Part 15

In the most tranquil of villages the survivors looking in shop windows and trying out their French might wonder how it was that they were alive, though they were certain that their brigadier thought well of them. Ask them or their officers what they thought of their brigadier and they were equally certain of that, too. Theirs was the best brigadier in the army. Think what this kind of confidence means to men in such an action when their lives are the pawns of his direction!

I felt a kind of awe in the presence of one of the battalions in billet in a warehouse, more than in the presence of prime ministers or potentates. Most of them were blinking and mind-stiff after having slept the clock around. They were Yorkshiremen, chiefly workers in worsted mills and a stubborn lot.

"What did you most want to do when you got out of the fight?" I asked.

They spoke with one voice which left no question of their desires in a one-two-three order. They wanted a wash, a shave, a good meal, and then sleep. And personal experiences? Tom called on Jim and Jim had bayoneted two Germans, he said; then Jim called on Bill, who had had a wonderful experience according to Jim, though all that Bill made of it was that he got there first with his bombs. Told among themselves the stories might have been thrilling. Before a stranger they were mere official reports. It had been quick work, too quick for anything but to dodge for cover and act promptly in your effort to get the other fellow before he got you.

Generically, they had a job to do and they did it just as they would have done one in the factories at home. They were not so interested in any exhibition of courage as in an encounter which had the element of sport. Each narrator invariably returned to the subject of soda water. The outstanding novelty of the charge to these men was the quantity of soda water in bottles which they had found in the German dugouts. They went on to their second objective with bottles of soda water in their pockets and German light cigars in the corners of their mouths and stopped to drink soda water between bombing rushes after they had arrived. It was a hot, thirsty day.

Through the curtains of artillery fire which were continually maintained back of their new positions supplies could not be brought up, but Boche provisions saved the day. In fact, I think this was one of the reasons why they felt almost kindly toward the Germans. They found the canned meat excellent, but did not care for the "K.K." bread.

Thus in the dim light of the warehouse they talked on, making their task appear as a half-holiday of sport. It seemed to me that this was in keeping with their training; the fashionable attitude of the British soldier toward a horrible business. If this helps him to endure what these men had endured without flinching, with comrades being blown to bits around them by shell-bursts, why, then, it is the attitude best suited to develop the fighting quality of the British. They had it from their officers who, in turn, perhaps, had it in part from such British regulars as the brigadier, though mostly I think that it was inborn racial phlegm.

I met the five officers who were the survivors of the twenty in one battalion, the five who had "carried through." One was a barrister, another just out of Oxford, a third, as I remember, a real estate broker in a small town. They told their stories without a gesture, quite as if they were giving an account of a game of golf. It might have seemed callous, but you knew better.

You knew when they said that it was "a bit stiff," or "a bit thick," or "it looked as if they had us," what inexpressible emotion lay behind the accepted army phrases. The truth was they would not permit themselves to think of the void in their lines made by the death of their comrades. They had drawn the curtain on all incidents which had not the appeal of action and finality as a part of the business of "going through." One officer with a twitch of the lips remarked almost casually that new officers and drafts were arriving and that it would seem strange to see so many new faces in the mess.

Those of their old comrades who were not dead were already in hospital in England. When an officer who had been absent joined the group he brought the news that one of their number who had been badly hit would live. The others' quiet ejaculation of "Good!" had a thrill back of it which communicated its joy to me. Eight of the wounded had not been seriously hit, which meant that these would return and that, after all, only four were dead. This was the first intimate indication I had of how the offensive exposing the whole bodies of men in a charge against the low-velocity shrapnel bullets and high-velocity bullets from rifles and machine guns must result in the old ratio of only one mortal wound for every five men hit.

There was consolation in that fact. It was another advantage of the war of movement as compared with the war of shambles in trenches. And none, from the general down to the privates, had really any idea of how glorious a part they had played. They had merely "done their bit" and taken what came their way--and they had "gone through."

XII

THE STORMING OF CONTALMAISON

The mighty animal of war makes ready for another effort--New charts at headquarters--The battle of the Somme the battle of woods and villages--A terrible school of war in session--Mametz--A wood not "thinned"--The Quadrangle--Marooned Scots--"Softening" a village--Light German cigars--Going after Contalmaison--Aeroplanes in the blue sky--Midsummer fruitfulness and war's destruction--Making chaos of a village--Attack under cover of a wall of smoke--A melodrama under the passing shells.

If the British and the French could have gone on day after day as they had on July 1st they would have put the Germans out of France and Belgium by autumn. Arrival at the banks of the Rhine and even the taking of Essen would have been only a matter of calculation by a schedule of time and distance. After the shock of the first great drive in which the mighty animal of war lunged forward, it had to stretch out its steel claws to gain further foothold and draw its bulky body into position for another huge effort. Wherever the claws moved there were Germans, who were too wise soldiers to fall back supinely on new lines of fortifications and await the next general attack. They would parry every attempt at footholds of approach for launching it; pound the claws as if they were the hands of an invader grasping at a window ledge.

At headquarters there was a new chart with different colored patches numbered by the days of the month beginning July 1st, each patch indicating the ground that had been won on that day. Compare their order with a relief map and in one-two-three fashion you were able to grasp the natural tactical sequence; how one position was taken in order to command another. Sometimes, though, they represented the lines of least resistance. Often the real generals were the battalions on the battle front who found the weak points and asked permission to press on. The principle was the same as water finding its level as it spreads from a reservoir.

