With the British on the Somme

Excerpt:

ON 3rd July I crept with many fears into the edge of Fricourt Wood, past the dressing-station and into the trees. It had not greatly suffered. The place was "pinched out/' and for some reason no superlative shelling of the place had been decreed by either side. Twenty thousand shells and more may have burst there, perhaps a hundred thousand ; but into Delville on the last day of a six weeks' bombardment we emptied at least a hundred and twenty thousand ; and they were concentrated only on one section. The bombardment was the heaviest till then attempted. Fricourt was, in the soldier's phrase, a health resort, a phrase meaning that life there was endurable. Ypres during the Somme battle was a " health resort." You were not quite sure to be shelled in the open, the approaches were open the greater part of the day, and only now and then was any section of trench knocked into hummocks. In that sense Fricourt was a health resort for a few days after the battle. Bernafay Wood, to the east of Montauban, was another health resort, just for a while. Only alleys, no fire trenches ran through it.

We captured it in twenty minutes with not as many as fifty casualties. But Bernafay, taken much at the same time as Fricourt, became a day later a roosting-place for innumerable shells ; and many men died there. At least as often as not it is more costly to hold than to take.

But we had not yet tasted the full terror of the woods ; nor had the Germans yet learned the full art of their defence. They had abandoned Fricourt and Bernaf ay at too great a speed ; and had left no feeding pipe for the reinforcement of the garrison. Their revenge at Bernafay was to sentinel our approaches with a quite ceaseless chasse of heavy shells. Almost every day for a while I went within sight and hearing of this wood ; and not once was there intermission of the bark of 5-9 shells and the black columns rising with damnable iteration from the hither edge of the wood. And then as ever afterwards throughout the battle they fired rather more at night than by day. Woods are the delight of attacking and despair of the defending artillery. Every contact shell that hits a tree is likely to explode. It follows that a shell becomes dangerous several hundred yards before it reaches its target.

Before the 15th Sept ember, when the last of the woods on our front was captured, and London troops put the final flourish on our knowledge in High Wood, we were to know all there was to be known about wood fighting.

When we forced a way into High Wood and pressed over the ridge down the slope facing the enemy our own gunners were helpless. The enemy facing us rested in a pool of serenity where no shells broke — for this reason. Any contact shell directed on their lines was more likely than not to strike a tree in its course over British trenches and explode its fragments suicidally. The Germans were as safe as a man sheltering under the arch of a waterfall ; and in this case, owing to the fall of the ground, the cascade fell many hundred yards beyond them. But for hostile artillery a wood is a perfect target, that no one can miss, though it is a little difficult to detect the exact location of emplacements and trenches. For the men the cover adds to the terror. Shells strike and explode above ground on the trunks. Every burst is endowed with a longer life of noise and higher intensity. Fragments fly at all tangents and, above all, the discovery and recovery of wounded men is a nightmare. To hear them calling at night through the wizardry of the tangled trees and roots fills the strongest with a shivering pity, like no other sensation in war.

Retreat in a wood surpasses all endurance, for it adds horror to the bitterest sensation a man knows : the compulsion to leave his wounded behind. Men are doubly brave in victory, largely because they know if they fall that they will be found and fetched, salved or saved, by their own people. It may not be so with all peoples — with the Latins, who have a gift of stronger intellectual imagination and higher mental ecstasy, but with English county troops the sense of staying alive or dead with their own people buttresses their courage more than any other single cause ; and nothing so depresses, so saddens them as the thought that they have left their friends wounded within the pale of the enemy or, yet worse, in No Man's Land. The flourish set on the brutality of war is the abandonment of wounded men to die slowly of cold, of hunger, of decay. Men have been brought into hospital after eight days of exposure when they have eaten and drunken only such scraps and drops as they could filch after dolorous crawling in the mire from the dead who were their companions.

And every wood across our path, except the first two, we nearly won and largely lost, not once, but many times, before trenches were fortified on the farther side, and the whole made good. Each of these woods is holy ground : Trones, Mametz, Delville, and the Bois des Foureaux or High Wood ; the cradle of high fame, as well as the grave of many noble lives. Troops from every part of Britain fought these forest fights.

