must have hundreds of them.” + 

Prolonged laughter greeted this speech. But the Celtic dreamer did not smile. He was staring into the future⁠ ⁠… And what he saw was true, though he did not live to see it, for in the Cambrai battle of November 11th the tanks did advance in hundreds, and gained an enormous surprise over the enemy, and led the way to a striking victory, which turned to tragedy because of risks too lightly taken. + 

XII + 

One branch of our military machine developed with astonishing rapidity and skill during those Somme battles. The young gentlemen of the Air Force went “all out” for victory, and were reckless in audacity. How far they acted under orders and against their own judgment of what was sensible and sound in fighting-risks I do not know. General Trenchard, their supreme chief, believed in an aggressive policy at all costs, and was a Napoleon in this war of the skies, intolerant of timidity, not squeamish of heavy losses if the balance were tipped against the enemy. Some young flying-men complained to me bitterly that they were expected to fly or die over the German lines, whatever the weather or whatever the risks. Many of them, after repeated escapes from antiaircraft shells and hostile craft, lost their nerve, shirked another journey, found themselves crying in their tents, and were sent back home for a spell by squadron commanders, with quick observation for the breaking-point; or made a few more flights and fell to earth like broken birds. + 

Sooner or later, apart from rare cases, every man was found to lose his nerve, unless he lost his life first. That was a physical and mental law. But until that time these flying-men were the knights-errant of the war, and most of them did not need any driving to the risks they took with boyish recklessness. + 

They were mostly boys⁠—babes, as they seemed to me, when I saw them in their tents or dismounting from their machines. On “dud” days, when there was no visibility at all, they spent their leisure hours joyriding to Amiens or some other town where they could have a “binge.” They drank many cocktails and roared with laughter over bottles of cheap champagne, and flirted with any girl who happened to come within their orbit. If not allowed beyond their tents, they sulked like baby Achilles, reading novelettes, with their knees hunched up, playing the gramophone, and ragging each other. + 

There was one child so young that his squadron leader would not let him go out across the battle-lines to challenge any German scout in the clouds or do any of the fancy “stunts” that were part of the next day’s program. He went to bed sulkily, and then came back again, in his pajamas, with rumpled hair. + 

“Look here, sir,” he said. “Can’t I go? I’ve got my wings. It’s perfectly rotten being left behind.” + 

The squadron commander, who told me of the tale, yielded. + 

“All right. Only don’t do any fool tricks.” + 

Next morning the boy flew off, played a lone hand, chased a German scout, dropped low over the enemy’s lines, machine-gunned infantry on the march, scattered them, bombed a train, chased a German motorcar, and after many adventures came back alive and said, “I’ve had a rare old time!” + 

On a stormy day, which loosened the tent poles and slapped the wet canvas, I sat in a mess with a group of flying-officers, drinking tea out of a tin mug. One boy, the youngest of them, had just brought down his first “Hun.” He told me the tale of it with many details, his eyes alight as he described the fight. They had maneuvered round each other for a long time. Then he shot his man en passant. The machine crashed on our side of the lines. He had taken off the iron crosses on the wings, and a bit of the propeller, as mementoes. He showed me these things (while the squadron commander, who had brought down twenty-four Germans, winked at me) and told me he was going to send them home to hang beside his college trophies⁠ ⁠… I guessed he was less than nineteen years old. Such a kid!⁠ ⁠… A few days later, when I went to the tent again, I asked about him. “How’s that boy who brought down his first ‘Hun’?” The squadron commander said: + 

“Didn’t you hear? He’s gone west. Brought down in a dogfight. He had a chance of escape, but went back to rescue a pal⁠ ⁠… a nice boy.” + 

They became fatalists after a few fights, and believed in their luck, or their mascots⁠—teddy-bears, a bullet that had missed them, china dolls, a girl’s lock of hair, a silver ring. Yet at the back of their brains, most of them, I fancy, knew that it was only a question of time before they “went west,” and with that subconscious thought they crowded in all life intensely in the hours that were given to them, seized all chance of laughter, of wine, of every kind of pleasure within reach, and said their prayers (some of them) with great fervor, between one escape and another, like young Paul Bensher, who has revealed his soul in verse, his secret terror, his tears, his hatred of death, his love of life, when he went bombing over Bruges. + 

On the mornings of the battles of the Somme I saw them as the heralds of a new day of strife flying toward the lines in the first light of dawn. When the sun rose its rays touched their wings, made them white like cabbage butterflies, or changed them to silver, all a sparkle. I saw them fly over the German positions, not changing their course. Then all about them burst black puffs of German shrapnel, so that many times I held my breath because they seemed in the center of the burst. But generally when the cloud cleared they were flying again, until they disappeared in the mists over the enemy’s country. There they did deadly work, in single fights with German airmen, or against great odds, until they had an air space to themselves and skimmed the earth like albatrosses in low flight, attacking machine-gun nests, killing or scattering the gunners by a burst of bullets from their Lewis guns, dropping bombs on German wagon transports, infantry, railway trains (one man cut a train in half and saw men and horses falling out), and ammunition-dumps, directing the fire of our guns upon living targets, photographing new trenches and works, bombing villages crowded with German troops. That they struck terror into these German troops was proved afterward when we went into Bapaume and Péronne and many villages from which the enemy retreated after the battles of the Somme. Everywhere there were signboards on which was written “Flieger Schutz!” (aircraft shelter) or German warnings of: “Keep to the sidewalks. This road is constantly bombed by British airmen.” + 

They were a new plague of war, and did for a time gain a complete mastery of the air. But later the Germans learned the lesson of low flying and night bombing, and in 1917 and 1918 came back in greater strength and made the nights horrible in camps behind the lines and in villages, where they killed many soldiers and more civilians. + 

The infantry did not believe much in our air supremacy at any time, not knowing what work was done beyond their range of vision, and seeing our machines crashed in No Man’s Land, and hearing the rattle of machine-guns from hostile aircraft above their own trenches. + 

“Those aviators of ours,” a general said to me, “are the biggest liars in the world. Cocky fellows claiming impossible achievements. What proof can they give of their preposterous tales? They only go into the air service because they haven’t the pluck to serve in the infantry.” + 

That was prejudice. The German losses were proof enough of our men’s fighting skill and strength, and German prisoners and German letters confirmed all their claims. But we were dishonest in our reckoning from first to last, and the British public was hoodwinked about our losses. “Three of our machines are missing.” “Six of our machines are missing.” Yes, but what about the machines which crashed in No Man’s Land and behind our lines? They were not missing, but destroyed, and the boys who had flown in them were dead or broken. + 

To the end of the war those aviators of ours searched the air for their adventures, fought often against overwhelming numbers, killed the German champions in single combat or in tourneys in the sky, and let down tons of high explosives which caused great death and widespread destruction; and in this work they died like flies, and one boy’s life⁠—one of those laughing, fatalistic, intensely living boys⁠—was of no more account in the general sum of slaughter than a summer midge, except as one little unit in the Armies of the Air. + 

XIII + 

I am not strong enough in the science of psychology to understand the origin of laughter and to get into touch with the mainsprings of gaiety. The sharp contrast between normal ethics and an abnormality of action provides a grotesque point of view arousing ironical mirth. It is probable also that surroundings of enormous tragedy stimulate the sense of humor of the individual, so that any small, ridiculous thing assumes the proportion of monstrous absurdity. It is also likely⁠—certain, I think⁠—that laughter is an escape from terror, a liberation of the soul by mental explosion, from the prison walls of despair and brooding. In the Decameron of Boccaccio a group of men and women encompassed by plague retired into seclusion to tell one another mirthful immoralities which stirred their laughter. They laughed while the plague destroyed society around them and when they knew that its foul germs were on the prowl for their own bodies⁠ ⁠… So it was in this war, where in many strange places and in many dreadful days there was great laughter. I think sometimes of a night I spent with the medical officers of a tent hospital in the fields of the Somme during those battles. With me as a guest went a modern Falstaff, a “ton of flesh,” who “sweats to death and lards the lean earth as he walks along.” + 

He was a man of many anecdotes, drawn from the sinks and stews of life, yet with a sense of beauty lurking under his coarseness, and a voice of fine, sonorous tone, which he managed with art and a melting grace. + 

On the way to the field hospital he had taken more than one nip of whisky. His voice was well oiled when he sang a greeting to a medical major in a florid burst of melody from Italian opera. The major was a little Irish medico who had been through the South African War and in tropical places, where he had drunk firewater to kill all manner of microbes. He suffered abominably from asthma and had had a heart-seizure the day before our dinner at his mess, and told us that he would drop down dead as sure as fate between one operation and another on “the poor, bloody wounded” who never ceased to flow into his tent. But he was in a laughing mood, and thirsty for laughter-making liquid. He had two whiskies before the dinner began to wet his whistle. His fellow-officers were out for an evening’s joy, but nervous of the colonel, an austere soul who sat at the head of the mess with the look of a man afraid that merriment might reach outrageous heights beyond his control. A courteous man he was, and rather sad. His presence for a time acted as a restraint upon the company, until all restraint was broken by the Falstaff with me, who told soul-crashing stories to the little Irish major across the table and sang love lyrics to the orderly who brought round the cottage pie and pickles. There was a tall, thin young surgeon who had been carving up living bodies all day and many days, and now listened to that fat rogue with an intensity of delight that lit up his melancholy eyes, watching him gravely between gusts of deep laughter, which seemed to come from his boots. There was another young surgeon, once of Barts’, who made himself the cup-server of the fat knight and kept his wine at the brim, and encouraged him to fresh audacities of anecdotry, with a humorous glance at the colonel’s troubled face⁠ ⁠… The colonel was forgotten after dinner. The little Irish major took the lid off the boiling pot of mirth. He was entirely mad, as he assured us, between dances of a wild and primitive type, stories of adventure in far lands, and spasms of asthmatic coughing, when he beat his breast and said, “A pox in my bleeding heart!” + 

Falstaff was playing Juliet to the Romeo of the tall young surgeon, singing falsetto like a fat German angel dressed in loose-fitting khaki, with his belt undone. There were charades in the tent. The boy from Barts’ did remarkable imitations of a gamecock challenging a rival bird, of a cow coming through a gate, of a general addressing his troops (most comical of all). Several glasses were broken. The corkscrew was disregarded as a useless implement, and whisky-bottles were decapitated against the tent poles. I remember vaguely the crowning episode of the evening when the little major was dancing the Irish jig with a kitchen chair; when Falstaff was singing the Prologue of Pagliacci to the stupefied colonel; when the boy, once of Barts’, was roaring like a lion under the mess table, and when the tall, melancholy surgeon was at the top of the tent pole, scratching himself like a gorilla in his native haunts⁠ ⁠… Outside, the field hospital was quiet, under a fleecy sky with a crescent moon. Through the painted canvas of the tent city candlelight glowed with a faint rose-colored light, and the Red Cross hung limp above the camp where many wounded lay, waking or sleeping, tossing in agony, dying in unconsciousness. Far away over the fields, rockets were rising above the battle-lines. The sky was flickering with the flush of gunfire. A red glare rose and spread below the clouds where some ammunition-dump had been exploded⁠ ⁠… Old Falstaff fell asleep in the car on the way back to our quarters, and I smiled at the memory of great laughter in the midst of tragedy. + 

