From the drawing by Georges Scott.
Reproduced from “L’Illustration” by kind permission.
Silent Ypres.

WITH OUR ARMY IN FLANDERS

BY

G. VALENTINE WILLIAMS

LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD
1915

All rights reserved

TO

THE BRITISH SOLDIER

PREFACE

In the words of the Chief of the Italian General Staff, the war correspondent is the link between that part of the nation that fights and that part which is watching—“a noble and fertile mission, as great as any mission ever was, and as necessary, too, for no army can long and resolutely march to victory if it has not the support and enthusiasm of the whole country behind it.”

As the accredited correspondent of the Daily Mail at the General Headquarters of Field-Marshal Sir John French, I have spent the greater part of the past six months with the British Army in Flanders. I have seen for myself the life and work of our army in the field. I have visited in person the trenches along practically our whole front. I have talked with our organizers of victory from the Commander-in-Chief downwards to the man in the saphead ten yards from the enemy.

This book is the result. It was written in the field, under the Censorship. That familiar phrase, “Passed by Censor,” stands at the foot of every chapter in the manuscript, as it will stand at the foot of this preface. To that part of the nation which is watching at home I could, in fulfilment of my mission, have offered a more detailed narrative of the life of that other part that is fighting in Flanders, did not considerations of military necessity stand in the way. But, apart altogether from the question of patriotism, the large measure of trust which the army has, in most instances, extended to the writer has made me the more anxious to respect a privileged position, and to eschew anything calculated to afford to the enemy the least information of value. My endeavour has rather been to present a picture of the life of our army in Flanders built up out of a series of impressions, to reveal the soul of the army as it has been unbared to me in the actual conditions of warfare.

If I should not seem to paint war as terrible or our task in Flanders as stupendous as it is, you must set it down to the army’s contagious habit of making the best of things. The army knows that, man for man, it is more than a match for the German. It knows that, given a lead, it can draw upon resources which, both physically and mentally, are better than anything the Germans have now remaining. With unconcealed impatience it looks to the Government at home to increase our machinery of war until, in this respect as well, we can claim superiority over our redoubtable and unscrupulous foe.

I have praised freely—and God knows there is enough to praise out here!—and if my criticism is sparing, it is solely because military criticism in the mouth of an accredited war correspondent acquires a weight in the eyes of the enemy that gives it the value of direct information.

I am anxious to express my gratitude to the Editor of the Daily Mail, who has generously allowed me to reproduce some of the admirable photographs in my book, and to M. René Baschet, Directeur-Gérant of the very excellent French weekly, L’Illustration, for his courtesy in permitting me to reprint M. Georges Scott’s striking sketch of “Silent Ypres.”

G. VALENTINE WILLIAMS.

In the Field,
September, 1915.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Elliott & Fry phot.
Mr. G. Valentine Williams.

WITH OUR ARMY IN FLANDERS

CHAPTER I
OF OUR ARMY IN THE FIELD

All wars present a series of contrasts. Is not war itself the greatest of all contrasts of life? The antithesis of Man at Peace and Man at War is one with which the poets and artists have familiarized mankind all through the ages. And so, though we are in the thirteenth month of the overwhelming change which this, the greatest of all wars, has wrought in our lives, I find, on sitting down to record my impressions of the life and work of the British Army in the field, that I am continually reverting to the perpetual, the confounding contrast between the world at peace and the world at war.

Never were contrasts so marked as in this war. To cast the mind back a twelvemonth is like looking back on one’s early childhood. “This time last year!...” How often one hears the phrase out here, with recollections of last year’s glorious, golden Ascot, of distant, half-forgotten strife about Ulster, of a far rumbling, as yet indistinctly heard, in the Balkans, where swift and sudden death was preparing for that sinister Prince whose passing plunged the world into war.

“This time last year ...”—City men use the phrase. They were then the top-hatted strap-hangers of Suburbia, their thoughts divided between their business, their families, their hobbies. Then the word Territorial might raise a laugh at a music-hall; on Saturday afternoons soldiering was a pleasant relief from the office grind, and in summer afforded a healthful open-air holiday. London was full of Germans. We all knew Germans, and in our insular way toadied to the big fry and ridiculed the small, holding our state of military unpreparedness to be the finest tribute to our pacific aims, and making fun of the German, his steadfastness of purpose, his strict national discipline, his thrift. We welcomed at our tables the vanguard of the German army of invasion, the charming, salaried spies of the Embassy who made their way everywhere in that loose-tongued, light-thinking cosmopolitan crowd that in London passes for society, and the humbler secret agents, the waiters who in the trenches in Flanders are now turning their knowledge of our tongue to profitable account. We had German clerks, nice, well-spoken, cheap—cheap labour covers a multitude of sins!—hard-working young fellows who lived in boarding-houses at Brondesbury or Lancaster Gate, according to their means, and who, over their port after Sunday dinner, exchanged assurances with the “dummen Engländern” of the mutual esteem entertained by England and Germany for each other.

“This time last year ...”—Aldershot, its ugly barrack buildings standing out hard in the brilliant sunlight, went peacefully about its routine pursuits of war. Maybe the stray bullet that was destined to put a premature end to the splendid career of General John Gough, best beloved of Aldershot Staff officers, had not yet been cast. The army officer went in mufti save in the intervals of duty; the general public had never heard of General Sam Browne and his famous belt. At the Curragh, still seething with the bubbles of the Ulster whirlpool which had swept John French from the War Office, the training went on as before. The machine-gun was still a weapon preeminently of experts, not common to the army at large, its paramount usefulness as an added strength to the forces not yet realized.

“This time last year ...”—polo at Ranelagh, where neither of the immortal Grenfell twins, the Castor and Pollux of our glorious army, saw Black Care that sits behind the horseman, cricket at Lord’s, throngs at Boulter’s Lock, lunchings and dinings and dancings innumerable....

“This time last year ...”—joyful holidays at Blackpool, New Brighton, or the Isle of Man at hand for the workers of the north, the brief relaxation from the loom, the spindle, the mine, the shipyard. All the life of England, in fine, ran along in its accustomed groove. We made a great deal of money; we spent a great deal more; we played our games; we talked them to the exclusion of topics of vital national importance; we rocked ourselves with dreams of universal peace based on political cries, such as “Two keels to one,” or the “pacific policy of the German Emperor.” One of the leading pacificist societies was arranging a great international peace congress at Vienna.

All at once, in a few hours of a hot August night, with great crowds waiting breathlessly in Whitehall, with a mob surging and singing round Buckingham Palace, it was swept away. The old life stopped. The new life began. Slowly, haltingly, as is our wont, we realized we were at war, though the process of mobilization was hindered by such idiotic cries (never was a people so swayed by cries as the British!) as “Business as usual!” the contraption of the astute City man who would save what business there was to save at the expense of the army, a catchword that kept the able-bodied young man at the counter measuring out yards of ribbon when he should have been shouldering a rifle at the front. Business as usual, indeed, when nothing was as usual in the world, when the Hun was halfway through Belgium, blasting his path with Titan howitzers larger than any the Allies possessed, and with machine-guns which he elected and made to be the primary weapon of the war, firing villages as he went to light up his work of murder and rapine! Business as usual when our little Expeditionary Force had not even set foot on the ships destined to transport it to France!

“This time last year ...”—the men who use the phrase to me are in the trenches now, Aldershot and Curragh regulars, City men in the famous London Territorial regiments, miners and factory hands and workers from all over the country, in the horse or foot or artillery or air corps or supply services. Every time I pass a regiment on the roads here, or meet one in the trenches, I find myself wondering what most of them did in civil life, what they would look like in civilian clothes.

“All wars are abnormal” is a saying of Sir John French. Though the civilized world must now perforce accept as a normal state of things the organized slaying which is going on right across Europe and over a good part of the rest of the world. I for one cannot bring my mind to adapt itself to the spectacle of the British people in arms as I see it day by day on all sides of me in this narrow but all-important wedge of the allied battle-line, where the ultimate fate of the British Empire will be sealed. The mind boggles at almost every one of the great stream of fresh impressions which pour in upon it in an irresistible torrent every day, the sea of English faces surging down a white ribbon of Flemish road, the unfamiliar sound of our mother tongue in settings which you intuitively know demand the smooth flow of French, the plain wooden cross over a simple grave which, without realizing it, you automatically accept as containing the mortal remains of a man you loved or admired, or maybe even disliked, one who had made his name in England, not in this bloody business of war, but at the Bar or in politics or in the City, at polo or at golf or football.

No, war is not normal, as all nations, except the Germans, know. It is abnormal in the events it produces as in the passions and virtues it engenders. Particularly it is abnormal to the British, strangest of all peoples, quick at a bargain and keenly sensible, singularly lacking in intuition, absorbed in business, slow to move, slow to mistrust, now, after basking in the sunshine of decades of peace (the Boer War hardly disturbed the national life of the country), saved only from the fate of Belgium by the ever-sounding sea that has stood so often between England and her enemies.

Yet, while following the fortunes of our army in the field, I have often found myself pondering the fact whether, after all, war is such an abnormal thing to this great host of ours, Britishers of all stamps and from every clime drawn to the fighting-line by the same high ideal. The world, I grant you, has never seen so many men of Britain arrayed for battle on their own or any other soil. Yet we were once a military nation. The whole history of these lands of Picardy and Flanders, where our army is now fighting, during the past six centuries proclaims it. Since the days of the third Edward to the present time Englishmen have fought at intervals in these richly cultivated fields. The bones of many a fair-haired, straight-backed bowman of England are crumbling beneath the smiling plains through which our trenches run in a long winding line.

The country is replete with souvenirs of our military past, of the Black Prince, of Henry V., of the Duke of York, of Marlborough. There are houses still standing in Ypres, despite German “frightfulness,” which witnessed the burning of the suburbs of the ancient capital of Flanders by the English and the burghers of Ghent in 1383. Half an hour’s motor drive from General Headquarters of our army in France will take you to the field of Agincourt, where, 500 years ago, King Harry and his archers struck a brave blow for England.

I went to the field of Agincourt. It was a pious pilgrimage. As another son of England with England’s fighting men in Picardy, I wanted to stretch forth a hand across that gulf of 500 years, and say to those stout English bowmen, who from their native shires followed their knights and squires across the sea, “It is well. We are carrying on. You may rest in peace.” I wanted to tell them in their graves beneath the warm grass ablaze, as I saw it, with buttercups and daisies and the gentle speedwell, that theirs was a clean fight that had left no bitter memories, that the gentlemen of France who fought so valiantly at Agincourt are with us to-day in spirit as surely as their descendants are with us in the flesh; that, like the Dickons and Peterkins and Wats of Agincourt, our men in Picardy and Flanders are brave and steadfast and true till death.

