Letters from France Part 5

To call these places villages conveys the idea of recognisable streets and houses. I suppose they were villages once, as pretty as the other villages of France; each with its red roofs showing out against its dark, overshadowing woodland. They are no more villages now than a dust-heap. Each is a tumbled heap of broken bricks, like the remains of a Chinese den after it has been pulled down by order of the local council. Through this heap runs a network of German trenches, here and there breaking through some still recognisable fragment of a wall.

It was by the sight of two or three English soldiers clambering up one of these jagged fragments and peering into whatever lay beyond it, that we knew, as we came in sight of Fricourt, that the village had already been taken. A string of men was winding past the end of the dust-heap into the dark wood behind it, where they became lost to view. Somewhere in the heart of the wood was the _knock-knock_ of an occasional rifle.

So the fight had gone on thither.

In front of us was a long gentle hill-slope, gridironed with trenches which broke out above the green gra.s.s like the wandering burrow of a mole. The last visible trench was in redder soil and ran along the crest of the hill. It pa.s.sed through or near to several small woods and clumps of trees--the edges of them torn to shreds with sh.e.l.l-fire. They stood up against the skyline. In one of them, clearly visible, was a roadside crucifix.

Our men possessed the whole of that slope right into the trench at the top. We could see occasional figures strolling about the old German trenches--probably from posts established here or there behind the line of battle. All day long odd men wandered up or down some part of the hill-side--a guard with a German prisoner coming down, a messenger or stretcher-bearers going up. Now and then one could even see heads, with our flat steel helmets on them, showing out from the red trench against the skyline. So the fighting could not be severe at the moment on the crest of the hill.

Yet we were clearly not holding the whole of that skyline trench. On its southern or right-hand shoulder the hill ran into Fricourt Wood, which covered all that end of it. At the lower end of the wood, standing out against it, was the dusty yellow ruin which once was Fricourt. Behind that shoulder of the hill was a valley, of which we could see the gentle green slopes stretching away to Mametz and Montauban, both taken the day before, in the first half-day's fighting. The green slopes must have been covered with the relics of that attack. But the kindly gra.s.s, the uncut growth of two years, hid them; and the valley, except for a few thin white trench lines, might have been any other smiling summer landscape.

When the wave of our attack swept through that country the Germans in Fricourt village and wood still held on. Another promontory was left jutting out into the wave of our attack in a similar village on our left--La Boiselle, where the main road for Bapaume runs straight out from our lines through the German front. We could see this heap of yellow-brown ruins sticking up beyond the left shoulder of the opposite hill much as Fricourt did on its right. There was a valley between, but it could only be guessed. Boiselle, too, had the remains of a small wood rising behind it. The bark hung from its ragged stumps as the rigging droops from the broken masts of a wreck.

We were looking another way, watching our troops trying to creep up to the extreme right-hand end of the red trench on the top of the hill. We could see them on the centre of the crest; but here, where the trench ran into the upper end of Fricourt Wood, there was apparently a check.

Men were lined up at this point, not in the trench, but lying down on the surface a little on our side of it. From beyond that corner of the wood there broke out occasionally a chatter of machine-gun fire.

Evidently the Germans still hung on there. The bursts of machine-gun must have been against small rushes of our men across the open. I believe that one British unit was attacking round this left-hand corner of the wood while another was attacking around its right. The drive through the wood was going forward at the same time. Clearly they were having some effect; for out of the wood there suddenly appeared a number of figures. Someone thought they were our men coming back, until it was noticed that they were unarmed, and held their hands up. They were a party of the enemy who had surrendered, and for the next quarter of an hour we watched them being marched slowly down the hill-side opposite.

Our advance here seemed to be held up by some cause we could not see.

German 5.9 sh.e.l.l were falling just on our side of Fricourt village, and in a line from there up the valley behind our attack. It was not a really heavy barrage--big black sh.e.l.l-bursts at intervals on the ground, helped by fairly constant white puffs of shrapnel in the air above them.

Just then our attention was attracted in quite another direction: La Boiselle.

It had been fairly obvious for some time that La Boiselle was about to be attacked. While the rest of the landscape before us was only treated to an occasional sh.e.l.l-burst, heavy explosions had been taking place in this clump of ruins. Huge roan-coloured bouquets of brickdust and ashes leaped from time to time into the air and slowly dissolved into a tawny mist which floated slowly beyond the scarred edge of the hill. It must have been a big howitzer sh.e.l.l, or perhaps a very large trench mortar bomb, which was making them. Gradually most of our artillery in the background to the left of us seemed to be converging upon this village.