XIV + 

The struggle of men from one low ridge to another low ridge in a territory forty miles wide by more than twenty miles deep, during five months of fighting, was enormous in its intensity and prolongation of slaughter, wounding, and endurance of all hardships and terrors of war. As an eyewitness I saw the full scope of the bloody drama. I saw day by day the tidal waves of wounded limping back, until two hundred and fifty thousand men had passed through our casualty clearing stations, and then were not finished. I went among these men when the blood was wet on them, and talked with hundreds of them, and heard their individual narratives of escapes from death until my imagination was saturated with the spirit of their conflict of body and soul. I saw a green, downy countryside, beautiful in its summer life, ravaged by gunfire so that the white chalk of its subsoil was flung above the earth and grass in a wide, sterile stretch of desolation pitted with shell-craters, ditched by deep trenches, whose walls were hideously upheaved by explosive fire, and littered yard after yard, mile after mile, with broken wire, rifles, bombs, unexploded shells, rags of uniform, dead bodies, or bits of bodies, and all the filth of battle. I saw many villages flung into ruin or blown clean off the map. I walked into such villages as Contalmaison, Martinpuich, Le Sars, Thilloy, and at last Bapaume, when a smell of burning and the fumes of explosives and the stench of dead flesh rose up to one’s nostrils and one’s very soul, when our dead and German dead lay about, and newly wounded came walking through the ruins or were carried shoulder high on stretchers, and consciously and subconsciously the living, unwounded men who went through these places knew that death lurked about them and around them and above them, and at any second might make its pounce upon their own flesh. I saw our men going into battle with strong battalions and coming out of it with weak battalions. I saw them in the midst of battle at Thièpval, at Contalmaison, at Guillemont, by Loupart Wood, when they trudged toward lines of German trenches, bunching a little in groups, dodging shell-bursts, falling in single figures or in batches, and fighting over the enemy’s parapets. I sat with them in their dugouts before battle and after battle, saw their bodies gathered up for burial, heard their snuffle of death in hospital, sat by their bedside when they were sorely wounded. So the full tragic drama of that long conflict on the Somme was burned into my brain and I was, as it were, a part of it, and I am still seared with its remembrance, and shall always be. + 

But however deep the knowledge of tragedy, a man would be a liar if he refused to admit the heroism, the gallantry of youth, even the gaiety of men in these infernal months. Psychology on the Somme was not simple and straightforward. Men were afraid, but fear was not their dominating emotion, except in the worst hours. Men hated this fighting, but found excitement in it, often exultation, sometimes an intense stimulus of all their senses and passions before reaction and exhaustion. Men became jibbering idiots with shell-shock, as I saw some of them, but others rejoiced when they saw our shells plowing into the enemy’s earthworks, laughed at their own narrow escapes and at grotesque comicalities of this monstrous deviltry. The officers were proud of their men, eager for their honor and achievement. The men themselves were in rivalry with other bodies of troops, and proud of their own prowess. They were scornful of all that the enemy might do to them, yet acknowledged his courage and power. They were quick to kill him, yet quick also to give him a chance of life by surrender, and after that were⁠—nine times out of ten⁠—chivalrous and kindly, but incredibly brutal on the rare occasions when passion overcame them at some tale of treachery. They had the pride of the skilled laborer in his own craft, as machine-gunners, bombers, raiders, trench-mortar-men, and were keen to show their skill, whatever the risks. They were healthy animals, with animal courage as well as animal fear, and they had, some of them, a spiritual and moral fervor which bade them risk death to save a comrade, or to save a position, or to kill the fear that tried to fetter them, or to lead men with greater fear than theirs. They lived from hour to hour and forgot the peril or the misery that had passed, and did not forestall the future by apprehension unless they were of sensitive mind, with the worst quality men might have in modern warfare⁠—imagination. + 

They trained themselves to an intense egotism within narrow boundaries. Fifty yards to the left, or five hundred, men were being pounded to death by shellfire. Fifty yards to the right, or five hundred, men were being mowed down by machine-gun fire. For the time being their particular patch was quiet. It was their luck. Why worry about the other fellow? The length of a traverse in a ditch called a trench might make all the difference between heaven and hell. Dead bodies were being piled up on one side of the traverse. A shell had smashed into the platoon next door. There was a nasty mess. Men sat under their own mud-bank and scooped out a tin of bully beef and hoped nothing would scoop them out of their bit of earth. This protective egotism seemed to me the instinctive soul-armor of men in dangerous places when I saw them in the line. In a little way, not as a soldier, but as a correspondent, taking only a thousandth part of the risks of fighting-men, I found myself using this self-complacency. They were strafing on the left. Shells were pitching on the right. Very nasty for the men in either of those places. Poor devils! But meanwhile I was on a safe patch, it seemed. Thank Heaven for that! + 

“Here,” said an elderly officer⁠—one of those rare exalted souls who thought that death was a little thing to give for one’s country’s sake⁠—“here we may be killed at any moment!” + 

He spoke the words in Contalmaison with a glow in his voice, as though announcing glad tidings to a friend who was a war artist camouflaged as a lieutenant and new to the scene of battle. + 

“But,” said the soldier-artist, adjusting his steel hat nervously, “I don’t want to be killed! I hate the idea of it!” + 

He was the normal man. The elderly officer was abnormal. The normal man, soldier without camouflage, had no use for death at all, unless it was in connection with the fellow on the opposite side of the way. He hated the notion of it applied to himself. He fought ferociously, desperately, heroically, to escape it. Yet there were times, many times, when he paid not the slightest attention to the near neighborhood of that grisly specter, because in immediate, temporary tranquillity he thrust the thought from his mind, and smoked a cigarette, and exchanged a joke with the fellow at his elbow. There were other times when, in a state of mental exaltation, or spiritual self-sacrifice, or physical excitement, he acted regardless of all risks and did mad, marvelous, almost miraculous things, hardly conscious of his own acts, but impelled to do as he did by the passion within him⁠—passion of love, passion of hate, passion of fear, or passion of pride. Those men, moved like that, were the leaders, the heroes, and groups followed them sometimes because of their intensity of purpose and the infection of their emotion, and the comfort that came from their real or apparent self-confidence in frightful situations. Those who got through were astonished at their own courage. Many of them became convinced consciously or subconsciously that they were immune from shells and bullets. They walked through harassing fire with a queer sense of carelessness. They had escaped so often that some of them had a kind of disdain of shell-bursts, until, perhaps, one day something snapped in their nervous system, as often it did, and the bang of a door in a billet behind the lines, or a wreath of smoke from some domestic chimney, gave them a sudden shock of fear. Men differed wonderfully in their nerve-resistance, and it was no question of difference in courage. + 

In the mass all our soldiers seemed equally brave. In the mass they seemed astoundingly cheerful. In spite of all the abomination of that Somme fighting our troops before battle and after battle⁠—a few days after⁠—looked bright-eyed, free from haunting anxieties, and were easy in their way of laughter. It was optimism in the mass, heroism in the mass. It was only when one spoke to the individual, some friend who bared his soul a second, or some soldier-ant in the multitude, with whom one talked with truth, that one saw the hatred of a man for his job, the sense of doom upon him, the weakness that was in his strength, the bitterness of his grudge against a fate that forced him to go on in this way of life, the remembrance of a life more beautiful which he had abandoned⁠—all mingled with those other qualities of pride and comradeship, and that illogical sense of humor which made up the strange complexity of his psychology. + 

XV + 

It was a colonel of the North Staffordshires who revealed to me the astounding belief that he was “immune” from shellfire, and I met other men afterward with the same conviction. He had just come out of desperate fighting in the neighborhood of Thièpval, where his battalion had suffered heavily, and at first he was rude and sullen in the hut. I gaged him as a hard Northerner, without a shred of sentiment or the flicker of any imaginative light; a stern, ruthless man. He was bitter in his speech to me because the North Staffords were never mentioned in my despatches. He believed that this was due to some personal spite⁠—not knowing the injustice of our military censorship under the orders of G.H.Q. + 

“Why the hell don’t we get a word?” he asked. “Haven’t we done as well as anybody, died as much?” + 

I promised to do what I could⁠—which was nothing⁠—to put the matter right, and presently he softened, and, later was amazingly candid in self-revelation. + 

“I have a mystical power,” he said. “Nothing will ever hit me as long as I keep that power which comes from faith. It is a question of absolute belief in the domination of mind over matter. I go through any barrage unscathed because my will is strong enough to turn aside explosive shells and machine-gun bullets. As matter they must obey my intelligence. They are powerless to resist the mind of a man in touch with the Universal Spirit, as I am.” + 

He spoke quietly and soberly, in a matter-of-fact way. I decided that he was mad. That was not surprising. We were all mad, in one way or another or at one time or another. It was the unusual form of madness that astonished me. I envied him his particular “kink.” I wished I could cultivate it, as an aid to courage. He claimed another peculiar form of knowledge. He knew before each action, he told me, what officers and men of his would be killed in battle. He looked at a man’s eyes and knew, and he claimed that he never made a mistake⁠ ⁠… He was sorry to possess that second sight, and it worried him. + 

There were many men who had a conviction that they would not be killed, although they did not state it in the terms expressed by the colonel of the North Staffordshires, and it is curious that in some cases I know they were not mistaken and are still alive. It was indeed a general belief that if a man funked being hit he was sure to fall, that being the reverse side of the argument. + 

I saw the serene cheerfulness of men in the places of death at many times and in many places, and I remember one group of friends on the Somme who revealed that quality to a high degree. It was when our front-line ran just outside the village of Martinpuich to Courcelette, on the other side of the Bapaume road, and when the 8th⁠–⁠10th Gordons were there, after their fight through Longueval and over the ridge. It was the little crowd I have mentioned before in the battle of Loos, and it was Lieut. John Wood who took me to the battalion headquarters located under some sandbags in a German dugout. All the way up to Contalmaison and beyond there were the signs of recent bloodshed and of present peril. Dead horses lay about, disemboweled by shellfire. Legs and arms protruded from shell-craters where bodies lay half buried. Heavy crumps came howling through the sky and bursting with enormous noise here, there, and everywhere over that vast, desolate battlefield, with its clumps of ruin and rows of dead trees. It was the devil’s hunting-ground and I hated every yard of it. But John Wood, who lived in it, was astoundingly cheerful, and a fine, sturdy, gallant figure, in his kilted dress, as he climbed over sandbags, walked on the top of communication trenches (not bothering to take cover) and skirting round hedges of barbed wire, apparently unconscious of the “crumps” that were bursting around. I found laughter and friendly greeting in a hole in the earth where the battalion staff was crowded. The colonel was courteous, but busy. He rather deprecated the notion that I should go up farther, to the ultimate limit of our line. It was no use putting one’s head into trouble without reasonable purpose, and the German guns had been blowing in sections of his new-made trenches. But John Wood was insistent that I should meet “old Thom,” afterward in command of the battalion. He had just been buried and dug out again. He would like to see me. So we left the cover of the dugout and took to the open again. Long lines of Jocks were digging a support trench⁠—digging with a kind of rhythmic movement as they threw up the earth with their shovels. Behind them was another line of Jocks, not working. They lay as though asleep, out in the open. They were the dead of the last advance. Captain Thom was leaning up against the wall of the front-line trench, smoking a cigarette, with his steel hat on the back of his head⁠—a handsome, laughing figure. He did not look like a man who had just been buried and dug out again. + 

“It was a narrow shave,” he said. “A beastly shell covered me with a ton of earth⁠ ⁠… Have a cigarette, won’t you?” + 