A little grove of trees enclosing a great crucifix planted in a solid base of brick is the only memorial on the battlefield. On a slab of stone affixed to the plinth the inscription runs:

25 OCTOBER, 1415.

C’EST ICI QUE NOS VAILLANS GUERRIERS ONT SUCCOMBÉ. LEUR ESPÉRANCE EST PLEINE D’IMMORTALITÉ. LA PRIÈRE POUR LES MORTS AFIN QU’ILS SOIENT DÉLIVRÉS DE LA PEINE QU’ILS SUBISSENT POUR LEURS FAUTES EST UNE SAINTE ET SALUTAIRE PENSÉE. CETTE CROIX A ÉTÉ ÉRIGÉE PAR VICTOR MARIE LÉONARD MARQUIS DE TRAMECOURT ET MADAME ALINE MARIE CÉCILE DE TRAMECOURT, SON ÉPOUSE, À LA MÉMOIRE DE CEUX QUI AVEC LEURS ANCÊTRES ONT PÉRI DANS LA FATALE JOURNÉE D’AGINCOURT.

PRIEZ POUR EUX.

There were woods on either side of the battlefield, possibly occupying the site of the woods in which our archers of Agincourt waited for the French. But there was no visible means of following the course of the fight from the conformation of the ground. A friendly peasant who was passing, and who proved to be the holder of some of the land, vouchsafed the information that the curé knew all the details of the battle. But the curé was in church.

The slab at the foot of the crucifix—the Calvary, the peasants call it—was covered with inscriptions cut in the stone or written in pencil. The dates showed that almost every one had been written since the outbreak of the war. They were martial and inspiring in tone. Most of them were the work of French soldiers quartered in the neighbouring villages, and they had signed their names, with the surname first, in approved military style, followed by the number of regiment and company. “Hommage à nos braves Alliés! Vive la France!” ran one. “Dieu protège la France!” was another, with the more prosaic addition, “Mort aux Boches!” “Vive Joffre! Vive l’armée!” ran a third. It was signed “Une petite Française.” Though Agincourt and the brave men who died there are remembered, the feud it stood for is forgotten. “C’est bien changé maintenant!” said the peasant at my side. Not only did the inscriptions on the stone attest that: they were also the eloquent expression of the great national revival which has been incorrectly summarized in the phrase, “The New France,” but which is in reality only the reawakening of a nation that led the world until it suffered the sordid pettiness of politics to carry it away from the true path of national greatness.

Maybe many of the bowmen sleeping under the green grass of Agincourt would recognize the speech of the army that is fighting in France to-day. Every accent, every burr and brogue, every intonation and inflexion, which one may meet with between Land’s End and the Hebrides, between the Wash and the Bay of Galway, may be heard in the ranks of our great volunteer army, in its way unique amongst the armed hosts standing in the field.

Englishmen travel but little in their own country. I am no exception to the rule, though I can plead in excuse a long period of service abroad as a newspaper correspondent. But a morning spent among the troops of the great army which has sprung from our little Expeditionary Force is equivalent to a six weeks’ tour of the British Isles. Going from regiment to regiment, you pass from county to county, with its characteristic speech, its colouring, its fetishes, its customs. At the end of my first day with the army, as long ago as last March, when reinforcements came very slowly, and a Territorial Division was a thing to take guests to see, “to write home about,” as the saying goes (though in this case the Censor would probably intervene), I felt that I had seen the microcosm of Britain, this Empire so vast, so widespread, so heterogeneous, that its essence has never been distilled before.

One of the most fascinating things to me about our army in France are the variations of speech. I have sometimes closed my eyes when a battalion has been marching past me on the road, and tried to guess, often with some measure of success, at the recruiting area of the regiment from the men’s accents or from their tricks of speech.

Take the Scottish regiments, for instance. I have little acquaintance with the dialects of Scotland, but my ear has told me that the speech of almost every Scottish regiment, save such regiments as the Gordons and the Black Watch, that attract men from all over the United Kingdom, differs. I spent a most fascinating half-hour one morning with a handful of Glasgow newsboys serving in a famous Scottish regiment that wears the trews. Their speech was unmistakably the speech of the Glasgow streets, and their wits were as sharp as their bayonets. I told them they were newsboys, and newsboys they were, or of the same class, van-boys and the like. I visited the Cameron Highlanders—what was left of their Territorial battalion—after the second battle of Ypres, and heard, in the speech of Inverness-shire, their story of the battle. Many of them speak Gaelic. One of their officers confided to me that during the battle, requiring two men to go down to the rear, the wires being cut, to ascertain the whereabouts of the brigade headquarters, he selected two notorious deer poachers as likely to have their wits about them. How many poachers of the red deer of Sherwood or the New Forest were there not at Agincourt?

Leaving the red tartan of the Camerons and getting back to the trews, I remember an afternoon spent with the shattered remnants of the Scottish Rifles, about 150 men all told led out of action at Neuve Chapelle by a Second Lieutenant of Special Reserve. The Cameronians, which is the official title of the regiment, recruit in Lanarkshire and Aberdeenshire, and their speech was, I presume, the speech of those parts, for it was an accent—a Scottish accent—different from any other I had heard from the other Scotsmen out here.

It is a gratifying task, this identification of dialects. I have heard two sappers “fra’ Wigan” engaged in a lively argument with two privates (from Cork) of the Leinster Regiment, in whose trench the two gentlemen “fra’ Wigan” were operating. A London cockney, say, from one of the innumerable battalions of the Royal Fusiliers, would have understood less of that conversation if it had been carried on in German, but only a little less. During the Battle of Ypres two privates of the Monmouthshire Regiment, who were talking Welsh, were pounced upon by two prowling Southerners from one of the Home Counties, and carried off to Brigade Headquarters as German spies. What with Welsh miners talking Welsh and Cameron Highlanders Gaelic, the broad speech of the Yorkshire Geordies, the homely burr of the 3rd Hussars and other regiments recruited in the West Country, the familiar twang of the cockneys, the rich brogue of the Irish regiments, the strong American intonation of the Canadians, a man out here begins to realize of what composite layers our race is formed.

Of that race our army in the field is the quintessence. The voluntary system may collect the scallywags, but it primarily attracts, in circumstances like those of to-day, that brand of Englishman who has done everything worth doing in England’s history “for conscience’ sake.” There was a theory freely ventilated at the front at one time to the effect that the first of the new armies raised by Lord Kitchener would not be of the same material, morally and physically, as the succeeding ones, owing to the fact that, on the outbreak of the war, many men flocked to the colours because they had lost their employment. The second and third armies, it is alleged, being principally composed of men who, having taken a few months to wind up their affairs, had joined alone from a high feeling of duty to their country, would be of a better stamp. This theory does not hold water. Everyone who has seen the men of the new armies at the front has been alike impressed by their fine physique, their magnificent military bearing, their smart, soldierly appearance. “They’re all right” is the verdict. No body of troops in an army in the field wants higher praise than this.

Everybody who is anybody is at the front. Never was there such a place for meetings as Flanders. The Strand is not in it. My own experience is that of everybody else. One finds at the front men one has lost sight of for years, old friends who have dropped away in the hurry of existence, chance acquaintances of a Riviera train de luxe, men one has met in business, men who have measured one for clothes. Often I have heard my name sung out from the centre of a column of marching troops, and a figure has stepped out to the roadside who, after my mind has shredded it of the unfamiliar uniform, the deep brown sunburn, the set expression, has revealed itself as old Tubby Somebody whom one had known at school, or Brown with whom one had played golf on those little links behind the Casino at Monte Carlo, or the manager of Messrs. Blank in the City.

Fortune, the fair goddess, has high jinks at the front. I wanted to find a relation of mine, a sergeant in a famous London regiment, and wrote to his people to get the number of his battalion and his company. When the reply came I discovered that the man I wanted was billeted not a hundred yards from me in the village, in which the War Correspondents’ Headquarters were situated, where he had come with the shattered remnant of his battalion to rest after the terrible “gruelling” they sustained in the second battle of Ypres. At the front one constantly witnesses joyous reunions, brother meeting brother in the happy, hazardous encounter of two battalions on the road or in the trenches. The very first man I met on coming out to the front was a motorcar driver whose father had particularly asked me to look out for his boy. I discovered that he was the man appointed to drive me!

What is it that has knit this great and representative body of the British people into one splendid harmonious whole, capable of gallantry and tenderness such as Homer sang, of steadfast endurance which Leonidas in Elysian fields must contemplate smiling through tear-dimmed eyes? We know that there is a deep strain of idealism in our race, lying far below a granite-like surface of cynical indifference, of frigid reserve. But who should have suspected its existence in the crowd of underground strap-hangers and tramway passengers, in the noonday throngs pouring out of the factories and workshops, in all that immense mass of workaday, civilian England from which our firing-line in France is now being fed? You cannot go among our soldiers in the field without becoming conscious of the fact that, beneath their unflagging high spirits, their absolute indifference to danger, their splendid tenacity, there burns an immense determination of purpose, an iron determination to set wrong right. For in the mind of the British soldier, who wastes no time over the subtleties of high politics, the world is wrong as long as the German is free to work his own sweet will in it.

Humour is probably the largest component part of the spirit of the British soldier, a paradoxical, phlegmatic sense of humour that comes out strongest when the danger is the most threatening. A Jack Johnson bursts close beside a British soldier who is lighting his pipe with one of those odious French sulphur matches. The shell blows a foul whiff of chemicals right across the man’s face. “Oh dear! oh dear!” he exclaims with a perfectly genuine sigh, “these ’ere French matches will be the death o’ me!” A reply which is equally characteristic of the state of mind of the British soldier who goes forth to war is that given by the irate driver of a Staff car to a sentry in the early days of the war. The sentry, in the dead of night, had levelled his rifle at the chauffeur because the car had not stopped instantly on challenge. The driver backed his car towards where the sentry was standing. “I’ll ’ave a word with you, young feller,” he said. “Allow me to inform you that this car can’t be stopped in less than twenty yards. If you go shoving that rifle of yours in people’s faces someone will get shot before this war’s over!”

There is a great strain of tenderness in the British soldier, a great readiness to serve. Hear him, on a wet night in the trenches, begrimed, red-eyed with fatigue, chilled to the bone, just about to lie down for a rest, offer to make his officer, tired as he is, “a drop of ’ot tea!” Watch him with German prisoners! His attitude is paternal, patronizing, rather that of a friendly London policeman guiding homeward the errant footsteps of a drunkard. Under influence of nameless German atrocities of all descriptions the attitude of the British soldier in the fighting-line is becoming fierce and embittered. Nothing will induce him, however, to vent his spite on prisoners, though few Germans understand anything else but force as the expression of power. They look upon our men as miserable mercenaries whose friendliness is simply an attempt to curry favour with the noble German Krieger; our men regard them as misguided individuals who don’t know any better.

The great strain of tenderness in the British soldier comes out most strongly in his attitude of mind towards the wounded and the dead. No British soldier will rest quiet in his trench whilst there are wounded lying out in front, and the deeds of heroism performed by men in rescuing the wounded have been so numerous in this war that it has been found necessary to restrict the number of Victoria Crosses awarded for this class of gallant action. No British soldier will lie quiet while our dead are unburied. Men will expose themselves fearlessly to recover the body of a comrade and give it decent burial.