Suddenly, at a little before 4 p.m., there lashed on to the place the shrapnel from three or four batteries of British field guns. They seemed to be fired as fast as they could be served. Sh.e.l.l after sh.e.l.l laid whip strokes across the dry earth as swiftly as a man could ply a lash. One knew perfectly well that our infantry must now be advancing for the attack, and that this hailstorm was to make the garrison, if any were left, keep its heads down. But the shoulder of the hill prevented us from seeing where the infantry was going to issue.

In the turmoil which covered that corner we scarcely noticed that the nature of the sh.e.l.ling had suddenly changed. Our sh.e.l.l-bursts had gone much farther up the hill--one realised that; and heavy black clouds were spurting into the air below Boiselle, just behind the hill's shoulder.

The _crash, crash, crash, crash_ of four heavy sh.e.l.ls, one following another almost as quickly as you would read the words, focused all one's attention on that point. The fire on it was growing. The Germans were shooting down a valley, almost a funnel, invisible to us. But we could see that the fire was increasing every minute; 4.2's were joining in, and field guns; the lighter guns firing shrapnel, the heavier guns high explosive. The black smoke of German high explosive streamed up the valley like a thundercloud. La Boiselle was entirely hidden by it.

There could be no doubt now where our infantry was to attack. That cauldron was the barrier of sh.e.l.l fire which the German artillery was throwing in front of them.

It seemed no living thing could face it. Our fire had lengthened at about 4 o'clock. The German barrage began almost immediately after.

Minute after minute pa.s.sed without a sign of any troops of ours. Our spirits fell. "It is one of these fearful attacks on small objectives,"

one thought, "where the enemy knows exactly where you must come out, and is able to converge an impenetrable artillery fire on that one small point. If you attack on a wide front, your artillery is bound to leave some of the enemy's machine-guns unharmed. And when you have to mop up the small points that are left, and attack on a small front, he gets you with his artillery--you get it one way or the other." One took it for granted that the head of this attack had been turned.

Suddenly, out of the mist, came the sound of a few rifle shots. Then bursts of a machine-gun. It could only be the Germans firing on advancing British infantry.

And presently they came out, running just beyond the shoulder of that hill. We could only see their heads at first, tucked down into it as a man bends when he hurries into a hailstorm. Presently the track on which they were advancing--I don't know whether it was originally a road or a trench, but it is a sort of chalky sandhill now[2]--brought them for a moment rather to our side of the hill into partial shelter. Each section that reached the place crouched down there for a moment. Spurts of shrapnel lashed past them whirling the white dust. Black rolling clouds sprang into existence on the earth beside them. Every minute one expected to see one of them obliterate the whole party. But, at the end of a minute or so, someone would pick himself up and run on--and the remainder would follow.

[2] What we thought was a road or sandhill I afterwards found to be the upturned edge of one of the two giant mine craters, south of La Boiselle.

Not all of them. Some there were who did not stir with the rest. Other figures came running up, heads down into it, often standing out black against white bursts of chalk dust. I saw one gallant fellow racing up quite alone, never stopping, running as a man runs a flat race. But there were an increasing number who never moved. And, though we watched them for an hour, they were still there motionless at the end of it.

For thirty minutes batches continued to come up. We could see them building up a line a little farther up the hill, where another bank gave cover. Then movement stopped and our heavy sh.e.l.l-bursts in La Boiselle began again. The whole affair was being repeated a step farther forward.

The last we saw was the men leaping over the bank and down into the s.p.a.ce between them and the village.

This morning we went to the same view point. The firing had gone well beyond Fricourt Wood. They were German sh.e.l.ls which were now falling on the smoking site of La Boiselle.

On the white bank there still lay twelve dark figures.

CHAPTER XIII

THE DUG-OUTS OF FRICOURT

_France, July 3rd._

Yesterday from the opposite slope of a gentle valley we watched Fricourt village taken. This morning we walked down through the long gra.s.s across what two days ago was No Man's Land into the old German defences. The gra.s.s has been uncut for two years on these slopes, and that is why there springs from them such a growth of flowers as I have rarely seen.

I think it was once a wheat field that we were walking through. It is a garden of poppies, cornflowers, and mustard flower now.

Half-way down the slope we noticed that we were crossing a line which seemed to have been strangely ruled through the wheat field. It was covered with gra.s.s, but there was a line of baby apple trees on each side of it. It took one some seconds to realise that it was a road.