It has come about that each wood is associated with a particular regiment ; and though perhaps a score of others fought as hard, the fame has always been won by signal service and a bloody fight.

The West Kents claim Trones by virtue of their forty-eight hours' siege, but in Trones the worst of the fighting was the endurance of the shells iby those who occupied it. One morning a young Fusilier officer was sitting there with the regimental doctor, also a young man ; and while the heavy shells burrowed and barked and, gobbled among the tree roots all round them, they discussed the war, which both hated. The doctor was, and happily is, one of the best" of the younger bacteriologists, and the officer a great lover of field natural history. There the two crouched in the dark — for the shell explosions perpetually blew out the candle — feeling themselves negative, if not useless, doing the work of a clod of earth, and likely at any moment to be pulverized by the ploughshare.

' It seems a pity" said the doctor at last, " that you should like all you like, and I should know all I know, and we two be here"

So at all sorts of times and places does the futility of war breed revolt in the finer spirits ; but always everywhere it is the finer spirit that holds out best, and best bears the brutality of shelling. That has been proved in this war times without number.

Trones Wood introduced to us the grimness of wood fighting. The Germans bordered it on our side with heavy shells, and kept all the while within their grip a few trenches by which they could filter into the fastnesses at will. As soon as our infantry came within attacking distance of these reinforced garrisons, our artillery was forced to withdraw its defence, and the enemy was left with the upper hand. The pear shape of the wood forced attacking troops to move from different directions, and, as experience in Delville afterwards proved (indeed, as we had already proved on the way from the Marne to the Aisne two years before), even regular soldiers could scarcely avoid the risk of firing at each other. Before my own eyes, as a foreboding picture of wood fighting, I keep the memory of a single English soldier who fell to English bullets in a little wood above the Marne, where his body was found as I reached the field nearly three weeks later.

Trones Wood remained an unspeakable cemetery for many weeks, for there, backwards and forwards, our troops and the Germans ebbed and flowed, each wave leaving behind it dead and wounded tangled in the undergrowth, like the bodies of seagulls mixed with other flotsam in the sea-wrack on a leeward shore.

Our own wounded and German wounded each in turn underwent a heavy shelling from their own guns. In some cases — I know one incredible experience — the wounded of the two sides fought duels with one another while they lay or crouched in the undergrowth or in craters, all the while increased promiscuously by either artillery. The intensity of our fire on one section of this cemetery was visible from miles away before the final attack, and the pillars of smoke served for a suitable background to the flashes and clouds of the enemy's shrapnel barraging on the near side.

Mametz Wood, taken almost at the same time was in some ways worse, because bigger ; and " Enter these enchanted woods, Ye who dare."

The Germans had stretched wires like poacher's snares. They had cut paths and avenues for hidden machine-guns to rake. They had built caves of Cacus and bristling forts — all this in a forest of exceptional thickness through which you would hardly care to push merely for the spidery and weevil fustiness of it.

It was repulsive then and afterwards. As I pushed through it some days after its capture the flies had settled like a thick, sticky sediment at the bottom of the shell holes. Once when I jumped into one on the sound of a singing shell, they lifted some few inches, like a coverlet raised by a puff of wind, and then settled back in their original position. Among the horrors of the wood was the wreck of one of our own aeroplanes.

The wood held us up for many days after the first rush through the nearer half ; and a second brilliant attack from the eastern side, which I watched on a day of such singular clearness that I could see the shadows of the juniper's bushes at a distance sufficient to reduce the men to the size of beetles. The delay caused much heart-searching, for we wished to hurry on to the second great attack finally delivered on 14th July and nothing could be done till Mametz was ours. It fell at last to Welsh troops, including the London Welsh. The men were perhaps peculiarly sensitive to the diabolism of the place. One platoon of these gallant Welshmen were waiting for the moment of attack with tingling nerves, when one of their officers fired a Verey-light cartridge from his pistol. At the top of its flight it lit the jagged trunks looking like giant skeletons, and as it fell, as it almost touched the undergrowth, it lit not a skeleton but a live giant. The face was shown up, clear and ghostly, and the body seemed to partake of the enormity of the trees. The young officer, himself constantly afraid of being afraid as are many brave men, had some ado to stop a real panic. For the first and only time his men began to run away, but the crisis was momentary. The light died down, and from the ambush of a tree a petrified voice cried out, " Mercy, Kamerad! " The figure of fear was a German deserter.