A friend of mine in the Cavalry gave me a striking account of a burial service he conducted thus on the Marne. A shrapnel burst right over him and his troop, but by great good luck only one man was killed. The troop was on the move, and it was necessary to bury the man at once. No military funeral this, with the chaplain reciting, “I am the Resurrection and the Life ...” and a firing-party rigid at attention; but a handful of men scraping a shallow hole in the earth, whilst others removed the dead man’s identity disc and effects and equipment. There was no time for prayer, but, my friend said, it was one of the most pathetic ceremonies he had ever attended. They were a rough lot in his squadron, but they showed a great tenderness as they laid the still form in its stained khaki in the ground. “Oh dear! pore ole Jack gorn to ’is last rest!” This and similar ejaculations came from the little group standing at the graveside, the rest of the squadron, with stamping horses, waiting a little distance away. “Now then, chaps, ’ats orf!” cried a veteran private, an old scamp of a soldier who had re-engaged for the war. The men bared their heads reverently as the poor body was laid in the chill earth. Someone produced a rough cross made out of an ammunition-box, with the man’s name and regiment written on it in indelible pencil, the grave was filled in, the cross set up, and the squadron proceeded on its way.

The line of fighting of the British Army is marked by these crosses, now gradually being replaced by that admirable organization, the Graves Commission, which identifies graves and furnishes them with properly inscribed crosses as a permanent identification. Our men do the rest. Troops always look after graves in the vicinity of their billets, plant them with turf and flowers, or, in the case of Catholic soldiers, with statues or holy pictures from the ruined churches which are so plentiful in the fighting zone.

What is the spirit of the British Army in the field? I have been asked. How was it inculcated, and how is it maintained? And I would reply that the spirit of our army is the spirit of our public schools, for it was inculcated and is maintained by the Regimental Officer, himself the product of our public schools. In saying this I do not mean that the British Army is dominated by an aristocratic caste. I mean that its spirit of courage, self-sacrifice, loyalty, and public-spirited obedience is the spirit upon which the whole of our public school system is based, a great commonwealth in which no man is for the party, but all are for the State.

The Regimental Officer, who has blazed for himself an imperishable trail of glory in this war, has cherished and fostered this feeling. His spirit of quiet, unostentatious courage, of uncomplaining devotion to duty, of never-failing thoughtfulness for the other man, the new-comer, “the fellow who’s a bit rattled, don’t you know?” carries on the tradition of our forefathers who fought with Marlborough and Wellington and Raglan. It is an eminently English spirit. That is why, no doubt, despite the expansion of our little Expeditionary Force into a great democratic host, our new armies have slipped it on with their tunics and their belts, so that the spirit of the new is the spirit of the old.

When this war is over I shall hope to see a monument erected in London, in the most prominent site that can be found, that the honour may be greater, with the plain inscription, “To the Regimental Officer, 1914.” Let it be white like his escutcheon, of marble like his fortitude, and in size vast and overwhelming and imposing like the pile of heroic deeds he has amassed to his credit in all our wars. German organization may have given the German armies high-explosive shells innumerable and machine-guns galore to break our bodies, and asphyxiating gases to stop our breath; they have no weapon to break the spirit of the Regimental Officer, which is the spirit of his men, the spirit of the army. The German Army is inspired by a magnificent military tradition, but it seems to linger principally in the regulars, and to be present only in a diminished form in the officers and men of the Reserve, the Landwehr, and the Landsturm. For the spirit of the German Army is artificial, the atmosphere of a military caste. The spirit of our army is the spirit of England that sent Drake sailing over the seven seas, that gave our greatest sailor that far-famed “Nelson touch”; it is the vivifying breath of the greatest Empire that the world has ever seen.

“Gentlemen, hats off!” as Napoleon said at the grave of Frederick the Great—hats off to the Regimental Officer. The military correspondent of The Times sounded a sane note, in the midst of the great clamour about the shortage of shells, when he bade us remember the value of good infantry, dashing in the attack, steady on the defensive. The Regimental Officer is the soul of our infantry. No matter that he is a boy, or that he is out from home but a few weeks, his sergeants will do the technical part of the job if needs be. But the Regimental Officer will show them all how to die.

Lord Wolseley used to tell how, standing on the parapet of the earthworks before Tel-el-Kebir, he saw a shell, a huge, clumsy projectile, hurling through the air before him. In an instant the question flashed across his mind whether it was the duty of the Regimental Officer to preserve his life usefully for the battalion, or to take a risk and give the men an example in indifference to danger. The shell answered the question for him by passing him by and bursting innocuously behind him. But I know what Wolseley’s, what any Regimental Officer’s answer would have been: “Stay where you are and take your chance!”

Revolutionary changes have been wrought in the army in everything, save in its spirit, since the outbreak of the war. We have come to rely on heavy artillery and high-explosive shells and machine-guns; we count our men by the hundred thousand where we counted them by the thousand before. The Territorial, the raw recruit, have proved their metal in the fiercest fire; the Canadian has not belied the reputation of our fighting race. Caste restrictions in the army have been swept away; exclusive regiments are now exclusive only to the incompetent. That jealously guarded, poorly paid, and, if the truth were told, rather ill-considered little army that the British people kept to fight its battles before August, 1914, has been swallowed up in the millions of Britons who have heard the country’s call. But the soul of the army marches on unchanged, with the same self-sacrifice, the same willing obedience, the same admirable discipline. The soul of the army is enshrined in the Regimental Officer. In the remoteness and the obscurity of the trenches and the billets he goes about his work quietly and without fuss, in the same way as he performs the deeds that win him distinction, in the same way that he goes to his death. His men worship him. His Brigadier trusts him. “The Regimental Officer,” said a General to me, “by God, he’s the salt of the earth!”

CHAPTER II
THE WAR OF POSITIONS

The Germans have a mania for phraseology. Their language lends itself to it, capable, as it is, of accumulative word-building and every kind of permutation. “German is a code, not a language,” has been very justly said. Theirs is the pigeon-hole brain in which everything is ticketed with its precise label, and classified under its own particular head. I have been often amused to find them carrying this habit of theirs into military matters. Thus, a German in a letter home, describing an attack on his trench, says that the warning passed along was: “Höchste Alarmbereitschaft” (highest alarm-readiness).

In the same way they describe trench warfare as the “Stellungskrieg,” the war of positions. It was from a German prisoner that I first heard this expression, a big, fair Westphalian captured at Neuve Chapelle, with whom I had some conversation in the train that was taking him and some 500 of his comrades down to Havre to embark for England. I did not at first grasp what he meant by his continual references to the “Stellungskrieg,” and asked him what the phrase signified. “‘Stellungskrieg,’” he said, “you know, what followed the ‘Bewegungskrieg’” (the war of movements).

The German mind again! “The war of movements!” What a priceless phrase to flash in the eyes of a blindly credulous people! The phrase has the inestimable advantage of being entirely vague. It does not say which way the movements went. I tested my prisoner on this point. He was quite positive that the Bewegungskrieg stopped and the Stellungskrieg set in by virtue of the carefully laid plans and ripe decision of the Great General Staff, and not of military necessity imposed on the Fatherland by the Allies. “Everybody knows,” a German-Swiss paper “kept” by the German Government cried the other day, “everybody knows that there never was a battle of the Marne!” That is the conviction of all German soldiers who did not take part in that disastrous and unforgettable retreat.

But this German phrase “Stellungskrieg” is a very accurate description of the great stalemate on the western front which we, more vaguely, term “trench warfare.” It is, indeed, a constant manœuvring for positions, a kind of great game of chess in which the Germans, generally speaking, are seeking to gain the advantage for the purposes of their defensive, whilst the Allies’ aim is to obtain the best positions for an offensive when the moment for this is ripe. It is a siege in which we are the besiegers, the Germans the besieged. I adhere to this view despite the great German thrusts against the Ypres salient. Both these were comparable to sorties en masse from a fortress, and in both instances, although the besieged were able to push the besiegers a little farther away from them, they failed to achieve their object, which was to break the lines of investment, and, if possible, cut off and surround part of the besieging forces.

The situation on the Western front, at least as far as the British line is concerned, for only of that am I competent to speak, represents siege warfare in its highest expression. The opponents face one another in endless lines of trenches winding in and out of the mostly flat country of Flanders, following the lie of the ground or the positions captured or lost in one or other of the great battles which from time to time break the monotony. By monotony I mean only the sameness of life and not inaction. For work never ceases on either side. It is not sufficient to capture, consolidate, and hold a position. The general situation must be reviewed in relation to the ground gained. Its possible weaknesses and the opportunities it offers for strengthening the adjacent positions must be studied. Trenches must be joined up with those captured, redoubts constructed to counteract a danger threatening from some point, and communication trenches dug to afford safe and sheltered ingress to and egress from the new position.

The ground is under ceaseless survey. A move by the enemy calls for a counter-move on our part. A new trench dug by him may be found to enfilade our trenches from a certain angle, and while by the construction of new traverses or the heightening of parapet and parados, the trench may be rendered immune from sniping, a fresh trench will be dug at a new angle, or a machine-gun brought up to make life sour for the occupants of the new German position, and force them in their turn to counter-measures.

Anyone who saw the trenches at Mons or even, much later, the trenches on the Aisne, would scarcely recognize them in the deep, elaborate earthworks of Flanders with the construction of which our army is now so familiar. At Mons our men sought shelter in shallow ditches dug in the ground, the entrenchments of field-days in the Chiltern Hills. In Flanders the trenches are dug deep into the soil, and built up with sandbags high above the ground-level, plentifully supplied with traverses to localize the effect of bursting shells. Very solid affairs, too, these traverses are, great masses of clay firmly bound together with wire-netting and topped with sandbags—stout sacks filled with earth—that can be relied upon to stop a bullet.

Trenches must not be too wide, or they would afford too broad a target to bullets and shells, yet they must be spacious enough to allow comparative freedom of movement to their inmates to pass swiftly from place to place in the event of a sudden attack. They must be roomy enough for the men holding them to live therein with a fair measure of comfort, with places for dug-outs where the men off duty may sleep, and where the officers, who are never off duty, properly speaking, in the trenches, may have their meals and snatch a few hours of slumber between times. There must be safe storage-places for such dangerous wares as ammunition, bombs, fuses, and flares, and specially prepared emplacements for the machine-guns. Sanitation, on which the lives of thousands depend, must also have its special arrangements.

Underwood & Underwood phot.
A corner of a trench with a traverse in the extreme left—note officer’s gas helmet.

The flooring of the trench must be boarded—sometimes in marshy places with two or three layers of planks—against the wet, with “grids” laid across. In the winter not even pumps sufficed to keep the trenches dry. Sandbags, disembowelled by the continual patter of bullets, must be constantly renewed. A stray shell, plumping through the timber and earth roofing of a dug-out, may do damage that will take three days (or rather nights, if the fatigue-party is in view of the enemy by day) to repair. Then the access to the trenches is a question requiring constant attention and unremitting labour.