We gossiped as though in St. James’s Street. Other young Scottish officers came up and shook hands, and said: “Jolly weather, isn’t it? What do you think of our little show?” Not one of them gave a glance at the line of dead men over there, behind their parados. They told me some of the funny things that had happened lately in the battalion, some grim jokes by tough Jocks. They had a fine crowd of men. You couldn’t beat them. “Well, good morning! Must get on with the job.” There was no anguish there, no sense of despair, no sullen hatred of this life, so near to death. They seemed to like it⁠ ⁠… They did not really like it. They only made the best of it, without gloom. I saw they did not like this job of battle, one evening in their mess behind the line. The colonel who commanded them at the time, Celt of the Celts, was in a queer mood. He was a queer man, aloof in his manner, a little “fey.” He was annoyed with three of his officers who had come back late from three days’ Paris leave. They were giants, but stood like schoolboys before their master while he spoke ironical, bitter words. Later in the evening he mentioned casually that they must prepare to go into the line again under special orders. What about the store of bombs, small-arms ammunition, machine-guns? + 

The officers were stricken into silence. They stared at one another as though to say: “What does the old man mean? Is this true?” One of them became rather pale, and there was a look of tragic resignation in his eyes. Another said, “Hell!” in a whisper. The adjutant answered the colonel’s questions in a formal way, but thinking hard and studying the colonel’s face anxiously. + 

“Do you mean to say we are going into the line again, sir? At once?” + 

The colonel laughed. + 

“Don’t look so scared, all of you! It’s only a field-day for training.” + 

The officers of the Gordons breathed more freely. Poof! They had been fairly taken in by the “old man’s” leg-pulling⁠ ⁠… No, it was clear they did not find any real joy in the line. They would not choose a front-line trench as the most desirable place of residence. + 

XVI + 

In queer psychology there was a strange mingling of the pitiful and comic⁠—among a division (the 35th) known as the Bantams. They were all volunteers, having been rejected by the ordinary recruiting-officer on account of their diminutive stature, which was on an average five feet high, descending to four feet six. Most of them came from Lancashire, Cheshire, Durham, and Glasgow, being the dwarfed children of industrial England and its mid-Victorian cruelties. Others were from London, banded together in a battalion of the Middlesex Regiment. They gave a shock to our French friends when they arrived as a division at the port of Boulogne. + 

“Name of a dog!” said the quayside loungers. “England is truly in a bad way. She is sending out her last reserves!” + 

“But they are the soldiers of Lilliput!” exclaimed others. + 

“It is terrible that they should send these little ones,” said kindhearted fishwives. + 

Under the training of General Pi, who commanded them, they became smart and brisk in the ranks. They saluted like miniature Guardsmen, marched with quick little steps like clockwork soldiers. It was comical to see them strutting up and down as sentries outside divisional headquarters, with their bayonets high above their wee bodies. In trench warfare they did well⁠—though the fire-step had to be raised to let them see over the top⁠—and in one raid captured a German machine-gun which I saw in their hands, and hauled it back (a heavier weight than ours) like ants struggling with a stick of straw. In actual battle they were hardly strong enough and could not carry all that burden of fighting-kit⁠—steel helmet, rifle, hand-grenades, shovels, empty sandbags⁠—with which other troops went into action. So they were used as support troops mostly, behind the Black Watch and other battalions near Bazentin and Longueval, and there these poor little men dug and dug like beavers and crouched in the cover they made under damnable fire, until many of them were blown to bits. There was no “glory” in their job, only filth and blood, but they held the ground and suffered it all, not gladly. They had a chance of taking prisoners at Longueval, where they rummaged in German dugouts after the line had been taken by the 15th Scottish Division and the 3rd, and they brought back a number of enormous Bavarians who were like the Brobdingnagians to these little men of Lilliput and disgusted with that humiliation. I met the whole crowd of them after that adventure, as they sat, half naked, picking the lice out of their shirts, and the conversation I had with them remains in my memory because of its grotesque humor and tragic comicality. They were excited and emotional, these stunted men. They cursed the war with the foulest curses of Scottish and Northern dialects. There was one fellow⁠—the jester of them all⁠—whose language would have made the poppies blush. With ironical laughter, outrageous blasphemy, grotesque imagery, he described the suffering of himself and his mates under barrage fire, which smashed many of them into bleeding pulp. He had no use for this war. He cursed the name of “glory.” He advocated a trade-unionism among soldiers to down tools whenever there was a threat of war. He was a Bolshevist before Bolshevism. Yet he had no liking for Germans and desired to cut them into small bits, to slit their throats, to disembowel them. He looked homeward to a Yorkshire town and wondered what his missus would say if she saw him scratching himself like an ape, or lying with his head in the earth with shells bursting around him, or prodding Germans with a bayonet. “Oh,” said that five-foot hero, “there will be a lot of murder after this bloody war. What’s human life? What’s the value of one man’s throat? We’re trained up as murderers⁠—I don’t dislike it, mind you⁠—and after the war we shan’t get out of the habit of it. It’ll come nat’ral like!” + 

He was talking for my benefit, egged on to further audacities by a group of comrades who roared with laughter and said: “Go it, Bill! That’s the stuff!” Among these Lilliputians were fellows who sat aloof and sullen, or spoke of their adventure with its recent horror in their eyes. Some of them had big heads on small bodies, as though they suffered from water on the brain⁠ ⁠… Many of them were sent home afterward. General Haldane, as commander of the 6th Corps, paraded them, and poked his stick at the more wizened ones, the obviously unfit, the degenerates, and said at each prod, “You can go⁠ ⁠… You⁠ ⁠… You.⁠ ⁠…” The Bantam Division ceased to exist. + 

They afforded many jokes to the army. One anecdote went the round. A Bantam died⁠—of disease (“and he would,” said General Haldane)⁠—and a comrade came to see his corpse. + 

“Shut ze door ven you come out,” said the old woman of his billet. “Fermez la porte, mon vieux.” + 

The living Bantam went to see the dead one, and came downstairs much moved by grief. + 

“I’ve seed poor Bill,” he said. + 

“As-tu fermé la porte?” said the old woman, anxiously. + 

The Bantam wondered at the anxious inquiry; asked the reason of it. + 

“C’est à cause du chat!” said the old woman. “Ze cat, Monsieur, ’e ’ave ’ad your friend in ze passage tree time already today. Trois fois!” + 

Poor little men born of diseased civilization! They were volunteers to a man, and some of them with as much courage as soldiers twice their size. + 

They were the Bantams who told me of the Anglican padre at Longueval. It was Father Hall of Mirfield, attached to the South African Brigade. He came out to a dressing station established in the one bit of ruin which could be used for shelter, and devoted himself to the wounded with a spiritual fervor. They were suffering horribly from thirst, which made their tongues swell and set their throats on fire. + 

“Water!” they cried. “Water! For Christ’s sake, water!” + 

There was no water, except at a well in Longueval, under the fire of German snipers, who picked off our men when they crawled down like wild dogs with their tongues lolling out. There was one German officer there in a shell-hole not far from the well, who sat with his revolver handy, and he was a dead shot. + 

But he did not shoot the padre. Something in the face and figure of that chaplain, his disregard of the bullets snapping about him, the upright, fearless way in which he crossed that way of death, held back the trigger-finger of the German officer and he let him pass. He passed many times, untouched by bullets or machine-gun fire, and he went into bad places, pits of horror, carrying hot tea, which he made from the well water for men in agony. + 

XVII + 

During these battles I saw thousands of German prisoners, and studied their types and physiognomy, and, by permission of Intelligence officers, spoke with many of them in their barbed-wire cages or on the field of battle when they came along under escort. Some of them looked degraded, bestial men. One could imagine them guilty of the foulest atrocities. But in the mass they seemed to me decent, simple men, remarkably like our own lads from the Saxon counties of England, though not quite so bright and brisk, as was only natural in their position as prisoners, with all the misery of war in their souls. Afterward they worked with patient industry in the prison-camps and established their own discipline, and gave very little trouble if well handled. In each crowd of them there were fellows who spoke perfect English, having lived in England as waiters and hairdressers, or clerks or mechanics. It was with them I spoke most because it was easiest, but I know enough German to talk with the others, and I found among them all the same loathing of war, the same bewilderment as to its causes, the same sense of being driven by evil powers above them. The officers were different. They lost a good deal of their arrogance, but to the last had excuses ready for all that Germany had done, and almost to the last professed to believe that Germany would win. Their sense of caste was in their nature. They refused to travel in the same carriages with their men, to stay even for an hour in the same enclosures with them. They regarded them, for the most part, as inferior beings. And there were castes even among the officers. I remember that in the last phase, when we captured a number of cavalry officers, these elegant sky-blue fellows held aloof from the infantry officers and would not mix with them. One of them paced up and down all night alone, and all next day, stiff in the corsets below that sky-blue uniform, not speaking to a soul, though within a few yards of him were many officers of infantry regiments. + 

Our men treated their prisoners, nearly always, after the blood of battle was out of their eyes, with a good-natured kindness that astonished the Germans themselves. I have seen them filling German water-bottles at considerable trouble, and the escorts, two or three to a big batch of men, were utterly trustful of them. “Here, hold my rifle, Fritz,” said one of our men, getting down from a truck-train to greet a friend. + 

An officer standing by took notice of this. + 

“Take your rifle back at once! Is that the way to guard your prisoners?” + 

Our man was astonished. + 

“Lor’ bless you, sir, they don’t want no guarding. They’re glad to be took. They guard themselves.” + 

“Your men are extraordinary,” a German officer told me. “They asked me whether I would care to go down at once or wait till the barrage had passed.” + 

He seemed amazed at that thoughtfulness for his comfort. It was in the early days of the Somme fighting, and crowds of our men stood on the banks above a sunken road, watching the prisoners coming down. This officer who spoke to me had an Iron Cross, and the men wanted to see it and handle it. + 

“Will they give it back again?” he asked, nervously, fumbling at the ribbon. + 

“Certainly,” I assured him. + 

He handed it to me, and I gave it to the men, who passed it from one to the other and then back to the owner. + 

“Your men are extraordinary,” he said. “They are wonderful.” + 

One of the most interesting prisoners I met on the field of battle was a tall, black-bearded man whom I saw walking away from La Boisselle when that place was smoking with shell-bursts. An English soldier was on each side of him, and each man carried a handbag, while this black-bearded giant chatted with them. + 

It was a strange group, and I edged nearer to them and spoke to one of the men. + 

“Who’s this? Why do you carry his bags?” + 

“Oh, we’re giving him special privileges,” said the man. “He stayed behind to look after our wounded. Said his job was to look after wounded, whoever they were. So there he’s been, in a dugout bandaging our lads; and no joke, either. It’s hell up there. We’re glad to get out of it.” + 

I spoke to the German doctor and walked with him. He discussed the philosophy of the war simply and with what seemed like sincerity. + 

“This war!” he said, with a sad, ironical laugh. “We go on killing one another⁠—to no purpose. Europe is being bled to death and will be impoverished for long years. We Germans thought it was a war for Kultur⁠—our civilization. Now we know it is a war against Kultur, against religion, against all civilization.” + 

“How will it end?” I asked him. + 

“I see no end to it,” he answered. “It is the suicide of nations. Germany is strong, and England is strong, and France is strong. It is impossible for one side to crush the other, so when is the end to come?” + 

I met many other prisoners then and a year afterward who could see no end of the massacre. They believed the war would go on until living humanity on all sides revolted from the unceasing sacrifice. In the autumn of 1918, when at last the end came in sight, by German defeat, unexpected a few months before even by the greatest optimist in the British armies, the German soldiers were glad. They did not care how the war ended so long as it ended. Defeat? What did that matter? Was it worse to be defeated than for the race to perish by bleeding to death? + 

XVIII + 

The struggle for the Pozières ridge and High Wood lasted from the beginning of August until the middle of September⁠—six weeks of fighting as desperate as any in the history of the world until that time. The Australians dealt with Pozières itself, working round Moquet Farm, where the Germans refused to be routed from their tunnels, and up to the Windmill on the high ground of Pozières, for which there was unceasing slaughter on both sides because the Germans counterattacked again and again, and waves of men surged up and fell around that mound of forsaken brick, which I saw as a reddish cone through flame and smoke. + 