We jumped across trench after trench of our own. At the bottom of the valley we stepped over a trench which had a wire entanglement in front of it. It was the old British front line. The s.p.a.ce in front of it had been No Man's Land.

Some of our men were still lying where shrapnel or rifle fire had caught them. By them ran another old road up the valley. Beyond the road the railway trucks were still standing as they have stood for two years in what once was Fricourt siding. The foundations of Fricourt village stood up a little beyond, against the dark shades of Fricourt Wood.

Immediately before us, in front of this battered white ash heap, were the remains of the rusted wire which had once been the maze in front of the German line.

We found fragments of that wire in the bottom of the trenches themselves; lengths of it were lying among the shattered buildings behind the lines. The British sh.e.l.ls and bombs must have tossed it about as you would toss hay with a rake. In the tumbled ruins behind the lines you simply stepped from one crater into another. Into many of those craters you could have placed a fair-sized room. One big sh.e.l.l, and two unexploded bombs like huge ancient cannon b.a.l.l.s, lay there on a shelf covered with rubbish.

Through this rubbish heap were scattered odd fragments of farming machinery--here an old wagon wheel--there a ploughshare or a portion of a harrow--in another place some old iron press of which I do not know the use. The rest of the village was like a deserted brick-field, or the remains of some ancient mining camp--I do not think there were three fragments of wall over 10 feet high left. And in and out of this debris wandered the German front line. We jumped down into those trenches where some sh.e.l.l had broken them in. They were deep and narrow, such as we had in Gallipoli. Back from them led narrow, deep, winding communication trenches which, curiously enough, in parts where we saw them, seemed to have no supports to their walls such as all the trenches in the wet country farther north must have. Here and there some sh.e.l.l-burst had broken or shaken them in.

As we made our way along the front line we found, every few yards or so, a low, squared, timbered opening below the parapet. A dozen wooden steps led down and forwards into some dark interior far below.

We clambered down into the first of these chambers. It was exactly as its occupants had left it. On the floor amongst some tumbled blankets and odd pieces of clothing, socks for the most part, was scattered a stock of German grenades, each like a grey jampot with a short handle.

The blankets had come from a series of bunks which almost filled up the whole dark chamber. These bunks were made roughly of wood, in pairs one over another, packed into every corner of the narrow s.p.a.ce with as much ingenuity as the berths in an emigrant s.h.i.+p. There were, I think, six of them in that first chamber. Inlet into the wall, at the end of one set of bunks, was a wooden box doing service for a cupboard. In it were a penny novel, and three or four bottles of a German table water. At least one of these was still full. So the garrison of Fricourt was not as hard put to it for supplies as some of the German prisoners with whom I spoke the day before. They had told me that for three or four days no water could be brought to them up their communication trenches owing to the British bombardment.

I expect that the garrison of Fricourt had been almost entirely in those dug-outs during the bombardment. The chambers seemed to have more than one entrance in some cases, and one suspects they also led into one another underground. A subterranean pa.s.sage led forward beneath the parapet to a door opening into No Man's Land--you could see the daylight at the end of it.

The fire trench was battered in places out of recognition. But here and there we came across a bay of it which the bombardment had left more or less untouched. There were slings of cartridges still hanging against the wall of the trench. There were the two steel plates through which they had peered out into No Man's Land, the slits in them half covered by the flap so as just to give a man room to peep through them. There was the machine-gun platform, with a long, empty belt still lying on it.

There was the periscope standing on its spike, which had been stuck into the trench wall. It looked out straight across No Man's Land, but both mirrors were gone.

As we picked our way through the brick heaps there came towards us a British soldier with fixed bayonet, and an elderly bareheaded man. The elderly man's hair was cut short, and was grizzly. He had not shaved for three days. He was stout, but his face had a curious grey tinge shot through the natural complexion. His lips were tightly compressed. He looked about him firmly enough, but with that open-eyed gaze of a wild animal which seemed to lack all comprehension. It was the face of a man almost witless. He wore the uniform of a German captain.

He was one of the men who had been through that bombardment.

CHAPTER XIV

THE RAID

_France, July 9th._

During the first week of the battle of the Somme the Anzac troops far to the north, near Armentieres, raided the German trenches about a dozen times. Here is a sample of these raids.

We were late. For some reason we had decided to watch this one from the firing-line. We had stayed too long at Brigade Headquarters getting the details of the night's plan. Just as we hurried out of the end of the communication trench into the dark jumble of the low sandbag constructions which formed this part of the firing-line, there came two bangs from the southward as if someone had hit an iron s.h.i.+p's tank with a big drumstick. It was our preparatory bombardment which had begun.