Men in the firing-line roundly declare they would rather be in the front trench than in the area behind the lines. Both sides attempt to embarrass the bringing-up of reliefs and supplies by shelling the roads and communication trenches leading up to the firing-line. Of course, nothing is ever allowed to interfere with the sending-up of reliefs or food, but the shells that crash daily, mostly towards evening, behind the lines claim their toll of life. It is to guard against this promiscuous shelling, against snipers posted in coigns of vantage in the enemy lines, and against spent bullets that come whinneying over from the front (gallant John Gough, most beloved of Generals, was struck and mortally wounded by a stray bullet at a long distance from the firing-line, in a spot that was believed to be entirely safe), that communication trenches are necessary.

The amount of work that some of these communication trenches represent is simply incredible. Going up to some trenches in the Ypres salient, I remember, I came across a short patch of road, 200 yards of it at the outside, which was well in view of the enemy and over which shrapnel burst from time to time, whilst bullets skimmed over it the live-long day. To avoid this dangerous area a communication trench had been dug in the fields bordering the road, and threaded its way in and out of the corn and the poppies for fully a mile before it again rejoined the road, which by this had wound out of view of the Germans. In many parts of the line there is a walk of a mile and a half through communication trenches up to the firing-line.

All these trenches have to be as deep as a man’s waist, and many as a man’s height. Most of them must have a timber flooring to make them passable in wet weather, and sometimes little bridges have to be constructed to cross the innumerable irrigation ducts and ditches which seam the fertile fields in the region of our army. There must be hundreds of miles of planks in our trenches in Flanders. If you consider that each plank has to be cut and fashioned to fit in its place, after the trench itself has been dug deep enough to be lined, you can form some kind of estimate of the enormous amount of labour which has gone to the welding of our line. As I have trudged down communication trenches behind the regimental guide taking me up to the firing-line, I have often had a sort of mental vision of a vast mountain of energy, as it were, a great sea of sweat and blood, representing the toil and lives expended in the digging of these deep, secure cuttings which are the straight paths leading to the glory of the fighting-line.

I do not think it would be going too far to say that these modern trenches are impregnable to direct assault. Indeed, the experience of the war of positions has been to show that neither side can succeed on the offensive unless the trenches have been destroyed, and not always then. Well protected in their deep earthworks, the men with the magazine-rifle and the machine-gun can beat off even such tremendous attacks en masse as the Japanese essayed with success, though at awful cost, in the siege of Port Arthur. As long as the trenches endure they are impregnable. Their impregnability only vanishes when they cease to exist, when they have been destroyed by shell-fire.

Three epochs of war meet in the war of positions. We have returned to methods and weapons of war which in our proud ignorance we thought to have discarded from our military experience for ever. The short broad knife of the primitive savage, the bomb and sap of the soldiers of Wellington, the machine-gun and heavy howitzer of the scientific inventor of the twentieth century, are the weapons of this war, a combination of brute force and man-slaying machinery which is surely a crowning dishonour to our civilization. In this siege warfare the magazine-rifle, which we believed to be the last word in military progress, has fallen from its place. High explosive, either in giant shells hurled from enormously powerful guns or concealed in mines in the bowels of the earth, to shatter the enemy in his skilfully contrived positions, the bomb and knife for the infantry who sweep forward to complete his discomfiture cowering in his battered trench, the automatic rifle and machine-gun to mow down survivors still holding out in their redoubts, with machine-guns playing on the captured position—these are die Forderung des Tages, the demand of the moment, in a phrase of Prince Bülow’s which was once a political catchword in Germany.

This siege warfare is a war of force against force, the force of machinery dealing ponderous, mighty blows against a wall of steel, smashing, smashing, smashing, always in the same place, until the line is bent, then broken, then the force of man coming into play in a wild onrush of storming infantry, with their primitive passions aflame, surging forward amid clouds of green and yellow and red smoke, bombing and slashing their way through the breach their machines have made. Not the strategist but the engineer is trumps in this warfare, this Armageddon in which, for all our vaunted civilization, we have returned to the darkness of the Dawn of Time.

What I have written of the trenches above will suffice to show, I think, that only the methods of siege warfare—that is, heavy guns and mines—can be used against them with any hope of success. High-explosive shells in unlimited quantities are necessary to keep the hammer pounding away at one given spot. To break a path for our infantry through the weakly held German trenches round Neuve Chapelle we had many scores of guns pouring in a concentrated fire on a front of 1,400 yards for a period of thirty-five minutes. In the operations round Arras the French are said to have fired nearly 800,000 shells in one day. Even this colossal figure was surpassed by the expenditure of high-explosive shells by the German and Austrian armies in their successful thrust against Przemysl. Our bombardment at Neuve Chapelle was, in the main, effective, though barbed-wire entanglements in front of part of the German trenches were not cut, and heavy casualties were thus caused to the infantry when they advanced. For the most part, however, we found the German trenches obliterated, the little village a smoking heap of ruins, and those Germans who survived dazed and frightened amid piles of torn corpses. If this enormous concentration of guns was required to blast a path of 1,400 yards with a thirty-five minute bombardment, what a gigantic concentration of artillery, what a colossal expenditure of ammunition, will be required to drive a wedge several miles deep through positions which the Germans have spent three seasons in strengthening and consolidating!

From “J’ai Vu.”
The War of Bomb and Knife: French soldiers with masks and steel helmets.

I make bold to prophesy (fully aware how dangerous this practice is in military matters) that, when the moment arrives for a resolute offensive in the West, the preliminary bombardment will not be a question of minutes or even of hours, but of days on end, an endless inferno of fire and steel and smoke in which no man will live. For this is a war of extermination.

My friend and colleague (if he will allow me to style him thus), “Eye-Witness,” remarked in one of his letters from the front on the bizarre circumstance that, during the lulls in the operations, the principal fighting went on in the air and beneath the ground. Sapping, which has played so notable a part in the war of positions, aims at a local effect as contrasted with bombardment, which covers a much wider area. Sapping, however, possesses the prime and obvious advantage that it can go forward without the enemy’s knowledge, whereas anything like a heavy bombardment will always awake the enemy’s suspicions, and enable him to prepare for the attack which he guesses to be impending.

Secrecy is the essence of sapping. The army does not like talking about its mines. You will never find in an official communiqué anything but the vaguest indication as to the region in which “we made a sap, laid a mine, and destroyed the enemy’s position.” An important branch of sapping and mining is the listening for the sound of the enemy’s subterranean operations in special “listening galleries” running out at intervals from the main sap. A precise indication of the locality where a mine was exploded, or rather of the trench from which the shaft of the sap was sunk, might not only intimate to the enemy that our sappers and miners were active in that particular sector, but might give him valuable assistance in testing the efficacy of any special apparatus or means he employs for listening underground. As far as human foresight may judge, this book will appear before the war has reached its conclusion, and therefore I must refrain, as in the case of much else I should like to write, but may not under the eye of my friend the Censor, who will scan these pages, from enlarging on the splendid daring, the amazing resourcefulness, and the inexhaustible endurance of our sappers and miners in their subterranean galleries.

I went down one of our mines one night. The proceeding was irregular, I believe, and if I had applied for permission through the official channel I make no doubt that it would have been refused. Incidentally, I was nearly shot on emerging, but that is another story. I was spending the night in our trenches, and in the course of an after-dinner stroll my host, the Captain in command of this particular section, asked me if I would care to see “our mine.” Considerations of the Censorship impel me to abridge what follows up to the moment when I found myself in a square, greasy gallery, with clay walls propped up by timber baulks leading straight out in the direction of the German trenches. Guttering candles stuck on the baulks at intervals faintly lit up as strange a scene as I have witnessed in this war.

Deep in the bowels of the earth a thick, square-set man in khaki trousers and trench boots, a ragged vest displaying a tremendous torso all glistening with sweat, was tipping clay out of a trolley, and gently chaffing in quite unprintable English of the region of Lancashire a hoarse but invisible person somewhere down the shaft. I crawled round the quizzer, slipping on the greasy planks awash with muddy water on the floor of the gallery, and found myself confronted by another of the troglodytes, a man who was so coated with clay that he appeared to be dyed khaki (like the horses of the Scots Greys) from top to toe. I asked him whence he came, so different was he, in speech and appearance, from the black-haired, low-browed Irishmen watching at the parapet of the trench far above us. “A coom fra’ Wigan!” he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a grimy hand, and thus saying he turned round and made off swiftly, bent double as he was, down the low gallery.

I followed, the water swishing ankle-deep round my field-boots. The air was dank and foul, the stooping position became almost unbearable after a few paces, one slipped and slithered at every step. At intervals side-galleries ran out from the main sap, unlit, dark, and forbidding—listening posts. After a hundred paces or so a trolley blocked the way. Behind it two men were working, my taciturn acquaintance and another. The latter was hacking at the virgin earth with a pick, the former was shovelling the clay into the trolley. Heavens, how these men worked! Their breath came fast and regular, they spoke not a word; one heard only the hack, hack, of the pick and the dull smack of the earth-clods as they fell into the trolley. There was no overseer there to harry them, no “speeder-up” to drive. They were alone in their sap, working as though life depended on it (as maybe it did). Good for Wigan, wasn’t it?

I had not been out of that mine for more than a minute when an electric lamp flashed in my eyes, and an excitable young man, who held an automatic pistol uncomfortably near my person, accosted me thus: “I beg your pardon, sir”—it occurred to me that the pistol accorded ill with this polite form of address—“but may I ask what you were doing down my mine?” My friend, the Captain, rushed forward with an explanation and an introduction, the pistol was put away, and the sapper subaltern—all credit to him for his vigilance!—was easily persuaded to come along to the dug-out and have a drop of grog before turning in.

That night I heard much of mining, its perils and its humours—of mine-shafts blocked by tons of earth dislodged by shells; of thrilling races underground, when the pick of the enemy sapper could be clearly heard and our men had to pile on every ounce of energy to get their sap finished and the mine laid before the German was “through” with his; of hand-to-hand fights with pick and shovel in cramped places in the dark when two saps meet. Through all the yarns appeared, bright as the flares that shone out above the trench-lines while we sat and talked, the young officer’s intense pride in his men, these stout North of England miners “doing their bit” in the bowels of the earth.

One story which made us laugh was the story of the subaltern fresh out from home. He was a keen young officer, as they all are, “smart as paint,” as Long John Silver would say, and full of zeal. One night he came to the dug-out of the sapper officer who was supervising the digging of a mine in this particular section of the line.

“You must get up at once,” he whispered in his ear, in a voice hoarse with excitement; “it is very important. Lose no time.” The sapper had gone to his dug-out worn out after several sleepless nights, and was very loth to sally forth into the cold and frosty air. “It is a mine, a German mine,” said the subaltern fresh out from home; “you can see them working through the glasses.” The sapper was out in a brace of shakes, and hurriedly followed the subaltern along the interminable windings of the trenches. In great excitement the subaltern led him to where a telescope rested on the parapet. “Look!” he said dramatically. The sapper applied his eye to the glass. There was a bright moon, and by its rays he saw, sure enough, figures working feverishly about a shaft. There was something familiar about it, though—then he realized that he was looking down his own mine. The wretched youth who had dragged him from his slumbers had forgotten the windings of the trench. This, and much else, the sapper pointed out with great forcefulness before he went back to resume his broken rest, leaving the young officer pondering over the coarse language of the Royal Engineers!