Those Australians whom I had seen arrive in France had proved their quality. They had come believing that nothing could be worse than their ordeal in the Dardanelles. Now they knew that Pozières was the last word in frightfulness. The intensity of the shellfire under which they lay shook them, if it did not kill them. Many of their wounded told me that it had broken their nerve. They would never fight again without a sense of horror. + 

“Our men are more highly strung than the English,” said one Australian officer, and I was astonished to hear these words, because those Australians seemed to me without nerves, and as tough as gristle in their fiber. + 

They fought stubbornly, grimly, in ground so ravaged with fire that the earth was finely powdered. They stormed the Pozières ridge yard by yard, and held its crest under sweeping barrages which tore up their trenches as soon as they were dug and buried and mangled their living flesh. In six weeks they suffered twenty thousand casualties, and Pozières now is an Australian graveyard, and the memorial that stands there is to the ghosts of that splendid youth which fell in heaps about that plateau and the slopes below. Many English boys of the Sussex, West Kents, Surrey, and Warwick regiments, in the 18th Division, died at their side, not less patient in sacrifice, not liking it better. Many Scots of the 15th and 9th Divisions, many New-Zealanders, many London men of the 47th and 56th Divisions, fell, killed or wounded, to the right of them, on the way to Martinpuich, and Eaucourt l’Abbaye and Flers, from High Wood and Longueval, and Bazentin. The 3rd Division of Yorkshires and Northumberland Fusiliers, Royal Scots and Gordons, were earning that name of the Iron Division, and not by any easy heroism. Every division in the British army took its turn in the bloodbath of the Somme and was duly blooded, at a cost of 25 percent and sometimes 50 percent of their fighting strength. The Canadians took up the struggle at Courcelette and captured it in a fierce and bloody battle. The Australians worked up on the right of the Albert⁠–⁠Bapaume road to Thilloy and Ligny Thilloy. On the far left the fortress of Thièpval had fallen at last after repeated and frightful assaults, which I watched from ditches close enough to see our infantry⁠—Wiltshires and Worcesters of the 25th Division⁠—trudging through infernal fire. And then at last, after five months of superhuman effort, enormous sacrifice, mass-heroism, desperate willpower, and the tenacity of each individual human ant in this wild ant-heap, the German lines were smashed, the Australians surged into Bapaume, and the enemy, stricken by the prolonged fury of our attack, fell back in a far and wide retreat across a country which he laid waste, to the shelter of his Hindenburg line, from Bullecourt to St.-Quentin. + 

XIX + 

The goal of our desire seemed attained when at last we reached Bapaume after these terrific battles in which all our divisions, numbering nearly a million men, took part, with not much difference in courage, not much difference in average of loss. By the end of that year’s fighting our casualties had mounted up to the frightful total of four hundred thousand men. Those fields were strewn with our dead. Our graveyards were growing forests of little white crosses. The German dead lay in heaps. There were twelve hundred corpses littered over the earth below Loupart Wood, in one mass, and eight hundred of them were German. I could not walk without treading on them there. When I fell in the slime I clutched arms and legs. The stench of death was strong and awful. + 

But our men who had escaped death and shell-shock kept their sanity through all this wilderness of slaughter, kept⁠—oh, marvelous!⁠—their spirit of humor, their faith in some kind of victory. I was with the Australians on that day when they swarmed into Bapaume, and they brought out trophies like men at a country fair⁠ ⁠… I remember an Australian colonel who came riding with a German beer-mug at his saddle⁠ ⁠… Next day, though shells were still bursting in the ruins, some Australian boys set up some painted scenery which they had found among the rubbish, and chalked up the name of the “Coo-ee Theater.” + 

The enemy was in retreat to his Hindenburg line, over a wide stretch of country which he laid waste behind him, making a desert of French villages and orchards and parks, so that even the fruit-trees were cut down, and the churches blown up, and the graves ransacked for their lead. It was the enemy’s first retreat on the western front, and that ferocious fighting of the British troops had smashed the strongest defenses ever built in war, and our raw recruits had broken the most famous regiments of the German army, so in spite of all tragedy and all agony our men were not downcast, but followed up their enemy with a sense of excitement because it seemed so much like victory and the end of war. + 

When the Germans retreated from Gommecourt, where so many boys of the 56th (London) Division had fallen on the 1st of July, I went through that evil place by way of Fonquevillers (which we called “Funky Villas”), and, stumbling over the shell-craters and broken trenches and dead bodies between the dead masts of slashed and branchless trees, came into the open country to our outpost line. I met there a friendly sergeant who surprised me by referring in a casual way to a little old book of mine. + 

“This place,” he said, glancing at me, “is a strange Street of Adventure.” + 

It reminded me of another reference to that tale of mine when I was among a crowd of London lads who had just been engaged in a bloody fight at a place called The Hairpin. + 

A young officer sent for me and I found him in the loft of a stinking barn, sitting in a tub as naked as he was born. + 

“I just wanted to ask you,” he said, “whether Katharine married Frank?” + 

The sergeant at Gommecourt was anxious to show me his own Street of Adventure. + 

“I belong to Toc-emmas,” he said (meaning trench-mortars), “and my officers would be very pleased if you would have a look at their latest stunt. We’ve got a 9.2 mortar in Pigeon Wood, away beyond the infantry. It’s never been done before and we’re going to blow old Fritz out of Kite Copse.” + 

I followed him into the blue, as it seemed to me, and we fell in with a young officer also on his way to Pigeon Wood. He was in a merry mood, in spite of harassing fire round about and the occasional howl of a 5.9. He kept stopping to look at enormous holes in the ground and laughing at something that seemed to tickle his sense of humor. + 

“See that?” he said. “That’s old Charlie Lowndes’s work.” + 

At another pit in upheaved earth he said: “That’s Charlie Lowndes again⁠ ⁠… Old Charlie gave ’em hell. He’s a topping chap. You must meet him⁠ ⁠… My God! look at that!” + 

He roared with laughter again, on the edge of an unusually large crater. + 

“Who is Charlie?” I asked. “Where can I find him?” + 

“Oh, we shall meet him in Pigeon Wood. He’s as pleased as Punch at having got beyond the infantry. First time it has ever been done. Took a bit of doing, too, with the largest size of Toc-emma.” + 

We entered Pigeon Wood after a long walk over wild chaos, and, guided by the officer and sergeant, I dived down into a deep dugout just captured from the Germans, who were two hundred yards away in Kite Copse. + 

“What cheer, Charlie!” shouted the young officer. + 

“Hullo, fellow-my-lad!⁠ ⁠… Come in. We’re getting gloriously binged on a rare find of German brandy.” + 

“Topping and I’ve brought a visitor.” + 

Capt. Charles Lowndes⁠—“dear old Charlie”⁠—received us most politely in one of the best dugouts I ever saw, with smoothly paneled walls fitted up with shelves, and good deal furniture made to match. + 

“This is a nice little home in hell,” said Charles. “At any moment, of course, we may be blown to bits, but meanwhile it is very comfy down here, and what makes everything good is a bottle of rare old brandy and an unlimited supply of German soda-water. Also to add to the gaiety of indecent minds there is a complete outfit of ladies’ clothing in a neighboring dugout. Funny fellows those German officers. Take a pew, won’t you? and have a drink. Orderly!” + 

He shouted for his man and ordered a further supply of German soda-water. + 

We drank to the confusion of the enemy, in his own brandy and soda-water, out of his own mugs, sitting on his own chairs at his own table, and “dear old Charlie,” who was a little étoilé, as afterward I became, with a sense of deep satisfaction (the noise of shells seemed more remote), discoursed on war, which he hated, German psychology, trench-mortar barrages (they had simply blown the Boche out of Gommecourt), and his particular fancy stunt of stealing a march on the infantry, who, said Captain Lowndes, are “laps behind.” Other officers crowded into the dugout. One of them said: “You must come round to mine. It’s a blasted palace,” and I went round later and he told me on the way that he had escaped so often from shell-bursts that he thought the average of luck was up and he was bound to get “done in” before long. + 

Charlie Lowndes dispensed drinks with noble generosity. There was much laughter among us, and afterward we went upstairs and to the edge of the wood, to which a heavy, wet mist was clinging, and I saw the trench-mortar section play the devil with Kite Copse, over the way. Late in the afternoon I took my leave of a merry company in that far-flung outpost of our line, and wished them luck. A few shells crashed through the wood as I left, but I was disdainful of them after that admirable brandy. It was a long walk back to “Funky Villas,” not without the interest of arithmetical calculations about the odds of luck in harassing fire, but a thousand yards or so from Pigeon Wood I looked back and saw that the enemy had begun to “take notice.” Heavy shells were smashing through the trees there ferociously. I hoped my friends were safe in their dugouts again.⁠ ⁠… + 

And I thought of the laughter and gallant spirit of the young men, after five months of the greatest battles in the history of the world. It seemed to me wonderful. + 

XX + 

I have described what happened on our side of the lines, our fearful losses, the stream of wounded that came back day by day, the “Butchers’ Shops,” the agony in men’s souls, the shell-shock cases, the welter and bewilderment of battle, the shelling of our own troops, the lack of communication between fighting units and the command, the filth and stench of the hideous shambles which were our battlefields. But to complete the picture of that human conflict in the Somme I must now tell what happened on the German side of the lines, as I was able to piece the tale together from German prisoners with whom I talked, German letters which I found in their abandoned dugouts, and documents which fell into the hands of our staff-officers. + 

Our men were at least inspirited by the knowledge that they were beating their enemy back, in spite of their own bloody losses. The Germans had not even that source of comfort, for whatever it might be worth under barrage fire. The mistakes of our generalship, the inefficiency of our staff-work, were not greater than the blunderings of the German High Command, and their problem was more difficult than ours because of the weakness of their reserves, owing to enormous preoccupation on the Russian front. The agony of their men was greater than ours. + 

To understand the German situation it must be remembered that from January to May, 1916, the German command on the western front was concentrating all its energy and available strength in manpower and gun-power upon the attack of Verdun. The Crown Prince had staked his reputation upon that adventure, which he believed would end in the capture of the strongest French fortress and the destruction of the French armies. He demanded men and more men, until every unit that could be spared from other fronts of the line had been thrown into that furnace. Divisions were called in from other theaters of war, and increased the strength on the western front to a total of about one hundred and thirty divisions. + 

But the months passed and Verdun still held out above piles of German corpses on its slopes, and in June Germany looked east and saw a great menace. The Russian offensive was becoming violent. German generals on the Russian fronts sent desperate messages for help. “Send us more men,” they said, and from the western front four divisions containing thirty-nine battalions were sent to them. + 

They must have been sent grudgingly, for now another menace threatened the enemy, and it was ours. The British armies were getting ready to strike. In spite of Verdun, France still had men enough⁠—withdrawn from that part of the line in which they had been relieved by the British⁠—to cooperate in a new attack. + 

It was our offensive that the German command feared most, for they had no exact knowledge of our strength or of the quality of our new troops. They knew that our army had grown prodigiously since the assault on Loos, nearly a year before. + 

They had heard of the Canadian reinforcements, and the coming of the Australians, and the steady increase of recruiting in England, and month by month they had heard the louder roar of our guns along the line, and had seen their destructive effect spreading and becoming more terrible. They knew of the steady, quiet concentration of batteries and divisions on the west and south of the Ancre. + 