I have often thought that a better name for the battle of the Somme would be the battle of woods and villages. Their importance never really dawned on the observer until after July 1st. Or, it might be called the battle of the spade. Give a man an hour with a spade in that chalky subsoil and a few sandbags and he will make a fortress for himself which only a direct hit by a shell can destroy. He ducks under the sweep of bullets when he is not firing and with his steel helmet is fairly safe from shrapnel while he waits in his lair until the other fellow comes.

Thus the German depended on the machine gun and the rifle to stop any charge which was not supported by artillery fire sufficient to crush in the trenches and silence his armament. When it was, he had his own artillery to turn a curtain of fire onto the charge in progress and to hammer the enemy if he got possession. This was obviously the right system--in theory. But the theory did not always work out, as we shall see. Its development through the four months that I watched the Somme battle was only less interesting than the development of offensive tactics by the British and the French. Every day this terrible school of war was in session, with a British battalion more skilful and cunning every time that it went into the firing-line.

Rising out of the slopes toward the Ridge in green patches were three large woods, not to mention small ones, under a canopy of shell-smoke, Mametz, Bernafay and Trones, with their orgies of combat hidden under their screens of foliage. They recall the Wilderness--a Wilderness lasting for days, with only one feature of the Wilderness lacking which was a conflagration, but with lachrymatory and gas shells and a few other features that were lacking in Virginia. In the next war we may have still more innovations. Ours is the ingenious human race.

It is Mametz with an area of something over two hundred acres that concerns us now. The Germans thought highly of Mametz. They were willing to lose thousands of lives in order to keep it in their possession. For two years it had not been thinned according to French custom; now shells and bullets were to undertake the task which had been neglected. So thick was the undergrowth that a man had to squeeze his way through and an enemy was as well ambushed as a field mouse in high grass.

The Germans had run barriers of barbed wire through the undergrowth. They had their artillery registered to fringe the woods with curtains of fire and machine guns nestling in unseen barricades and trenches. Through the heart of it they had a light railway for bringing up supplies. All these details had been arranged in odd hours when they were not working on the main first- and second-line fortifications during their twenty months of preparation. I think they must have become weary at times of so much "choring," judging by a German general's order after his inspection of the second line, in which he said that the battalions in occupation were a lazy lot who were a disgrace to the Fatherland. After the battle began they could add to the defenses improvements adapted to the needs of the moment. Of course, large numbers of Germans were killed and wounded by British shell fire in the process of "thinning" out the woods; but that was to be expected, as the Germans learned during the battle of the Somme.

How the British ever took Mametz Wood I do not understand; or how they took Trones Wood later, for that matter. A visit to the woods only heightened perplexity. I have seen men walk over broken bottles with bare feet, swallow swords and eat fire and knew that there was some trick about it, as there was about the taking of Mametz.

The German had not enough barbed wire to go all the way around the woods, or, at least, British artillery would not let him string any more and he thought that the British would attack where they ought to according to rule; that is, by the south. Instead, they went in by the west, where the machine guns were not waiting and the heavy guns were not registered, as I understand it. A piece of strategy of that kind might have won a decisive battle in an old-time war, but I confess that it did not occur to me to ask who planned it when I heard the story. Strategists became so common on the Somme that everybody took them as much for granted as that every battalion had a commander.

Mametz was not taken with the first attack. The British were in the woods once and had to come out; but they had learned that before they could get a proper point d'appui they must methodically "clean up" a small grove, a neighboring cemetery, an intricate maze of trenches called the Quadrangle, and a few other outlying obstacles. In the first rush a lot of Tyneside Scots were marooned from joining in the retreat. They fortified themselves in German dugouts and waited in siege, these dour men of the North. When the British returned eighty of the Scots were still full of fight if short of food and "verra well" otherwise, thank you. At times they had been under blasts of shells from both sides, and again they had been in an oasis of peace, with neither British nor German gunners certain whether they would kill friend or foe.

Going in from the west while the Germans had their curtains of fire registered elsewhere, the British grubbed their way in one charge through most of Mametz and when night fell in the midst of the undergrowth, with a Briton not knowing whether it was Briton or German lying on the other side of a tree-trunk, they had the satisfaction of possessing four big guns which the Germans had been unable to withdraw, and had ascertained also that the Germans had a strong position protected by barbed wire at the northern end of the woods.

"This will require a little thinking," as one English officer said, "but of course we shall take it."

The purchase on Mametz and the occupation of Bailiff's Wood, the Quadrangle, La Boisselle and Ovillers-la-Boisselle brought the circle of advancing British nearer to Contalmaison, which sat up on the hills in a sea of chalk seams. Contalmaison was being gradually "softened" by the artillery. The chateau was not yet all down, but after each bite by a big shell less of the white walls was visible when the clouds of smoke from the explosion lifted. Bit by bit the guns would get the chateau, just as bit by bit a stonemason chips a block down to the proper dimensions to fit it into place in a foundation.

A visit to La Boisselle on the way to Contalmaison justified the expectation as to what was in store for Contalmaison. I saw the blackened and shell-whittled trunks of two trees standing in La Boisselle. Once with many others they had given shade in the gardens of houses; but there were no traces of houses now except as they were mixed with the earth. The village had been hammered into dust. Yet some dugouts still survived. Keeping at it, the British working around these had eventually forced the surrender of the garrison, who could not raise their heads to fire without being met by a bullet or a bomb-burst from the watchful besiegers.