Vermelles is the best example I have seen of the important rôle that sapping plays in this siege warfare. Indeed, this little village, which the French wrested from the Germans by sapping along and blowing it up house by house, is renowned along the entire front of the Allies as a kind of exhibition model of fighting typical of the war of positions. Vermelles is in the Black Country of the North of France, five miles south-east of Béthune, a pretty little village lying on a small ridge running up from a fertile plain. The French Tenth Army, under General Maud’huy, advancing after the failure of the great German thrust against Arras in October, found their passage barred at Vermelles by the Germans, whose machine-guns, their muzzles thrust out of the cellar openings of the houses, held them up at the very entrance to the village. A French frontal attack from the western approaches to the place failed with heavy loss, and tentative attempts from the flanks to carry the village by assault were fruitless. Every house was a German stronghold, bristling with machine-guns, defended by deep trenches, and linked up by telephone with the poste de commandement, which was installed in the cellars of the Château of Vermelles under the front steps.

“Daily Mail” phot.
A BURSTING MINE.

To visit Vermelles, as I was privileged to do, is to get an object-lesson of the methods of the new French Army, that wonderful weapon of efficiency which has emerged finely tempered, pliant, and sharp from the furnace of those first disastrous months of war. Never was the painstaking thoroughness of the French mind seen to better advantage than in the patient and elaborate operations which culminated in the two centres of German resistance in Vermelles, the brewery and the château respectively, being squeezed in a pair of pincers, as it were, and crushed. The French, recognizing that the German machine-guns made a direct attack practically hopeless, sapped their way under each German stronghold in turn, and, having made a breach, rushed in with bomb and bayonet, and made good the position, afterwards sapping on to the next.

I found practically every house in Vermelles roofless, every window broken, every wall pierced with loopholes and pitted with shell-holes and bullet-marks. There were long, narrow trenches innumerable, marking the line of the French saps, and ending in deep, wide craters where the explosion had taken place and opened a passage for the French infantry. Four bleak walls surrounding an immense tumulus of rubbish were all that was left of the château, whose grounds were literally honeycombed with trenches in all directions. The Germans made their last stand here, holding in turn the two high red-brick walls surrounding the château grounds until the French, by means of a sap more than 100 yards long, blew a breach and rushed the place.

I saw this mine. It starts in the white chalky soil of some kind of garden outside the château wall. This same white soil nearly proved the undoing of the assailants, for the Germans in the château “spotted” the French operations by the high white piles of clay thrown up from the mine almost level with the top of the wall, and our Allies were forced to explode the mine before the operation was quite complete. However, it did its work well. Two huge craters were made right beneath the wall, the masonry of which was blown apart in great chunks, which were still lying about when I visited the spot. The last German resistance was broken. Vermelles was captured. There will be many Vermelles in this war before the Hun is beaten to the ground.

The trench mortar and the bomb have become essential weapons of the war of positions. Both weapons of the past, they seem strangely out of place beside such modern man-slaying instruments as the machine-gun and the magazine-rifle. But they have come in response to the demand of a unique situation because the weapons which military experts believed to represent the last word in progress in their profession no longer sufficed. Handier to manipulate than a field-gun, because much smaller in bulk, of short range, the trench mortar, throwing a heavy bomb filled with high-explosive, might at least blow in a part of a trench which, as I have shown, in the ordinary way is impregnable to direct assault. There are all kinds of trench mortars, from modern specimens to rudimentary kinds of catapults, knocked together by inventive officers or men in their spare time. The French, I believe, have actually used mortars taken from old fortresses of the days of Vauban.

Of all the ills attendant on the life of the men in the trenches I know of none more trying to the nerves than these trench mortars. As they are fired at close range from the enemy’s trench, which may be anything from 30 to 300 yards away, one has no warning of their coming. You hear a sudden report mingled with a kind of screech, and the rush of a heavy body through the air, then a deafening explosion, with a spout of earth and clouds of black smoke and a rain of fragments of iron and earth for yards around. The bombs thrown by the big mortars allow you about two seconds—the interval between the impact and the burst—in which to take cover. The small bombs, on the other hand—which our men call “sausages”—burst on impact, without warning.

Just as the men in the trenches in the winter months adapted their costume to suit the trying climate (rather to the horror of some military martinets out here!), so these weapons of trench warfare have been evolved by the men in the firing-line. The revival of bombing began when a British soldier, to while away an idle moment, put some high-explosive and a lighted fuse in a discarded bully-beef tin, and pitched it into the German trench opposite him. In his way the British soldier is as handy as the blue-jacket, and the long days of the winter monotony produced all kinds of inventions in the way of mortars and bombs, which led to the scientific development of this mode of warfare. A Territorial officer was discovered making all manner of ingenious bombs and trench appliances in his spare time. He was taken out of the trenches and installed in an empty school, and when last I heard of him had a regular factory turning out bombs for the firing-line.

Bombing is very tricky work. Your bomb must be safe as long as it is in your possession. Nor must it be liable to explosion if dropped after the safety-catch has been removed. That is why bombs are provided with time-fuses. Some nicety of judgment is required to hurl them so that they will explode on impact or immediately afterwards. If the time-fuse has still a second or so to burn when the bomb falls in the enemy trench, a resolute man will pick it up and fling it back, with disastrous consequences to the bomber. Therefore bombers must be trained. The training is extremely simple, but it is essential, and I look forward to the time when every soldier who comes out to France from home will have gone through a course of bombing just as he has gone through a course of musketry. The work of experimenting with bombs and of training in bombing has claimed many victims in our army behind the firing-line, but the blood thus shed has not been spilt in vain, for by every account the bombing companies now attached to each brigade are of invaluable assistance.

In the war of positions the bombers seem to be obtaining the chances for winning imperishable glory that in the Bewegungskrieg fell to the lot of the gunners. The bombers have their motto already, as unalterable as the rule of the sea. “The bombers go first!” Private Appleton, of the bombing company of the 16th (Vancouver) Battalion of the Canadian Division, consecrated the phrase in a beau geste which is the spirit of our bombers incorporate. The battalion was attacking a German stronghold known as The Orchard, situated south-east of Festubert, during the successful advance of the First Army on May 20. Just in front of the position a grave and unlooked-for obstacle was encountered in the shape of a deep ditch with a thick hedge on the other side. Many scrambled across the ditch, and at the only opening in the thick-set hedge an officer wanted to lead the way. Then spake Private Appleton, girded about with bombs. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, “bombers must go first!”

So the bombers went first. That is the rule of the game. When the first line of German trenches has been captured in an attack, up come the bombers, their bombing aprons lined with pockets (like the skirt of a lady shop-lifter), jogging as they trot along, and plunge, bombs uplifted to fling, into the narrow communication trenches where, behind the first traverse, Death, in grey-green dress, is lurking. The path of the bombers is starred with golden deeds. V.C.’s and D.S.O.’s and D.C.M.’s and M.C.’s reward their prowess sometimes, but more often their recompense has been a few feet of brown earth in Flanders and a corner for ever green in the memory of their fellows.

The bomb goes with the knife. The bayonet fixed on the rifle is too long for the corps-à-corps in a narrow trench. When a German trench has been obliterated by a bombardment or an exploded mine and the infantry rush forward, there is no time for the niceties of bayonet drill. You want to get at your man and kill him before he can recover from his shock. The French infantry have been known to fling aside their rifles when the charge sounds, and hurl themselves on the Germans with their bayonets alone or with clasp-knives, or even with knives of their own manufacture.

Lord Cavan, who for many months commanded the famous Guards Brigade in the war, told me of an Irish Guardsman who killed a dozen or so of Germans with a spade. The Irishman was going up a narrow communication trench when a German rushed out round a traverse. The Guardsman shot him with the last cartridge in his magazine. He was so cramped for space that he did not know whether he could spare time to load again, as he knew that other Germans were behind the first. So, quick as thought, he called to a comrade who was working on the parapet of the trench above him. “Show us your spade here, Mike!” The other handed down his spade just as a second German came round the traverse. The Guardsman promptly felled him with a blow that would have killed an ox, and went on “slipping it across them” (as he would have said himself) as fast as they emerged. I believe that in this way he actually accounted for ten or more Germans. The rifle and bayonet will play their part again when the time comes for an advance over a broad front. For the rush through a narrow breach the knife and bomb are the weapons.

Siege warfare will not be the last word in this war. Opinions vary, but for me there will be no peace of the kind that will banish the German peril for generations to come unless the German lines can be broken and the enemy hurled back in disorder from the North of France far back into Belgium, and maybe beyond. Once the German line is pierced, if only the breach be wide and deep enough, we return to the Bewegungskrieg, which is the only kind of fighting in this war for which both sides have a standard of comparison in previous campaigns, and for which consequently the Germans are better equipped than the Allies.

The weapon of the Bewegungskrieg, as we learnt in the fighting at the outset of the war, and of the Stellungskrieg as well, as often as the armies have “got moving,” is undoubtedly the machine-gun. The machine-gun, or, generally speaking, the automatic gun that fires several hundred shots a minute, is, I believe, the principal contribution which this war is destined to make to military science. Just as the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 introduced the needle-gun, and the Franco-Prussian War the chassepot rifle, and the South African War was the war of the magazine-rifle, so the present war will be known as the war of the automatic gun. When the German General Staff sits down to write its official history of the Great War, it will be able to attribute the greater part of the success that German arms may have achieved to its foresight in accumulating an immense stock of machine-guns, and in studying the whole theory and tactics of this comparatively new weapon before any other army in the world became alive to its paramount importance.

When Germany went to war she is believed to have had a very large supply of machine-guns in her army. They were assembled together in a Machine-Gun Corps, on the principle of our Royal Artillery, and the machine-guns were attached to divisions and brigades, with their own divisional and brigade commanders on the same lines as our divisional artillery. I do not know how many machine-guns the British Army possessed, but it was a negligible quantity, somewhere about two per battalion. We had studied the handling and mechanism of the gun and its tactical employment, but had not accustomed the army generally to its usage. Our machine-guns are attached to battalions, and may on occasion be handed over by the brigade to the brigade machine-gun officer for a special emergency. In the German Army, however, the machine-guns are at the immediate disposal of the Division Commander, just as the artillery is. Their utility is thus greatly enhanced, for, instead of being operated according to strictly local requirements, their disposition is governed by the needs of the general situation. An example will best illustrate the value of the German system.

The war correspondent of the Frankfürter Zeitung, attached to the German General Headquarters in the West, in a despatch dealing with the operations of the German Army cavalry (Heereskavallerie) during the advance on Paris and the retreat from the Marne, mentions that a Jäger battalion, sent out to check the British advance, was able to put no fewer than twenty-one machine-guns into line on a front of 1,000 yards against a single British battalion, which as a result was practically destroyed.