The German command expected a heavy blow and, prepared for it, but as yet had no knowledge of the driving force behind it. What confidence they had of being able to resist the British attack was based upon the wonderful strength of the lines which they had been digging and fortifying since the autumn of the first year of war⁠—“impregnable positions,” they had called them⁠—the inexperience of our troops, their own immense quantity of machine-guns, the courage and skill of their gunners, and their profound belief in the superiority of German generalship. + 

In order to prevent espionage during the coming struggle, and to conceal the movement of troops and guns, they ordered the civil populations to be removed from villages close behind their positions, drew cordons of military police across the country, picketed crossroads, and established a network of counter espionage to prevent any leakage of information. + 

To inspire the German troops with a spirit of martial fervor (not easily aroused to fever pitch after the bloody losses before Verdun) Orders of the Day were issued to the battalions counseling them to hold fast against the hated English, who stood foremost in the way of peace (that was the gist of a manifesto by Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, which I found in a dugout at Montauban), and promising them a speedy ending to the war. + 

Great stores of material and munitions were concentrated at railheads and dumps ready to be sent up to the firing-lines, and the perfection of German organization may well have seemed flawless⁠—before the attack began. + 

When they began they found that in “heavies” and in expenditure of high explosives they were outclassed. + 

They were startled, too, by the skill and accuracy of the British gunners, whom they had scorned as “amateurs,” and by the daring of our airmen, who flew over their lines with the utmost audacity, “spotting” for the guns, and registering on batteries, communication trenches, crossroads, railheads, and every vital point of organization in the German war-machine working opposite the British lines north and south of the Ancre. + 

Even before the British infantry had left their trenches at dawn on July 1st, German officers behind the firing-lines saw with anxiety that all the organization which had worked so smoothly in times of ordinary trench-warfare was now working only in a hazardous way under a deadly storm of shells. + 

Food and supplies of all kinds could not be sent up to front-line trenches without many casualties, and sometimes could not be sent up at all. Telephone wires were cut, and communications broken between the front and headquarters staffs. Staff-officers sent up to report were killed on the way to the lines. Troops moving forward from reserve areas came under heavy fire and lost many men before arriving in the support trenches. + 

Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, sitting aloof from all this in personal safety, must have known before July 1st that his resources in men and material would be strained to the uttermost by the British attack, but he could take a broader view than men closer to the scene of battle, and taking into account the courage of his troops (he had no need to doubt that), the immense strength of their positions, dug and tunneled beyond the power of high explosives, the number of his machine-guns, the concentration of his artillery, and the rawness of the British troops, he could count up the possible cost and believe that in spite of a heavy price to pay there would be no break in his lines. + 

At 7:30 a.m. on July 1st the British infantry, as I have told, left their trenches and attacked on the right angle down from Gommecourt, Beaumont Hamel, Thièpval, Ovillers, and La Boisselle, and eastward from Fricourt, below Mametz and Montauban. For a week the German troops⁠—Bavarians and Prussians⁠—had been crouching in their dugouts, listening to the ceaseless crashing of the British “drumfire.” In places like Beaumont Hamel, the men down in the deep tunnels⁠—some of them large enough to hold a battalion and a half⁠—were safe as long as they stayed there. But to get in or out was death. Trenches disappeared into a sea of shell-craters, and the men holding them⁠—for some men had to stay on duty there⁠—were blown to fragments. + 

Many of the shallower dugouts were smashed in by heavy shells, and officers and men lay dead there as I saw them lying on the first days of July, in Fricourt and Mametz and Montauban. The living men kept their courage, but below ground, under that tumult of bursting shells, and wrote pitiful letters to their people at home describing the horror of those hours. + 

“We are quite shut off from the rest of the world,” wrote one of them. “Nothing comes to us. No letters. The English keep such a barrage on our approaches it is terrible. Tomorrow evening it will be seven days since this bombardment began. We cannot hold out much longer. Everything is shot to pieces.” + 

Thirst was one of their tortures. In many of the tunneled shelters there was food enough, but the water could not be sent up. The German soldiers were maddened by thirst. When rain fell many of them crawled out and drank filthy water mixed with yellow shell-sulphur, and then were killed by high explosives. Other men crept out, careless of death, but compelled to drink. They crouched over the bodies of the men who lay above, or in, the shell-holes, and lapped up the puddles and then crawled down again if they were not hit. + 

When our infantry attacked at Gommecourt and Beaumont Hamel and Thièpval they were received by waves of machine-gun bullets fired by men who, in spite of the ordeal of our seven days’ bombardment, came out into the open now, at the moment of attack which they knew through their periscopes was coming. They brought their guns above the shell-craters of their destroyed trenches under our barrage and served them. They ran forward even into No Man’s Land, and planted their machine-guns there, and swept down our men as they charged. Over their heads the German gunners flung a frightful barrage, plowing gaps in the ranks of our men. + 

On the left, by Gommecourt and Beaumont Hamel, the British attack failed, as I have told, but southward the “impregnable” lines were smashed by a tide of British soldiers as sand castles are overwhelmed by the waves. Our men swept up to Fricourt, struck straight up to Montauban on the right, captured it, and flung a loop round Mametz village. + 

For the German generals, receiving their reports with great difficulty because runners were killed and telephones broken, the question was: “How will these British troops fight in the open after their first assault? How will our men stand between the first line and the second?” + 

As far as the German troops were concerned, there were no signs of cowardice, or “low morale” as we called it more kindly, in those early days of the struggle. They fought with a desperate courage, holding on to positions in rearguard actions when our guns were slashing them and when our men were getting near to them, making us pay a heavy price for every little copse or gully or section of trench, and above all serving their machine-guns at La Boisselle, Ovillers, above Fricourt, round Contalmaison, and at all points of their gradual retreat, with a wonderful obstinacy, until they were killed or captured. But fresh waves of British soldiers followed those who were checked or broken. + 

After the first week of battle the German General Staff had learned the truth about the qualities of those British “New Armies” which had been mocked and caricatured in German comic papers. They learned that these “amateur soldiers” had the qualities of the finest troops in the world⁠—not only extreme valor, but skill and cunning, not only a great power of endurance under the heaviest fire, but a spirit of attack which was terrible in its effect. They were fierce bayonet fighters. Once having gained a bit of earth or a ruined village, nothing would budge them unless they could be blasted out by gunfire. General Sixt von Arnim put down some candid notes in his report to Prince Rupprecht. + 

“The English infantry shows great dash in attack, a factor to which immense confidence in its overwhelming artillery greatly contributes⁠ ⁠… It has shown great tenacity in defense. This was especially noticeable in the case of small parties, which, when once established with machine-guns in the corner of a wood or a group of houses, were very difficult to drive out.” + 

The German losses were piling up. The agony of the German troops under our shellfire was reaching unnatural limits of torture. The early prisoners I saw⁠—Prussians and Bavarians of the 14th Reserve Corps⁠—were nerve-broken, and told frightful stories of the way in which their regiments had been cut to pieces. The German generals had to fill up the gaps, to put new barriers of men against the waves of British infantry. They flung new troops into the line, called up hurriedly from reserve depots. + 

Now, for the first time, their staff-work showed signs of disorder and demoralization. When the Prussian Guards Reserves were brought up from Valenciennes to counterattack at Contalmaison they were sent on to the battlefield without maps or local guides, and walked straight into our barrage. A whole battalion was cut to pieces and many others suffered frightful things. Some of the prisoners told me that they had lost three-quarters of their number in casualties, and our troops advanced over heaps of killed and wounded. + 

The 122nd Bavarian Regiment in Contalmaison was among those which suffered horribly. Owing to our ceaseless gunfire, they could get no food-supplies and no water. The dugouts were crowded, so that they had to take turns to get into these shelters, and outside our shells were bursting over every yard of ground. + 

“Those who went outside,” a prisoner told me, “were killed or wounded. Some of them had their heads blown off, and some of them their arms. But we went on taking turns in the hole, although those who went outside knew that it was their turn to die, most likely. At last most of those who came into the hole were wounded, some of them badly, so that we lay in blood.” That is one little picture in a great panorama of bloodshed. + 

The German command was not thinking much about the human suffering of its troops. It was thinking of the next defensive line upon which they would have to fall back if the pressure of the British offensive could be maintained⁠—the Longueval⁠–⁠Bazentin⁠–⁠Pozières line. It was getting nervous. Owing to the enormous efforts made in the Verdun offensive, the supplies of ammunition were not adequate to the enormous demand. + 

The German gunners were trying to compete with the British in continuity of bombardments and the shells were running short. Guns were wearing out under this incessant strain, and it was difficult to replace them. General von Gallwitz received reports of “an alarmingly large number of bursts in the bore, particularly in field-guns.” + 

General von Arnim complained that “reserve supplies of ammunition were only available in very small quantities.” The German telephone system proved “totally inadequate in consequence of the development which the fighting took.” The German air service was surprisingly weak, and the British airmen had established temporary mastery. + 

“The numerical superiority of the enemy’s airmen,” noted General von Arnim, “and the fact that their machines were better made, became disagreeably apparent to us, particularly in their direction of the enemy’s artillery fire and in bomb-dropping.” + 

On July 15th the British troops broke the German second line at Longueval and the Bazentins, and inflicted great losses upon the enemy, who fought with their usual courage until the British bayonets were among them. + 

A day or two later the fortress of Ovillers fell, and the remnants of the garrison⁠—one hundred and fifty strong⁠—after a desperate and gallant resistance in ditches and tunnels, where they had fought to the last, surrendered with honor. + 

Then began the long battle of the woods⁠—Devil’s Wood, High Wood, Trones Wood⁠—continued through August with most fierce and bloody fighting, which ended in our favor and forced the enemy back, gradually but steadily, in spite of the terrific bombardments which filled those woods with shellfire and the constant counterattacks delivered by the Germans. + 

“Counterattack!” came the order from the German staff, and battalions of men marched out obediently to certain death, sometimes with incredible folly on the part of their commanding officers, who ordered these attacks to be made without the slightest chance of success. + 

I saw an example of that at close range during a battle at Falfemont Farm, near Guillemont. Our men had advanced from Wedge Wood, and I watched them from a trench just south of this, to which I had gone at a great pace over shell-craters and broken wire, with a young observing officer who had been detailed to report back to the guns. (Old “Falstaff,” whose songs and stories had filled the tent under the Red Cross with laughter, toiled after us gallantly, but grunting and sweating under the sun like his prototype, until we lost him in our hurry.) Presently a body of Germans came out of a copse called Leuze Wood, on rising ground, faced round among the thin, slashed trees of Falfemont, and advanced toward our men, shoulder to shoulder, like a solid bar. It was sheer suicide. I saw our men get their machine-guns into action, and the right side of the living bar frittered away, and then the whole line fell into the scorched grass. Another line followed. They were tall men, and did not falter as they came forward, but it seemed to me they walked like men conscious of going to death. They died. The simile is outworn, but it was exactly as though some invisible scythe had mown them down. + 

In all the letters written during those weeks of fighting and captured by us from dead or living men there was one cry of agony and horror. + 

“I stood on the brink of the most terrible days of my life,” wrote one of them. “They were those of the battle of the Somme. It began with a night attack on August 13th and 14th. The attack lasted till the evening of the 18th, when the English wrote on our bodies in letters of blood, ‘It is all over with you.’ A handful of half-mad, wretched creatures, worn out in body and mind, were all that was left of a whole battalion. We were that handful.” + 

The losses of many of the German battalions were staggering (yet not greater than our own), and by the middle of August the morale of the troops was severely shaken. The 117th Division by Pozières suffered very heavily. The 11th Reserve and 157th Regiments each lost nearly three-quarters of their effectives. The 9th Reserve Corps had also lost heavily. The 9th Reserve Jäger Battalion lost about three-quarters, the 84th Reserve and 86th Reserve over half. On August 10th the 16th Division had six battalions in reserve. + 