Within a wood all the common sounds and symptoms of war gain terror. The sense of direction of sound is blurred or distorted. When these gallant Welshmen were delivering their final triumphant attack, a single German machine-gun opened fire in the extreme corner of the wood. Its deadly tap seemed placeless, everywhere and yet nowhere, echoing off trunks and thrown back by blocks of trees. This single gun, which was firing not into the wood but across the open, almost arrested the charge. There was one moment of wavering and then the terror was converted into an ecstasy of rage. The Welshmen bitted their imagination and drove straight through the northern space of the wood, across the trench at the edge and so out into the open.

Thus the wood was won ; but it was not cleared. Two days later a German officer was discovered in a dugout with stores of food, with maps and telephone apparatus ; and there is some evidence that he amused himself with occasional sniping. The clearance work of any battle-field is both laborious and repulsive. An attack to-day means so much more than an attack. First, behind an attacking force in this war, come " the cleaners," as the French call them, who follow into trenches and dugouts and rake out or burn out or bomb out or smoke out the hiders and the ambuscaders lying in wait in holes and earths. After those who attend to the remnant of the living come the men whose work it is to look after the dead. But a wood surpasses a trench, and in this great rectangle was no end to the strange discoveries, from the short-necked howitzer, which could not be pulled from its lair, to all the pitiful litter of retreat and defeat.

Like other captured woods, it contained near the northern end a huge dump for food, letters, and ammunition. Prisoners surrendering here and in similar places speak with peculiar horror of the thirst they suffered. In Fricourt Wood men were saved from something near madness by the thunder rain that made pools in their trenches. Water is almost always the hardest of supplies to send through a barrage. Imagine the position of a German soldier shackled by foot and waist to his machine-gun when the water-carriers failed ; and other soldiers, as tied by discipline as he by chains, fare little better. A letter found on one of the prisoners said : " We are shut off from the rest of the world. Nothing comes to us. No letters. The enemy keeps such a barrage on all the communications. It's terrible."

For ourselves, when we had taken the place and held it firm, with trenches out beyond, the wood remained a place of ill-omen. Cavalrymen and yeomen who went up to help clear and dig trenches never turned their hand to less lovely employment. Every day and most of the day the enemy, who knew every inch of the wood, directed their guns on to crucial spots. Every day and nearly all day you could see the great black columns rising from the scarred trees, and hurling dark lumps, which one prayed were no more than wood and stone, high into air. Here General Williams was killed.

After five months the whole of the wood is probably not explored. Even one of the guns was not discovered for several weeks.


The Story of Delville Wood

The occupation of Mametz and Trones left us free to attack a wood that was to have and keep an ugly pre-eminence. In the course of that most brilliant attack of 14th July the two Bazentin woods and villages were captured and held " at the first instance " by our left and centre ; and the right wing began with equal dash and fortune. The village of Longueval, nursed under the western lea of the wood, was penetrated, and our South African troops — the most highly trained, the most athletic men that ever I saw — swept across the wood. Their charge, in spite of its triumph, was no more than the prelude to a six weeks' battle, much of it fought on the edges of the wood, which was completely ditched in. But no association of troops, no acts of regimental daring surpassed the combination of South African and Scottish troops in the early fighting.