The machine-gun has been of priceless advantage to the Germans in this war. If they made good use of it during their advance through Belgium towards Paris, they came to rely almost entirely upon it when their advance was checked and they found themselves called upon to remain on the defensive for many months on end. In all the campaigns of this war it has been the same story. On the western and eastern fronts, in Gallipoli, in Africa, the machine-gun has been the deadliest foe of the attacking force, because the German, possessing this weapon in far greater numbers than his opponent, has been able by its means to increase the fire-power of his battalions to such a point as to give him actually the effect of superior numbers. As the offensive is the Allies’ only key to success, our salvation lies in the machine-gun, which Sir Ian Hamilton, in his historic Dardanelles despatch, lachrymosely calls “that invention of the devil”—thousands of machine-guns—but also the automatic rifle.

The only factor that furnishes anything like a certain basis for calculation as to the date of the conclusion of the war is the number of fighting-men available for each of the different belligerents. Of all the supplies required for making war, the supply of men is limited. The Germans recognized this sooner than any of their opponents. In the machine-gun they had a machine that does the work of many men. They reckoned that a machine-gun in a trench on the Western front would release at least a score of men for one of their great thrusts in the Eastern theatre of war. They took measures accordingly.

Time and time again we came up against this deadly weapon. The only bar that stood between us and Lille on that fateful March 10, after the capture of Neuve Chapelle, were the German strongholds, bristling with machine-guns, along the Moulin de Piètre Road and the fringe of the Bois de Biez. On the Fromelles ridge, at La Quinque Rue, at Hooge in May and June, it was the German machine-guns that stemmed our further advance after our first objectives had been gained and beat us to earth, while the German heavy artillery were getting the range of the new positions and the bombers were creeping forward to drive us back.

The machine-gun is the multiplication of the rifle. The Vickers gun fires up to 550 shots a minute. This is also about the average performance of the German gun. To silence this multiplication of fire you must outbid it, you must beat it down with an even greater multiplication. This is where the difficulty comes in for an attacking force. The machine-gun, with its mounting and ammunition and spare parts, is neither light in weight nor inconspicuous to carry. When the infantry has rushed a trench after the preliminary bombardment, the machine-guns have to be carried bodily forward over a shell and bullet swept area, where the machine-gun detachment is a familiar and expected target for the German marksmen. This is where the automatic rifle is destined to play a part—a part so decisive, in my opinion, as may win the war for us.

The automatic rifle is a light machine gun. In appearance it resembles an ordinary service rifle, with rather a complicated and swollen-looking magazine. It is not water-cooled like the machine-gun, but air-cooled, and is therefore not absolutely reliable for long usage, as it inevitably becomes heated after much firing. It will fire, however, up to 300 odd shots a minute, and can be regarded as the ideal weapon for beating down German machine-gun fire and checking the advance of bombers while the heavier but more reliable machine-guns are coming up.

Its mechanism is extremely simple. It can be carried at a good pace over a distance of several hundred yards by a single man, and it is not distinguishable from the ordinary rifle except at fairly close range. It is my conviction that the automatic rifle is the key to the machine-gun problem, which has hitherto proved of such insurmountable difficulty to the Allies in the different theatres of war.

It has been said that we hold our trenches with infantry, the French with their 75-centimetre guns—“the black butchers,” as my friend, Mr. George Adam, calls them in his admirable book “Behind the Scenes at the War”—but the Germans with machine-guns. The more machine-guns we have—and this view is fully upheld by the new Ministry of Munitions at home—the thinner we can make our front line in the trenches, and the more men we shall accordingly have at our disposal for an offensive at one or more points.

CHAPTER III
THE FIGHT FOR THE SALIENT

I.
The Capture and Loss of Hill 60.

The grass has grown up thick and long about the little graves strung out in a great semicircle about Ypres, marking the line of the famous salient, in the defence of which so many thousands of Britons and Frenchmen cheerfully laid down their lives. Spring and summer have smiled on the wooded and undulating plain about the ruined towers of Ypres, and the profusion of wild flowers, the wealth of green foliage, which their gentle caress has brought forth, has so transformed the land that the awful battle-pictures these green pastures have seen now seem like a far-off dream.

With wise strategy we drew in the horns of the Yser salient on May 3, and fell back to the position we now hold, at the beginning of August, from the Yser Canal, north of Ypres, through Wieltje, Verlorenhoek, and Hooge, back to the foot of Hill 60, and thence down to St. Eloi. Thus a great part of the battlefield, which was the scene of the tremendous struggle lasting from April 17 until May 13, is now in German hands—St. Julien, sacred for ever in the Empire’s history in memory of Canadian gallantry there; St. Jean, where the gallant Geddes died; Zonnebeke, where, by the light of candles stuck in beer-bottles, those gallant doctors, Ferguson and Waggett—Waggett, the throat specialist of Harley Street, now Major Waggett, R.A.M.C.—in the cellars of the ruined houses worked for hours over the wounded, and brought them safely away.

Yet I have contrived to visit in person many corners of the battlefield of Ypres, sometimes a day or two after the great contest had raged itself out. On the chaussée by the Yser Canal, north of Ypres, I have seen the humble graves, many of them nameless, in which the poor French victims of the first great gas attack were laid to rest, their rusting rifles and blood-stained uniform close at hand. I have stood in the emplacements of our guns about Ypres amid the putrefying carcasses of horses and piles of empty shell-cases. I have walked through trenches dug across the battlefield where, through fissures in the ground, one yet might see the dead, buried as they died, in uniform.

I have looked upon the hill of St. Eloi—the Mound of Death—that tumulus of glory of the Princess Pat.’s. I have seen the brown and scarred top of Hill 60, where in the yawning craters rent by our mines 2,000 Britons and Germans are yet lying awaiting the Last Trump, where shells and bullets have stripped the trees of their last leaf, and where chlorine gas has stained the herbage yellow.

I have talked with the Generals who directed the fight, who spoke eagerly of its strategy and tactics, and of the undying heroism of our men. I have spoken with the humble privates, whose only recollection of this classic struggle is of long marches over the hard and galling pavé of the Belgian roads, of such an inferno of shell-fire as no man ever dreamt of before, of hours spent, hungry and thirsty, with nerves benumbed, in narrow trenches where comrades cried sharply “Oh!” and “Ah!” as fragments of shell or bullets struck them, where dead men sprawled around, where wounded sighed and died, where one fired and loaded and fired and “stuck it,” because, avowedly, one wouldn’t go back for no bloody German—in reality, because one was British.

I have been among the Canadians who went through the gas horror with a gallantry that made the Empire ring. I have talked with soldiers to whom, but five days out from England, the hell of fire that swept the salient night and day was their first taste of war, and with veterans fresh from the fight on whose breasts the discoloured medal ribbons spoke of former service in the field. From all I have seen myself and all I have heard from others, my mind has focussed so sublime a spectacle of heroism, of pluck undaunted by adversity, of resourcefulness never foiled by confusion, that I have felt impelled to try my hand at painting the picture of that battle which history will set down as one of the crucial struggles of the war.

Map to illustrate the second battle of Ypres.
From “The Times,” by kind permission.

The second battle of Ypres has been called the second German thrust for Calais. It may have become so in the upshot; it was not at the outset. There is no doubt that the Germans were preparing an offensive, the main object of which was to test the efficacy of their asphyxiating gas, one of their great devices of “frightfulness” with which the German Government, through its newspapers and its agents, was wont to make our flesh creep. Their offensive was certainly in the nature of an experiment, and it seems probable that the large number of troops which, as my friend and colleague, Mr. James Dunn, Daily Mail correspondent at Rotterdam, a week before the battle, warned us, were being transported through Belgium and massed on the Western front were intended to press home any advantage that might be won by the asphyxiating gas.

A decided lack of vigour on the part of the German infantry at Ypres has been attributed, and is probably due, to the fact, clearly established by the statements of prisoners, that the German soldiers were terrified of their gas-cylinders, and showed the utmost reluctance to advance immediately behind their gas-cloud. That they had good reason to look askance at their new instrument of frightfulness is shown by the circumstance that, both at Hill 60 and farther northward in the salient, more than once the gas-cloud was seen to drift back into the German lines. Shortly after the second battle of Ypres I was told by an unimpeachable witness, a Belgian who had escaped from Ghent, that there were German gas victims in the military hospitals there, and that their sufferings had caused the military authorities the greatest embarrassment, owing to the effect thereby produced on the German wounded in the wards. The German soldiers’ dread of their unholy ally may to some extent account for the enemy’s failure to press home his advantage, but in my own mind I am convinced that the real explanation is that the German plans were entirely upset by our offensive at Hill 60 on April 17.

As the result of the dashing feat of arms by the 1st Royal West Kents and the 2nd King’s Own Scottish Borderers in capturing the hill, the German offensive was forestalled. The second battle of Ypres, in a figure of speech, went off at half-cock. The German General Staff may well have believed that the attack on Hill 60, instead of being a purely local affair as it really was, was the precursor of a vigorous offensive by the Allies.

The Germans had their pipe-lines laid and their gas-cylinders embedded in front of their trenches in the northern part of the salient. They obviously had no gas at Hill 60, otherwise, seeing that from April 22 on the wind was favourable, they would have gassed the 13th Brigade off the hill immediately the position fell into our hands, instead of waiting until May 1, when they gained a footing on the hill by means of their first gas attack (against the Dorsets), and May 5, when they overwhelmed the Duke of Wellington’s and recaptured the position. Believing, then, that the attempt was to be made to pierce their line at Hill 60, they naturally turned their hand to the best offensive weapon they believed themselves to possess—namely, the line of gas-cylinders installed ready for their experiment in the northern part of the salient.

They had been accumulating a formidable concentration of artillery in anticipation of their attack. Their plans were certainly not ripe, for during the battle they had to bring down heavy naval guns from the Belgian coast to reinforce their artillery. Fortune favoured them in respect of guns.

The second battle of Ypres was an artillery battle. As I have said, the German infantry showed want of vigour. Its attacks, when they were made, were half-hearted and comparatively easily repulsed. Their strength lay in their artillery, of which they possessed guns of all calibres, and used them with a reckless expenditure of ammunition that must have struck our gunners, starved of high-explosive shells, hot with angry envy. From April 22 until May 13 they pounded our men in their trenches, wherever they were, night and day, with relentless energy until the trenches were obliterated in places and choked with débris. They stretched a curtain of fire right across the salient, over Ypres (from which all the main roads radiate like the spokes of a wheel) and far beyond, and the brigades rushed up into action had to traverse this inferno before they came into the fight.

It was a battle of machinery. It was scientific slaughter—death and destruction poured out from miles away. There was a British brigade in the fight that lost all its Colonels but one, and battalions that lost heavily without ever seeing a German. For the Germans not to have won through, against an enemy thrown into confusion by a foul and diabolical surprise and out-gunned from start to finish, is in itself a defeat. Their failure to blast their way through to the sea, which was their objective as the battle developed for them with such unexpected success, must be counted a signal triumph for the Allies—not only for the British troops that held the salient, but also for the gallant French, whose counter-attacks were instrumental in delaying the onrush of the German hordes down the western bank of the canal.