By August 19th, owing to the large number of casualties, the greater part of those reserves had been absorbed into the front and support trenches, leaving as available reserves two exhausted battalions. + 

The weakness of the division and the absolute necessity of reinforcing it led to the 15th Reserve Infantry Regiment (2nd Guards Division) being brought up to strengthen the right flank in the Leipzig salient. This regiment had suffered casualties to the extent of over 50 percent west of Pozières during the middle of July, and showed no eagerness to return to the fight. These are but a few examples of what was happening along the whole of the German front on the Somme. + 

It became apparent by the end of August that the enemy was in trouble to find fresh troops to relieve his exhausted divisions, and that the wastage was faster than the arrival of new men. It was noticeable that he left divisions in the line until incapable of further effort rather than relieving them earlier so that after resting they might again be brought on to the battlefield. The only conclusion to be drawn from this was that the enemy had not sufficient formations available to make the necessary reliefs. + 

In July three of these exhausted divisions were sent to the east, their place being taken by two new divisions, and in August three more exhausted divisions were sent to Russia, eight new divisions coming to the Somme front. The British and French offensive was drawing in all the German reserves and draining them of their life’s blood. + 

“We entrained at Savigny,” wrote a man of one of these regiments, “and at once knew our destination. It was our old bloodbath⁠—the Somme.” + 

In many letters this phrase was used. The Somme was called the “Bath of Blood” by the German troops who waded across its shell-craters and in the ditches which were heaped with their dead. But what I have described is only the beginning of the battle, and the bath was to be filled deeper in the months that followed. + 

XXI + 

The name (that “bloodbath”) and the news of battle could not be hidden from the people of Germany, who had already been chilled with horror by the losses at Verdun, nor from the soldiers of reserve regiments quartered in French and Belgian towns like Valenciennes, St.-Quentin, Cambrai, Lille, Bruges, and as far back as Brussels, waiting to go to the front, nor from the civil population of those towns, held for two years by their enemy⁠—these blond young men who lived in their houses, marched down their streets, and made love to their women. + 

The news was brought down from the Somme front by Red Cross trains, arriving in endless succession, and packed with maimed and mangled men. German military policemen formed cordons round the railway stations, pushed back civilians who came to stare with somber eyes at these blanketed bundles of living flesh, but when the ambulances rumbled through the streets toward the hospitals⁠—long processions of them, with the soles of men’s boots turned up over the stretchers on which they lay quiet and stiff⁠—the tale was told, though no word was spoken. + 

The tale of defeat, of great losses, of grave and increasing anxiety, was told clearly enough⁠—as I read in captured letters⁠—by the faces of German officers who went about in these towns behind the lines with gloomy looks, and whose tempers, never of the sweetest, became irritable and unbearable, so that the soldiers hated them for all this cursing and bullying. A certain battalion commander had a nervous breakdown because he had to meet his colonel in the morning. + 

“He is dying with fear and anxiety,” wrote one of his comrades. + 

Other men, not battalion commanders, were even more afraid of their superior officers, upon whom this bad news from the Somme had an evil effect. + 

The bad news was spread by divisions taken out of the line and sent back to rest. The men reported that their battalions had been cut to pieces. Some of their regiments had lost three-quarters of their strength. They described the frightful effect of the British artillery⁠—the smashed trenches, the shell-crater, the horror. + 

It was not good for the morale of men who were just going up there to take their turn. + 

The man who was afraid of his colonel “sits all day long writing home, with the picture of his wife and children before his eyes.” He was afraid of other things. + 

Bavarian soldiers quarreled with Prussians, accused them (unjustly) of shirking the Somme battlefields and leaving the Bavarians to go to the bloodbath. + 

“All the Bavarian troops are being sent to the Somme (this much is certain, you can see no Prussians there), and this in spite of the losses the 1st Bavarian Corps suffered recently at Verdun! And how we did suffer!⁠ ⁠… It appears that we are in for another turn⁠—at least the 5th Bavarian Division. Everybody has been talking about it for a long time. To the devil with it! Every Bavarian regiment is being sent into it, and it’s a swindle.” + 

It was in no cheerful mood that men went away to the Somme battlefields. Those battalions of gray-clad men entrained without any of the old enthusiasm with which they had gone to earlier battles. Their gloom was noticed by the officers. + 

“Sing, you sheeps’ heads, sing!” they shouted. + 

They were compelled to sing, by order. + 

“In the afternoon,” wrote a man of the 18th Reserve Division, “we had to go out again; we were to learn to sing. The greater part did not join in, and the song went feebly. Then we had to march round in a circle and sing, and that went no better. After that we had an hour off, and on the way back to billets we were to sing ‘Deutschland über Alles,’ but this broke down completely. One never hears songs of the Fatherland any more.” + 

They were silent, grave-eyed men who marched through the streets of French and Belgian towns to be entrained for the Somme front, for they had forebodings of the fate before them. Yet none of their forebodings were equal in intensity of fear to the frightful reality into which they were flung. + 

The journey to the Somme front, on the German side, was a way of terror, ugliness, and death. Not all the imagination of morbid minds searching obscenely for foulness and blood in the great, deep pits of human agony could surpass these scenes along the way to the German lines round Courcelette and Flers, Gueudecourt, Morval, and Lesbœufs. + 

Many times, long before a German battalion had arrived near the trenches, it was but a collection of nerve-broken men bemoaning losses already suffered far behind the lines and filled with hideous apprehension. For British long-range guns were hurling high explosives into distant villages, barraging crossroads, reaching out to railheads and ammunition-dumps, while British airmen were on bombing flights over railway stations and rest-billets and highroads down which the German troops came marching at Cambrai, Bapaume, in the valley between Irles and Warlencourt, at Ligny-Thilloy, Busigny, and many other places on the lines of route. + 

German soldiers arriving one morning at Cambrai by train found themselves under the fire of a single airplane which flew very low and dropped bombs. They exploded with heavy crashes, and one bomb hit the first carriage behind the engine, killing and wounding several men. A second bomb hit the station buildings, and there was a clatter of broken glass, the rending of wood, and the fall of bricks. All lights went out, and the German soldiers groped about in the darkness amid the splinters of glass and the fallen bricks, searching for the wounded by the sound of their groans. It was but one scene along the way to that bloodbath through which they had to wade to the trenches of the Somme. + 

Flights of British airplanes circled over the villages on the way. At Grevilliers, in August, eleven 112‒16 bombs fell in the market square, so that the center of the village collapsed in a state of ruin, burying soldiers billeted there. Every day the British airmen paid these visits, meeting the Germans far up the roads on their way to the Somme, and swooping over them like a flying death. Even on the march in open country the German soldiers tramping silently along⁠—not singing in spite of orders⁠—were bombed and shot at by these British aviators, who flew down very low, pouring out streams of machine-gun bullets. The Germans lost their nerve at such times, and scattered into the ditches, falling over one another, struck and cursed by their Unteroffizieren, and leaving their dead and wounded in the roadway. + 

As the roads went nearer to the battlefields they were choked with the traffic of war, with artillery and transport wagons and horse ambulances, and always thousands of gray men marching up to the lines, or back from them, exhausted and broken after many days in the fires of hell up there. Officers sat on their horses by the roadside, directing all the traffic with the usual swearing and cursing, and rode alongside the transport wagons and the troops, urging them forward at a quicker pace because of stern orders received from headquarters demanding quicker movement. The reserves, it seemed, were desperately wanted up in the lines. The English were attacking again⁠ ⁠… God alone knew what was happening. Regiments had lost their way. Wounded were pouring back. Officers had gone mad. Into the midst of all this turmoil shells fell⁠—shells from long-range guns. Transport wagons were blown to bits. The bodies and fragments of artillery horses lay all over the roads. Men lay dead or bleeding under the debris of gun-wheels and broken bricks. Above all the noise of this confusion and death in the night the hard, stern voices of German officers rang out, and German discipline prevailed, and men marched on to greater perils. + 

They were in the shell-zone now, and sometimes a regiment on the march was tracked all along the way by British gunfire directed from airplanes and captive balloons. It was the fate of a captured officer I met who had detrained at Bapaume for the trenches at Contalmaison. + 

At Bapaume his battalion was hit by fragments of twelve-inch shells. Nearer to the line they came under the fire of eight-inch and six-inch shells. Four-point-sevens (4.7’s) found them somewhere by Bazentin. At Contalmaison they marched into a barrage, and here the officer was taken prisoner. Of his battalion there were few men left. + 

It was so with the 3rd Jäger Battalion, ordered up hurriedly to make a counterattack near Flers. They suffered so heavily on the way to the trenches that no attack could be made. The stretcher-bearers had all the work to do. + 

The way up to the trenches became more tragic as every kilometer was passed, until the stench of corruption was wafted on the wind, so that men were sickened, and tried not to breathe, and marched hurriedly to get on the lee side of its foulness. They walked now through places which had once been villages, but were sinister ruins where death lay in wait for German soldiers. + 

“It seems queer to me,” wrote one of them, “that whole villages close to the front look as flattened as a child’s toy run over by a steamroller. Not one stone remains on another. The streets are one line of shell-holes. Add to that the thunder of the guns, and you will see with what feelings we come into the line⁠—into trenches where for months shells of all caliber have rained⁠ ⁠… Flers is a scrap heap.” + 

Again and again men lost their way up to the lines. The reliefs could only be made at night lest they should be discovered by British airmen and British gunners, and even if these German soldiers had trench maps the guidance was but little good when many trenches had been smashed in and only shell-craters could be found. + 

“In the front line of Flers,” wrote one of these Germans, “the men were only occupying shell-holes. Behind there was the intense smell of putrefaction which filled the trench⁠—almost unbearably. The corpses lie either quite insufficiently covered with earth on the edge of the trench or quite close under the bottom of the trench, so that the earth lets the stench through. In some places bodies lie quite uncovered in a trench recess, and no one seems to trouble about them. One sees horrible pictures⁠—here an arm, here a foot, here a head, sticking out of the earth. And these are all German soldiers⁠—heroes! + 

“Not far from us, at the entrance to a dugout, nine men were buried, of whom three were dead. All along the trench men kept on getting buried. What had been a perfect trench a few hours before was in parts completely blown in⁠ ⁠… The men are getting weaker. It is impossible to hold out any longer. Losses can no longer be reckoned accurately. Without a doubt many of our people are killed.” + 

That is only one out of thousands of such gruesome pictures, true as the death they described, true to the pictures on our side of the line as on their side, which went back to German homes during the battles of the Somme. Those German soldiers were great letter-writers, and men sitting in wet ditches, in “foxholes,” as they called their dugouts, “up to my waist in mud,” as one of them described, scribbled pitiful things which they hoped might reach their people at home, as a voice from the dead. For they had had little hope of escape from the bloodbath. “When you get this I shall be a corpse,” wrote one of them, and one finds the same foreboding in many of these documents. + 

Even the lucky ones who could get some cover from the incessant bombardment by English guns began to lose their nerves after a day or two. They were always in fear of British infantry sweeping upon them suddenly behind the Trommelfeuer, rushing their dugouts with bombs and bayonets. Sentries became “jumpy,” and signaled attacks when there were no attacks. The gas-alarm was sounded constantly by the clang of a bell in the trench, and men put on their heavy gas-masks and sat in them until they were nearly stifled. + 

Here is a little picture of life in a German dugout near the British lines, written by a man now dead: + 