The South Africans rushed the wood, but the Germans held all the approaches, many of them quite protected from hostile shell fire. The remnants of the South Africans who coursed through and avoided death from snipers first received a mass of shells, and were then counter-attacked from all sides by an enemy "verminous with bombs." Our men were at first criticized for not consolidating as they went, for shirking the trench-digging after the charge. The criticism had no grounds. The men never had a moment's leisure to use the spade, and they held every trench they reached till the last possible moment, perhaps too long. They had their crowded hour of glorious life, if men ever had ; and the story of the sweep through " Devil's " Wood, and the push through Longueval village, which itself dovetails into that wood, will be ever memorable as a feat of arms in itself and as a triumphant sequel to a twelve days' battle. Our artillery went through the wood like a mower with his scythe : first one broad swathe, then a second at a certain remove, and, to conclude, a third, embracing the last of the wood.

The mowers moved like old-time harvesters and with as steady progression. But the cutting was rough, as of a crop that had been " laid " by wind and weather. The wood is thinner to sight than Mametz, but the floor of it all holes and humps. As the men moved on through the wood they met with little serious obstruction either from rifles, machine-guns, or bombs.

Prisoners surrendered ; and our batteries had not fired more than a few rounds each when sixty Germans dashed from the wood with hands up. Even the Brandenburgers, of whose prowess the German accounts were afterwards full, gave themselves up, as they did before on the Aisne. I was surprised to find that one member of the Prussian Guard who was among the prisoners was of very small build. The fact was pointed out to other prisoners from the 102nd Saxons, but they refused to grant the grandeur of the Prussian. " Lots of the Berlin men are small like that," they said, The enemy still left in the wood crouched in shell holes or very shallow trenches, making use of their time by devising methods of surrender — handkerchiefs tied to the end of entrenching tools to serve as a white flag, and, in one case, a Red Cross flag fixed to the end of a stretcher. Some men went on their knees, and " Kamerad, Kamerad " was heard from many men too frightened to show their heads or indicate the place of origin of their ventriloquial cry. One very small Tommy took captive a group of nine Germans collected in the crater made by a 12-inch howitzer or some such monster.

When the success of the attack was assured, and behind the third swathe our troops reached the edge of the wood, they saw the most cheering of all sights : groups of the enemy — in one case fourteen — running away up and over the hill, for the wood dips a little at its far edge. Some were in the open, some in communication trenches which we could enfilade with eye and rifle, some mere busts of men flying down trenches not more than three feet deep.

Doubtless the total of flying enemy thus seen was not large, but in a close war, a war of woods and trenches, the sight of enemy in open retreat is not often vouchsafed to infantry. They were, however, enough to keep the rifles busy. One sniper himself accounted for ten outside the wood.

The troops on the left advanced more slowly. On the village side the dugouts were many and deep. The orchard redoubt was not yet robbed of its thorns, and the enemy had a line of infiltration through the grove that juts out as a protective eaves over the north of the village. One of these dugouts had three openings, but each was rilled up by our bursting shells, till one of our doctors scratched his way into it with a trenching tool, and that was later. Though the men in the wood were in advance of the men to right and left, and were a target for the enemy's artillery, they repelled during the afternoon two very furious and costly counter-attacks. Our own bombs and ammunition were passed forward with great speed, and the enemy's machine-guns and bombs were to some extent used against him. It was thought by several of the men engaged that the Germans had prepared their trenches with the definite idea of their recapture; that they had arranged and in some measure concealed stores — bombs, ammunition, and food — with the idea of being well and handily supplied when they retook the trench.

The attacks continued with persistence after bouts of heavy bombardment. Twice the enemy gathered some half-mile away and, moving through both communication trenches and through the long grass, drove a very heavy ram of men at our trenches north of the wood just east of the middle. A few got through into a section about 25 yards long, but all who reached that point were killed — some bayoneted, some bombed ; and the losses were considerable both in the advance and the retreat. Some of our men told me that they found nothing so exhilarating as seeing the enemy gathering for a counter-attack. Like a good shot in the jungle — and the firing was good — they felt that the charging beast was dead the moment he faced the rifle.

Such moments had the Canadians known at Ypres in June — where one man sniped seventeen Germans — and the Australians round the Windmill off the Bapaume road. But the position was too hot to hold. We could not reinforce as the Germans could, and the men were in a salient. At one time the Germans, with no little skill and daring, rushed forward a field-gun on the right of the South Africans, fired it at point-blank range, and escaped untouched.