The balance of the second battle of Ypres cannot have been agreeable reading for the Supreme War Lord. On the credit side the gain of a mile or two of a position which we could hardly have hoped to hold against a really strong thrust, on the debit side an expenditure of ammunition, only exceeded by the colossal Austro-German bombardment before Przemysl, and extremely severe casualties. The battle marked the end of all German offensives on the Western front for months, and in this theatre the war relapsed into the state of stalemate, in which Time, most valued ally of the Western Powers, can make his assistance most efficaciously felt against the enemy of mankind.

As, in my opinion, the capture of Hill 60 by the British was in reality the starting-point of the fight for the salient, no account of this historic battle would, I believe, be complete without the story of the capture and loss of the hill, a chaplet of stirring incidents in which the 13th Infantry Brigade won immortal glory. In order to make a connected narrative, I will group together the incidents marking the capture and loss of Hill 60, though, in reality, the fight for the salient had begun before the hill was finally lost.

Hill 60 lies in an isolated position on the extreme western ridge of the Klein Zillebeke Ridge with the Ypres-Comines railway-line, which here runs through a deep cutting, spanned by a small bridge on the one side and the Klein Zillebeke-Zwartelen Road on the other. It is a low hill, with a flattish top, about 45 feet above the surrounding country. The Germans held the upper slopes and the summit of the hill, while our trenches ran round the lower slopes.

For some months before the events which I am about to describe the trenches round Hill 60 were held by a division whose General was not slow to recognize the strategical advantage which the possession of the hill conferred. He accordingly began to make his plans to this end, but before he could bring them to fruition his division was ordered north to take over some of the line from the French.

It fell to the lot of the 13th Brigade to put to the test the plan for the capture of the hill. Like all successful offensives, the attack was the object of the most minute preparation in advance. It was decided that the summit of the hill should be mined, after which the infantry should advance to the capture of the hill. While underground the mining operations went forward, the Brigadier reconnoitred the positions in person. Finally everything was ready for the attack, which was timed to be launched at seven o’clock on the evening of April 17.

The 1st Royal West Kents, otherwise “The Gallant Half-Hundred,” and the 2nd King’s Own Scottish Borderers, who were for so long in garrison in Dublin, were entrusted with the initial attack. Officers and non-commissioned officers received their instructions as to the order in which the storming parties were to go forward, ammunition and bombs were laid ready, the doctors selected their regimental aid-posts, where first aid is administered to the wounded, and all along the line the requisite measures were taken for the replenishment without delay of the supplies in men, ammunition, and provisions as the wastage of the fight should make itself felt. So it is before every engagement. Meanwhile the West Kents and the K.O.S.B.’s spent a long day in the trenches on the fateful April 17, waiting for the shadows to fall and the hands of the watch to point to 7 p.m. When an attack of this kind is impending men’s nerves are strung up tight. It speaks well for the discipline of these two battalions that they stood the test without a trace of nerves.

Thin blue threads of smoke were rising from the German trenches into the clear evening air when, with a dull, low thud, accompanied by a billowing quiver of the earth, the summit of Hill 60 was blown sky-high in an immense black spout of earth and débris and human fragments. Immediately afterwards, with a deafening roar, the second mine went up—exploding, it is believed, a German mine with it, so loud was the report. In the space of a minute or two five mines were touched off, and immediately after our artillery opened rapid fire on all the German positions in the vicinity, on the woods in the rear, on the ruins of Zwartelen village on the left (see map), and on the railway cutting. As our guns spoke, Major Joslin, who was commanding the West Kents’ storming party, standing beside the Royal Engineers officer who fired the mines, blew the charge on his whistle, and the attack got away, the bombers in front.

The Germans were as completely surprised as they were at Neuve Chapelle. Their trenches had been practically obliterated, and in their place appeared five yawning craters, the largest of which measured about 50 yards across by 40 feet deep. These gulfs were filled with dead and wounded men. A few Germans made a show of resistance, but were speedily accounted for. Many who fled headlong across the open behind their trenches were mown down by our machine-guns, which had been expecting this development. The West Kents went through the craters and bombed their way down the communication trenches into the German support trenches, while digging parties of the K.O.S.B.’s set about making trenches across the lips of the craters.

At 7.20 p.m. Hill 60 was ours.

The loss of the hill was a bad shock for the enemy. He did not recover from it that evening at any rate. After a rather feeble bombardment with “whizz-bangs,” he attempted three counter-attacks in the small hours of the morning, but they were easily smothered by our machine-gun fire.

As the night wore on, however, his bombardment began to increase in violence. The K.O.S.B.’s, who came up to the relief of the West Kents about 2.30 a.m. (April 18), came in for it badly. It was pitch dark, and the going was made difficult by the holes in the ground, the dead bodies scattered around, and the innumerable strands of broken barbed wire strewing the Hill. Major Joslin was killed, so was the company commander of the relieving party, while Major Sladen, the commanding officer of the K.O.S.B.’s, was wounded and his Adjutant mortally wounded. It was a subaltern who finally took the K.O.S.B.’s into their new trenches on the hill-top.

By this time the German bombardment was extremely severe. High-explosive shells were bursting in regular volleys on the exposed slopes, and the Germans, whose trenches in some places were but a few yards distant from ours, separated by only a sandbag barrier thrown across a communication trench, kept up a merciless fusillade of bombs. The flares broke in a gush of green light over the battered hill, showing the green and yellow eddies of smoke from the bursting projectiles. But the K.O.S.B.’s, swathed in choking smoke, their trenches clogged with the dead and wounded, kept a brave heart. Some of them actually whiled away the night in song, shouting in chorus that ditty which is, above any other, the song of our fighting-men in Flanders:

“Here we are! Here we are!
Here we are again!
Tommy, Jack, and Pat, and Mac, and Joe!”

Dawn stole with lemon streaks into the sky, and found them there amid the bursting shells. But they had had to give ground a little and abandon the trenches on the far side of the crater on the extreme left of our position.

Their condition was rather precarious, and the West Kents sent a company up in support. The officer commanding the company described how he found the K.O.S.B.’s Captain dead in the crater between the British and German trenches, on top of a pile of dead and wounded men so thick that “hardly a portion of the ground could be seen.”

At 11.30 a.m. the Duke of Wellington’s (The West Riding) Regiment, 2nd Battalion, arrived to relieve the K.O.S.B.’s and West Kents, who by this time had been able to retain possession of only three of the craters on the near side of the hill (the three right-hand craters in the map). “The Duke’s,” as they are called, did magnificently that day. “The Old Duke would be as proud of you to-day as he was when he commanded you,” the Brigadier said afterwards in addressing the shattered remnant of the battalion that came away from the hill. Despite the rain of shells and bombs, they held on grimly all through the day. By the early afternoon the Germans had recaptured the whole of the hill save only for a section behind the second and third craters (counted from the right in the map), where “The Duke’s” still resisted. Their General saw them clinging to the brown, scarred ridge “like a patch of flies on the ceiling.”

The day wore on and “The Duke’s” still held out. It was decided to relieve the pressure on them by a counter-attack with artillery support. The King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry were brought up, and at six o’clock “The Duke’s,” their numbers thinned, it is true, by heavy casualties, particularly in officers, were over the parapet and away, their fellow county men of Yorkshire at their heels. Behind came some of the K.O.S.B.’s and the “Q. Vic.’s” (the Queen Victoria Rifles, that well-known London Territorial battalion). These young Londoners covered themselves with glory in this day’s fighting and later. Second Lieutenant Woolley, one of their subalterns, won the Victoria Cross for a magnificent display of endurance and gallantry.

“B” Company of “The Duke’s,” on the right, reached the German trenches, and established themselves there with slight loss; “C” Company had to cross open ground, got badly hammered, and only Captain Barton and eleven men reached their objective. They never stopped to see how many men they had lost, however. They went for their crafty enemy with bayonet and bomb, and killed or routed every man in the trench. Their blows would have been struck doubly hard had they known what stood before. “D” Company, on the left, had also a patch of open country to traverse. All its officers were killed or wounded in its passage over the broken ground swept by shell and machine-gun fire, but with the help of the stout-hearted Yorkshire Light Infantry it managed to secure the trench.

Hill 60 was ours once more. It would still be in our hands to-day but for the German crime against civilization and humanity, the nameless horror of the asphyxiating gas. Sir John French said as much in his despatch on the second battle of Ypres (dated “Headquarters, June 15”). Referring to the loss of Hill 60, the Commander-in-Chief wrote:

“The enemy owes his success ... entirely to the use of asphyxiating gas. It was only a few days later that the means, which have since proved so effective, of counteracting this method of making war, were put into practice. Had it been otherwise, the enemy’s attack on May 5 would most certainly have shared the fate of all the many previous attempts he had made.”

On the morning of the 20th, in the small hours, the 13th Brigade, exhausted by its spell of hard fighting, was relieved by the arrival of another brigade, which took over the hill. The East Surreys and the Bedfordshires went into the trenches, and forthwith had to bear the brunt of a whole series of most desperate efforts made by the Germans to recapture the hill, or, failing that, to prevent us from consolidating the positions gained. Desperate hand-to-hand fights, bombing encounters, and point-blank rifle and machine-gun fire, together with an incessant stream of shells, marked the whole of that day and the following night, when the Devons came up and relieved.

The East Surreys and the Bedfords fought most gallantly, and were splendidly seconded by the 6th King’s Liverpools, a Territorial battalion, which, notwithstanding the terrific fire, rendered very real support to the regulars in the front line by carrying up stores of all kinds throughout the fighting. A quartermaster-sergeant of the Bedfordshires paid a fine tribute to the work of these gallant Territorials. “The approaches to our positions,” he wrote to me, “were swept by a storm of bullets and shells of all kinds, and they (‘The King’s’) had a large number of casualties, but they never flinched, and it was largely owing to the manner in which they kept up the supply of hand-grenades and ammunition of all kinds that we were able to hang on and finally drive back the enemy’s attacks.”

The losses of the East Surreys and the Bedfordshires were very severe, but two V.C.’s and many other decorations were afterwards awarded to the two battalions in recognition of their fine behaviour.

In the meantime the 13th Brigade had marched off to its rest-billets, looking forward to a spell of well-earned repose. But it was not to be. Hardly had the brigade settled down in its new quarters before urgent orders reached the Brigadier to push it up with all speed through Ypres to the Pilckem Road in support of the French, who had been driven in by the German gas attack, and of the Canadians, whose flank had been left “in the air” by the French withdrawal.

The Germans could not do without Hill 60. They wanted it notably as a vantage-point from which to sweep the Ypres salient with a rain of fire to support the tremendous effort, which they were just developing, to pierce the Allied line. “Necessity knows no law” is a saying that served to justify in German eyes the murder of Belgium. It served equally well to explain (if the moral aspects of the question were ever discussed, which I doubt) the employment of gas to wrest from our grasp the hill we had won and held with untarnished weapons.