“The telephone bell rings. ‘Are you there? Yes, here’s Nau’s battalion.’ ‘Good. That is all.’ Then that ceases, and now the wire is in again perhaps for the twenty-fifth or thirtieth time. Thus the night is interrupted, and now they come, alarm messages, one after the other, each more terrifying than the other, of enormous losses through the bombs and shells of the enemy, of huge masses of troops advancing upon us, of all possible possibilities, such as a train broken down, and we are tortured by all the terrors that the mind can invent. Our nerves quiver. We clench our teeth. None of us can forget the horrors of the night.” + 

Heavy rain fell and the dugouts became wet and filthy. + 

“Our sleeping-places were full of water. We had to try and bail out the trenches with cooking-dishes. I lay down in the water with G⁠⸺. We were to have worked on dugouts, but not a soul could do any more. Only a few sections got coffee. Mine got nothing at all. I was frozen in every limb, poured the water out of my boots, and lay down again.” + 

Our men suffered exactly the same things, but did not write about them. + 

The German generals and their staffs could not be quite indifferent to all this welter of human suffering among their troops, in spite of the cold, scientific spirit with which they regarded the problem of war. The agony of the individual soldier would not trouble them. There is no war without agony. But the psychology of masses of men had to be considered, because it affects the efficiency of the machine. + 

The German General Staff on the western front was becoming seriously alarmed by the declining morale of its infantry under the increasing strain of the British attacks, and adopted stern measures to cure it. But it could not hope to cure the heaps of German dead who were lying on the battlefields, nor the maimed men who were being carried back to the dressing stations, nor to bring back the prisoners taken in droves by the French and British troops. + 

Before the attack on the Flers line, the capture of Thièpval, and the German debacle at Beaumont Hamel, in November, the enemy’s command was already filled with a grave anxiety at the enormous losses of its fighting strength; was compelled to adopt new expedients for increasing the number of its divisions. It was forced to withdraw troops badly needed on other fronts, and the successive shocks of the British offensive reached as far as Germany itself, so that the whole of its recruiting system had to be revised to fill up the gaps torn out of the German ranks. + 

XXII + 

All through July and August the enemy’s troops fought with wonderful and stubborn courage, defending every bit of broken woodland, every heap of bricks that was once a village, every line of trenches smashed by heavy shellfire, with obstinacy. + 

It is indeed fair and just to say that throughout those battles of the Somme our men fought against an enemy hard to beat, grim and resolute, and inspired sometimes with the courage of despair, which was hardly less dangerous than the courage of hope. + 

The Australians who struggled to get the high ground at Pozières did not have an easy task. The enemy made many counterattacks against them. All the ground thereabouts was, as I have said, so smashed that the earth became finely powdered, and it was the arena of bloody fighting at close quarters which did not last a day or two, but many weeks. Mouquet Farm was like the phoenix which rose again out of its ashes. In its tunneled ways German soldiers hid and came out to fight our men in the rear long after the site of the farm was in our hands. + 

But the German troops were fighting what they knew to be a losing battle. They were fighting rearguard actions, trying to gain time for the hasty digging of ditches behind them, trying to sell their lives at the highest price. + 

They lived not only under incessant gunfire, gradually weakening their nerve-power, working a physical as well as a moral change in them, but in constant terror of British attacks. + 

They could never be sure of safety at any hour of the day or night, even in their deepest dugouts. The British varied their times of attack. At dawn, at noon, when the sun was reddening in the west, just before the dusk, in pitch darkness, even, the steady, regular bombardment that had never ceased all through the days and nights would concentrate into the great tumult of sudden drumfire, and presently waves of men⁠—English or Scottish or Irish, Australians or Canadians⁠—would be sweeping on to them and over them, rummaging down into the dugouts with bombs and bayonets, gathering up prisoners, quick to kill if men were not quick to surrender. + 

In this way Thièpval was encircled so that the garrison there⁠—the 180th Regiment, who had held it for two years⁠—knew that they were doomed. In this way Guillemont and Ginchy fell, so that in the first place hardly a man out of two thousand men escaped to tell the tale of horror in German lines, and in the second place there was no long fight against the Irish, who stormed it in a wild, fierce rush which even machine-guns could not check. The German General Staff was getting flurried, grabbing at battalions from other parts of the line, disorganizing its divisions under the urgent need of flinging in men to stop this rot in the lines, ordering counterattacks which were without any chance of success, so that thin waves of men came out into the open, as I saw them several times, to be swept down by scythes of bullets which cut them clean to the earth. Before September 15th they hoped that the British offensive was wearing itself out. It seemed to them at least doubtful that after the struggle of two and a half months the British troops could still have spirit and strength enough to fling themselves against new lines. + 

But the machinery of their defense was crumbling. Many of their guns had worn out, and could not be replaced quickly enough. Many batteries had been knocked out in their emplacements along the line of Bazentin and Longueval before the artillery was drawn back to Grandcourt and a new line of safety. Battalion commanders clamored for greater supplies of hand-grenades, intrenching-tools, trench-mortars, signal rockets, and all kinds of fighting material enormously in excess of all previous requirements. + 

The difficulties of dealing with the wounded, who littered the battlefields and choked the roads with the traffic of ambulances, became increasingly severe, owing to the dearth of horses for transport and the longer range of British guns which had been brought far forward. + 

The German General Staff studied its next lines of defense away through Courcelette, Martinpuich, Lesbœufs, Morval, and Combles, and they did not look too good, but with luck and the courage of German soldiers, and the exhaustion⁠—surely those fellows were exhausted!⁠—of British troops⁠—good enough. + 

On September 15th the German command had another shock when the whole line of the British troops on the Somme front south of the Ancre rose out of their trenches and swept over the German defenses in a tide. + 

Those defenses broke hopelessly, and the waves dashed through. Here and there, as on the German left at Morval and Lesbœufs, the bulwarks stood for a time, but the British pressed against them and round them. On the German right, below the little river of the Ancre, Courcelette fell, and Martinpuich, and at last, as I have written, High Wood, which the Germans desired to hold at all costs, and had held against incessant attacks by great concentration of artillery, was captured and left behind by the London men. A new engine of war had come as a demoralizing influence among German troops, spreading terror among them on the first day out of the tanks. For the first time the Germans were outwitted in inventions of destruction; they who had been foremost in all engines of death. It was the moment of real panic in the German lines⁠—a panic reaching back from the troops to the High Command. + 

Ten days later, on September 25th, when the British made a new advance⁠—all this time the French were pressing forward, too, on our right by Roye⁠—Combles was evacuated without a fight and with a litter of dead in its streets; Gueudecourt, Lesbœufs, and Morval were lost by the Germans; and a day later Thièpval, the greatest fortress position next to Beaumont Hamel, fell, with all its garrison taken prisoners. + 

They were black days in the German headquarters, where staff-officers heard the news over their telephones and sent stern orders to artillery commanders and divisional generals, and after dictating new instructions that certain trench systems must be held at whatever price, heard that already they were lost. + 

It was at this time that the morale of the German troops on the Somme front showed most signs of breaking. In spite of all their courage, the ordeal had been too hideous for them, and in spite of all their discipline, the iron discipline of the German soldier, they were on the edge of revolt. The intimate and undoubted facts of this break in the morale of the enemy’s troops during this period reveal a pitiful picture of human agony. + 

“We are now fighting on the Somme with the English,” wrote a man of the 17th Bavarian Regiment. “You can no longer call it war. It is mere murder. We are at the focal-point of the present battle in Foureaux Wood (near Guillemont). All my previous experiences in this war⁠—the slaughter at Ypres and the battle in the gravel-pit at Hulluch⁠—are the purest child’s play compared with this massacre, and that is much too mild a description. I hardly think they will bring us into the fight again, for we are in a very bad way.” + 

“From September 12th to 27th we were on the Somme,” wrote a man of the 10th Bavarians, “and my regiment had fifteen hundred casualties.” + 

A detailed picture of the German losses under our bombardment was given in the diary of an officer captured in a trench near Flers, and dated September 22nd. + 

“The four days ending September 4th, spent in the trenches, were characterized by a continual enemy bombardment that did not abate for a single instant. The enemy had registered on our trenches with light, as well as medium and heavy, batteries, notwithstanding that he had no direct observation from his trenches, which lie on the other side of the summit. His registering was done by his excellent air service, which renders perfect reports of everything observed. + 

“During the first day, for instance, whenever the slightest movement was visible in our trenches during the presence, as is usually the case, of enemy aircraft flying as low as three and four hundred yards, a heavy bombardment of the particular section took place. The very heavy losses during the first day brought about the resolution to evacuate the trenches during the daytime. Only a small garrison was left, the remainder withdrawing to a part of the line on the left of the Martinpuich⁠–⁠Pozières road. + 

“The signal for a bombardment by ‘heavies’ was given by the English airplanes. On the first day we tried to fire by platoons on the airplanes, but a second airplane retaliated by dropping bombs and firing his machine-gun at our troops. Our own airmen appeared only once for a short time behind our lines. + 

“While many airplanes are observing from early morning till late at night, our own hardly ever venture near. The opinion is that our trenches cannot protect troops during a barrage of the shortest duration, owing to lack of dugouts. + 

“The enemy understands how to prevent, with his terrible barrage, the bringing up of building material, and even how to hinder the work itself. The consequence is that our trenches are always ready for an assault on his part. Our artillery, which does occasionally put a heavy barrage on the enemy trenches at a great expense of ammunition, cannot cause similar destruction to him. He can bring his building material up, can repair his trenches as well as build new ones, can bring up rations and ammunition, and remove the wounded. + 

“The continual barrage on our lines of communication makes it very difficult for us to ration and relieve our troops, to supply water, ammunition, and building material, to evacuate wounded, and causes heavy losses. This and the lack of protection from artillery fire and the weather, the lack of hot meals, the continual necessity of lying still in the same place, the danger of being buried, the long time the wounded have to remain in the trenches, and chiefly the terrible effect of the machine- and heavy-artillery fire, controlled by an excellent air service, has a most demoralizing effect on the troops. + 

“Only with the greatest difficulty could the men be persuaded to stay in the trenches under those conditions.” + 

There were some who could not be persuaded to stay if they could see any chance of deserting or malingering. For the first time on our front the German officers could not trust the courage of their men, nor their loyalty, nor their sense of discipline. All this horror of men blown to bits over living men, of trenches heaped with dead and dying, was stronger than courage, stronger than loyalty, stronger than discipline. A moral rot was threatening to bring the German troops on the Somme front to disaster. + 

Large numbers of men reported sick and tried by every kind of trick to be sent back to base hospitals. + 

In the 4th Bavarian Division desertions were frequent, and several times whole bodies of men refused to go forward into the front line. The morale of men in the 393rd Regiment, taken at Courcelette, seemed to be very weak. One of the prisoners declared that they gave themselves up without firing a shot, because they could trust the English not to kill them. + 

The platoon commander had gone away, and the prisoner was ordered to alarm the platoon in case of attack, but did not do so on purpose. They did not shoot with rifles or machine-guns and did not throw bombs. + 

Many of the German officers were as demoralized as the men, shirking their posts in the trenches, shamming sickness, and even leading the way to surrender. Prisoners of the 351st Regiment, which lost thirteen hundred men in fifteen days, told of officers who had refused to take their men up to the front-line, and of whole companies who had declined to move when ordered to do so. An officer of the 74th Landwehr Regiment is said by prisoners to have told his men during our preliminary bombardment to surrender as soon as we attacked. + 

A German regimental order says: “I must state with the greatest regret that the regiment, during this change of position, had to take notice of the sad fact that men of four of the companies, inspired by shameful cowardice, left their companies on their own initiative and did not move into line.” + 

Another order contains the same fact, and a warning of what punishment may be meted out: + 

“Proofs are multiplying of men leaving the position without permission and hiding at the rear. It is our duty⁠ ⁠… each at his post⁠—to deal with this fact with energy and success.” + 

Many Bavarians complained that their officers did not accompany them into the trenches, but went down to the hospitals with imaginary diseases. In any case there was a great deal of real sickness, mental and physical. The ranks were depleted by men suffering from fever, pleurisy, jaundice, and stomach complaints of all kinds, twisted up with rheumatism after lying in waterlogged holes, lamed for life by bad cases of trench-foot, and nerve-broken so that they could do nothing but weep. + 

The nervous cases were the worst and in greatest number. Many men went raving mad. The shell-shock victims clawed at their mouths unceasingly, or lay motionless like corpses with staring eyes, or trembled in every limb, moaning miserably and afflicted with a great terror. + 

To the Germans (barely less to British troops) the Somme battlefields were not only shambles, but a territory which the devil claimed as his own for the torture of men’s brains and souls before they died in the furnace fires. A spirit of revolt against all this crept into the minds of men who retained their sanity⁠—a revolt against the people who had ordained this vast outrage against God and humanity. + 

Into German letters there crept bitter, burning words against “the millionaires⁠—who grow rich out of the war,” against the high people who live in comfort behind the lines. Letters from home inflamed these thoughts. + 

It was not good reading for men under shellfire. + 

“It seems that you soldiers fight so that official stay-at-homes can treat us as female criminals. Tell me, dear husband, are you a criminal when you fight in the trenches, or why do people treat women and children here as such?⁠ ⁠… + 

“For the poor here it is terrible, and yet the rich, the gilded ones, the bloated aristocrats, gobble up everything in front of our very eyes⁠ ⁠… All soldiers⁠—friend and foe⁠—ought to throw down their weapons and go on strike, so that this war which enslaves the people more than ever may cease.” + 

Thousands of letters, all in this strain, were reaching the German soldiers on the Somme, and they did not strengthen the morale of men already victims of terror and despair. + 

Behind the lines deserters were shot in batches. To those in front came Orders of the Day warning them, exhorting them, commanding them to hold fast. + 

“To the hesitating and fainthearted in the regiment,” says one of these Orders, “I would say the following: + 

“What the Englishman can do the German can do also. Or if, on the other hand, the Englishman really is a better and superior being, he would be quite justified in his aim as regards this war, viz., the extermination of the German. There is a further point to be noted: this is the first time we have been in the line on the Somme, and what is more, we are there at a time when things are more calm. The English regiments opposing us have been in the firing-line for the second, and in some cases even the third, time. Heads up and play the man!” + 

It was easy to write such documents. It was more difficult to bring up reserves of men and ammunition. The German command was harder pressed by the end of September. + 

From July 1st to September 8th, according to trustworthy information, fifty-three German divisions in all were engaged against the Allies on the Somme battlefront. Out of these fourteen were still in the line on September 8th. + 

Twenty-eight had been withdrawn, broken and exhausted, to quieter areas. Eleven more had been withdrawn to rest-billets. Under the Allies’ artillery fire and infantry attacks the average life of a German division as a unit fit for service on the Somme was nineteen days. More than two new German divisions had to be brought into the front-line every week since the end of June, to replace those smashed in the process of resisting the Allied attack. In November it was reckoned by competent observers in the field that well over one hundred and twenty German divisions had been passed through the ordeal of the Somme, this number including those which have appeared there more than once. + 

XXIII + 

By September 25th, when the British troops made another attack, the morale of the German troops was reaching its lowest ebb. Except on their right, at Beaumont Hamel and Beaucourt, they were far beyond the great system of protective dugouts which had given them a sense of safety before July 1st. Their second and third lines of defense had been carried, and they were existing in shell-craters and trenches hastily scraped up under ceaseless artillery fire. + 

The horrors of the battlefield were piled up to heights of agony and terror. Living men dwelt among the unburied dead, made their way to the front-lines over heaps of corpses, breathed in the smell of human corruption and had always in their ears the cries of the wounded they could not rescue. They wrote these things in tragic letters⁠—thousands of them⁠—which never reached their homes in Germany, but lay in their captured ditches. + 

“The number of dead lying about is awful. One stumbles over them.” + 

“The stench of the dead lying round us is unbearable.” + 

“We are no longer men here. We are worse than beasts.” + 

“It is hell let loose.”⁠ ⁠… “It is horrible.”⁠ ⁠… “We’ve lived in misery.” + 

“If the dear ones at home could see all this perhaps there would be a change. But they are never told.” + 

“The ceaseless roar of the guns is driving us mad.” + 

Poor, pitiful letters, out of their cries of agony one gets to the real truth of war⁠—the “glory” and the “splendor” of it preached by the German philosophers and British Jingoes, who upheld it as the great strengthening tonic for their race, and as the noblest experience of men. Every line these German soldiers wrote might have been written by one of ours; from both sides of the shifting lines there was the same death and the same hell. + 

Behind the lines the German General Staff, counting up the losses of battalions and divisions who staggered out weakly, performed juggling tricks with what reserves it could lay its hands on, and flung up stray units to relieve the poor wretches in the trenches. Many of those reliefs lost their way in going up, and came up late, already shattered by the shellfire through which they passed. + 

“Our position,” wrote a German infantry officer, “was, of course, quite different from what we had been told. Our company alone relieved a whole battalion. We had been told we were to relieve a company of fifty men weakened by casualties. + 

“The men we relieved had no idea where the enemy was, how far off he was, or whether any of our own troops were in front of us. We got no idea of our support position until six o’clock this evening. The English are four hundred yards away, by the windmill over the hill.” + 

One German soldier wrote that the British “seem to relieve their infantry very quickly, while the German commands work on the principle of relieving only in the direst need, and leaving the divisions in as long as possible.” + 

Another wrote that: + 

“The leadership of the divisions really fell through. For the most part we did not get orders, and the regiment had to manage as best it could. If orders arrived they generally came too late or were dealt out ‘from the green table’ without knowledge of the conditions in front, so that to carry them out was impossible.” + 

All this was a sign of demoralization, not only among the troops who were doing the fighting and the suffering, but among the organizing generals behind, who were directing the operations. The continual hammer-strokes of the British and French armies on the Somme battlefields strained the German war-machine on the western front almost to breaking-point. + 

It seemed as though a real debacle might happen, and that they would be forced to effect a general retreat⁠—a withdrawal more or less at ease or a retirement under pressure from the enemy.⁠ ⁠… + 

But they had luck⁠—astonishing luck. At the very time when the morale of the German soldiers was lowest and when the strain on the High Command was greatest the weather turned in their favor and gave them just the breathing-space they desperately needed. Rain fell heavily in the middle of October, autumn mists prevented airplane activity and artillery-work, and the ground became a quagmire, so that the British troops found it difficult to get up their supplies for a new advance. + 

The Germans were able in this respite to bring up new divisions, fresh and strong enough to make heavy counterattacks in the Stuff and Schwaben and Regina trenches, and to hold the lines more securely for a time, while great digging was done farther back at Bapaume and the next line of defense. Successive weeks of bad weather and our own tragic losses checked the impetus of the British and French driving power, and the Germans were able to reorganize and reform. + 

As I have said, the shock of our offensive reached as far as Germany, and caused a complete reorganization in the system of obtaining reserves of manpower. The process of “combing out,” as we call it, was pursued with astounding ruthlessness, and German mothers, already stricken with the loss of their elder sons, raised cries of despair when the youngest born were also seized⁠—boys of eighteen belonging to the 1918 class. + 

The whole of the 1917 class had joined the depots in March and May of this year, receiving a three months’ training before being transferred to the field-recruit depots in June and July. About the middle of July the first large drafts joined their units and made their appearance at the front, and soon after the beginning of our offensive at least half this class was in the front-line regiments. The massacre of the boys had begun. + 

Then older men, men beyond middle age, who correspond to the French Territorial class, exempted from fighting service and kept on lines of communication, were also called to the front, and whole garrisons of these gray heads were removed from German towns to fill up the ranks. + 

“The view is held here,” wrote a German soldier of the Somme, “that the Higher Command intends gradually to have more and more Landsturm battalions (men of the oldest reserves) trained in trench warfare for a few weeks, as we have been, according to the quality of the men, and thus to secure by degrees a body of troops on which it can count in an emergency.” + 

In the month of November the German High Command believed that the British attacks were definitely at an end, “having broken down,” as they claimed, “in mud and blood,” but another shock came to them when once more British troops⁠—the 51st Highland Division and the 63rd Naval Division⁠—left their trenches, in fog and snow, and captured the strongest fortress position on the enemy’s front, at Beaumont Hamel, bringing back over six thousand prisoners. It was after that they began their retreat. + 

These studies of mine, of what happened on both sides of the shifting lines in the Somme, must be as horrible to read as they were to write. But they are less than the actual truth, for no pen will ever in one book, or in hundreds, give the full record of the individual agony, the broken heart-springs, the soul-shock as well as the shell-shock, of that frightful struggle in which, on one side and the other, two million men were engulfed. Modern civilization was wrecked on those fire-blasted fields, though they led to what we called “Victory.” More died there than the flower of our youth and German manhood. The Old Order of the world died there, because many men who came alive out of that conflict were changed, and vowed not to tolerate a system of thought which had led up to such a monstrous massacre of human beings who prayed to the same God, loved the same joys of life, and had no hatred of one another except as it had been lighted and inflamed by their governors, their philosophers, and their newspapers. The German soldier cursed the militarism which had plunged him into that horror. The British soldier cursed the German as the direct cause of all his trouble, but looked back on his side of the lines and saw an evil there which was also his enemy⁠—the evil of a secret diplomacy which juggled with the lives of humble men so that war might be sprung upon them without their knowledge or consent, and the evil of rulers who hated German militarism not because of its wickedness, but because of its strength in rivalry and the evil of a folly in the minds of men which had taught them to regard war as a glorious adventure, and patriotism as the right to dominate other peoples, and liberty as a catchword of politicians in search of power. After the Somme battles there were many other battles as bloody and terrible, but they only confirmed greater numbers of men in the faith that the old world had been wrong in its “makeup” and wrong in its religion of life. Lip service to Christian ethics was not good enough as an argument for this. Either the heart of the world must be changed by a real obedience to the gospel of Christ or Christianity must be abandoned for a new creed which would give better results between men and nations. There could be no reconciling of bayonet-drill and high explosives with the words “Love one another.” Or if bayonet-drill and high-explosive force were to be the rule of life in preparation for another struggle such as this, then at least let men put hypocrisy away and return to the primitive law of the survival of the fittest in a jungle world subservient to the king of beasts. The devotion of military chaplains to the wounded, their valor, their decorations for gallantry under fire, their human comradeship and spiritual sincerity, would not bridge the gulf in the minds of many soldiers between a gospel of love and this argument by bayonet and bomb, gas-shell and high velocity, blunderbuss, club, and trench-shovel. Some time or other, when German militarism acknowledged defeat by the break of its machine or by the revolt of its people⁠—not until then⁠—there must be a new order of things, which would prevent such another massacre in the fair fields of life, and that could come only by a faith in the hearts of many peoples breaking down old barriers of hatred and reaching out to one another in a fellowship of common sense based on common interests, and inspired by an ideal higher than this beast-like rivalry of nations. So thinking men thought and talked. So said the soldier-poets who wrote from the trenches. So said many onlookers. The simple soldier did not talk like that unless he were a Frenchman. Our men only began to talk like that after the war⁠—as many of them are now talking⁠—and the revolt of the spirit, vague but passionate, against the evil that had produced this devil’s trap of war, and the German challenge, was subconscious as they sat in their dugouts and crowded in their ditches in the battles of the Somme. + 