On May 1 the gas appeared on Hill 60. The Dorsets held the line. It was in the early hours of the morning that a low greenish cloud came rolling over the top of the hill on to our trenches. Our men were taken unawares, unprepared. Of respirators they had none. Respirators were only just beginning to arrive at the front as the result of an appeal made to the women of England after the gas attack against the French and Canadians on April 22 and 24. In a minute or two the gas had got the Dorsets in its grip, and they were choking with its stifling fumes. The Germans came on at them behind their gas-cloud, but the Dorsets were ready for them. Half-asphyxiated as they were, they scrambled on the parapet of the trench and swept down the advancing files with machine-gun and rifle-fire.

That day the spirit of England, as enshrined in the begrimed and mud-stained exterior of these Dorsetshire lads, rose superior to the menace of a hideous and long-drawn-out death. Again and again throughout the morning and afternoon messages came down from the Dorsets on the hill to the Devons in support asking for machine-gun ammunition. All day long the Devons waiting in the woods heard the brave tap-tapping of the machine-guns on the hill, and knew that the Dorsets were keeping their end up.

The Devons went up in relief that night, cleverly led to our trenches without the loss of a man. They still speak with reluctance of the sights that met their eyes on the way, for the fields were strewn with many gallant Dorsets who had crawled into the fields and ditches to die. The men cursed the Germans savagely as they stumbled over the prostrate forms.

The 13th Brigade had not taken “The Duke’s” into action with them at Ypres, and on May 4 this battalion relieved the Devons on the hill. The following morning the Germans made another and stronger bid for the position. At eight o’clock in the morning of a balmy May day they opened their gas-cylinders behind the crest of Hill 60, and presently, “like mist rising from the fields,” in the words of an eyewitness, the vapours came creeping up in greater volume than ever. At the same time the German guns opened a heavy bombardment.

The gallant “Duke’s” were overwhelmed. The ordeal was too severe. They were forced to give ground. Alone they stood the full brunt of the attack, officers and men sticking to the trenches until the sandbags fell in upon them, until there was no room to move for dead and wounded men and débris. Standing at the entrance to his dug-out in the rear that morning, the Adjutant of “The Duke’s,” as he afterwards told me himself, saw an officer and an orderly staggering towards him. The officer spoke in a gasping voice. “They’ve gassed ‘The Duke’s,’” he said. “I believe I was the last man to leave the hill. All the men up there are dead. They were splendid. I thought I ought to come and report.” The officer was new to the regiment, having been detached from the 3rd East Yorks for service with “The Duke’s” after the heavy losses of the latter at Hill 60 on the 18th. The high spirit of duty that impelled him, a dying man, to struggle down the hillside and make his report is characteristic of the British regimental officer. He died at the field ambulance that night, a hero if there ever was one. He was Captain G. U. Robins.

The situation was highly critical. The Devons in support at the foot of the hill collected every man they could find, and lined them up in anticipation of a German rush. It never came.

The British Army has passed through some stern trials in this war, but I doubt if any were more terrible than the ordeal of May 5 at Hill 60. The sun shone hotly out of a cerulean sky on the slopes of the hill, where the dead lay in thick clusters on the grass stained yellow by the gas-fumes. The railway cutting was a shambles, dead and wounded lying in places so thickly that men had to move them out of the way in order to pass. Our soldiers, who went along the cutting where the shells were crashing with reverberating explosions, were positively sickened at the sights they saw, and filled with fierce anger against the fiends who had perpetrated this nameless crime.

The men at Hill 60 had their fight to fight out alone. Farther to the north one of the greatest battles of the war was raging. The horrors of the hill and the railway cutting were but an incident in the mighty struggle of nations which was swaying to and fro in the fields and woods about Ypres. Yet it had cost in lives many more men than the costliest battle of the South African War.

Now the 13th Brigade, which had shortly before come out of the inferno about Ypres, returned to Hill 60 with orders to counter-attack and recapture it if possible. We were back in our old positions on the lower slopes of the hill. The work had to be begun again. It was tired men who had to do it. Such is the fortune of war.

West Kents and K.O.S.B.’s were again to furnish the storming parties. It was a pitch-black night. Not even a flare rent the inky curtain which had descended on the hill. Craters and holes innumerable, dead bodies, fragments of timber, splintered barbed-wire posts, miles of barbed wire in inextricable tangles, made a forward rush impossible. But the hill had to be taken, and the army had entrusted the gallant “Half-Hundred” and the lads of the Kilmarnock bonnets with the task. So on the stroke of ten they were ready to go, the West Kents on the left, the K.O.S.B.’s on the right.

It was a desperate undertaking, and it failed from the outset. As the first files of men clambered out over the parapet, the Germans, as though they had been waiting for the attack, opened a storm of shell on them, while the air fairly whizzed with machine-gun bullets. Only a few officers and a handful of men reached the German trench, and were there shot down or took cover in the numerous shell-holes dotted about.

With the first light of daybreak another attempt was made to gain the hill. The Yorkshire Light Infantry and the Cheshires attacked, supported on either side by the bombers of the Irish Rifles and the K.O.S.B.’s respectively. Two companies of the Yorkshire Light Infantry, despite a murderous fire, fairly burst their way into the Zwartelen salient, a very strong German redoubt, and were never heard of again. The Germans in their stronghold enfiladed the Cheshires on the right, and after a desperate struggle we had to fall back to our trenches. Throughout the night heavy fighting, often at close quarters with bomb and bayonet, went on amid a terrific bombardment, whilst from the north the guns thundered incessantly.

That was our last attempt to capture Hill 60. Honeycombed with mines, eviscerated, battered, and blasted, the summit of the hill lay abandoned and desolate when I visited the positions in July. The dead were still lying in the craters, huge yawning chasms of crumbling brown earth, the edges strewn with a wild jumble of rags of uniform, haversacks, splintered rifles, and barbed wire. Just below the summit the German trenches, with sandbags of brown and blue and red and green, wound their way round the side of the hill, seeming to tower above our narrow trenches which clung to the lower slopes.

II.
The Fight for the Salient.

The afternoon of April 22 was drawing to a close, and a fresh breeze was blowing from the north-east, when the German Supreme Command decided that the moment had arrived for the perpetration of the crime that will brand the German Army with infamy until the end of time. Our line about Ypres ran, more or less as the first great German thrust for Calais had left it in November, in a wide semicircle about Ypres. The French were on our left on the east bank of the Yser Canal, along a line running eastward through Langemarck to the point where our line began. Here the Canadian Division was in the trenches which went through Kersselaere along the Gravenstafel ridge to a point adjacent to the cross-roads at Broodseinde, where the 28th Division under General Bulfin held the line as far as the outer, the eastern, edge of the Polygon Wood. Here the 27th Division under General Snow took over the line which bent back westward down to where the 5th Division was in position about Hill 60.

This, then, was the famous salient of Ypres. It was in the northern part that the Germans launched their first gas attack, and one can imagine with what eager expectation their gas engineers throughout that fine April day fingered the taps of the cylinders embedded in front of their trenches, where our outlook men had observed them working for several weeks before. We have never heard the French version of what happened after 5.15 on the evening of April 22, when the fatal greenish-yellow cloud, the significance of which no man could fathom at that time, rising to about man’s height, began to roll sluggishly forward from the white and blue sandbags marking the German line. We only know that our artillery observation officers in their different coigns of vantage in this region saw a mysterious greenish haze hovering over the French lines, and that presently down all the roads leading from the canal to Ypres and Vlamertinghe and Poperinghe a stream of French infantry and Turcos appeared, most of them with terror in their faces, with streaming eyes and gasping breath, in the grip of a horror they feared because they did not understand it.

It was a grim and awful ordeal to be the first to endure a method of warfare so diabolical in its conception, so fiendish in its effects, that its equal has hardly been encountered in all the blood-stained history of man. The whole British Army applauded the noble words in which its Commander-in-Chief alluded to the conduct of the French on that occasion. In his despatch of June 15 Sir John French said, referring to the gas attack on the French: “I wish particularly to repudiate any idea of attaching the least blame to the French Division for this unfortunate incident. After all the examples our gallant Allies have shown of dogged and tenacious courage in the many trying situations in which they have been placed throughout the course of this campaign, it is quite superfluous for me to dwell on this aspect of the incident, and I would only express the firm conviction that, if any troops in the world had been able to hold their trenches in the face of such a treacherous and altogether unexpected onslaught, the French Division would have stood firm.” We know now that many of our brave Allies, both officers and men, stayed and died at their posts, victims of slow asphyxiation. You may find the graves of many of them to-day, among other places by the canal bank, around Ypres, and in a little burial-ground close to a road leading out of Poperinghe.

Fortunately, the healthy respect the Germans had for their new ally delayed their advance, and enabled the news of the overwhelming of the right of the Allied line to reach General Headquarters, where it was received with amazement. Prompt measures were taken, for it was at once recognized that the Canadian left was dangerously exposed.

The fact that the Germans had, on April 20, started bombarding Ypres with 17-inch shells had aroused the suspicions of General Bulfin, commanding the 28th Division, which was on the right of the Canadians. Knowing that most of the practicable roads from west to east led through Ypres, he very wisely ordered everything to come east of the city, in anticipation of some German move which at that time he was unable to fathom. The most urgent need of the moment, after the retirement of the French, was to fill the gap left in the line between the French who had escaped the poisoned gas and were still in their old positions and the Canadian left. Colonel Geddes of the Buffs was accordingly put in command of four battalions in reserve east of Ypres—the Buffs, the Middlesex, the 5th King’s Own, and the Yorks and Lancaster—and two Canadian battalions in billets at Wieltje, and sent up to stop the gap. At the same time the 13th Brigade, which had just emerged exhausted from the fighting at Hill 60, was rushed up from its rest-billets to support the French and the Canadians along the Pilckem Road.

It was a critical night for the Canadians. The Germans, realizing at last that the French trenches opposite their gas-cylinders were unoccupied, and that their experiment had succeeded beyond their widest hopes, had advanced, and were now threatening the Canadian flank. Advancing with the utmost gallantry, Geddes’s strange conglomeration of British and Canadian troops had succeeded in capturing by assault a small wood west of the village of St. Julien, in which four 4·7 guns—the 2nd London Heavy Battery—lent to the French some time before, had fallen into German hands. The 10th Canadian Regiment and the Canadian Highlanders made a most spectacular and splendid charge through the wood that night, routing the Germans and recapturing the guns. Unfortunately, the “heavies” could not be brought away, so the breech-blocks were removed and the guns otherwise rendered useless.

That night the Canadians bent back their left flank against the attack they knew could not be long delayed. Indeed, reports showed the Germans to be busy outside their trenches. The Canadians dug themselves in along their new line whilst the dawn came creeping up heralding the day that was to win immortal glory for the Maple Leaf. They knew that they must hold out against the arrival of the British troops which were coming to reinforce them, and of the French reinforcements which were hastening up to try and regain what had been lost.

It was at 4 a.m. that the gas was released. It came on in its sluggish rolling billows against the Canadians lined up behind their sandbags on the Gravenstafel ridge from a distance calculated by the Winnipeg Rifles (8th Canadian Battalion) to be about 200 yards. They had time to load and discharge two charges of their Ross rifles before the gas was on them, rolling over the parapet, creeping in and out of the sandbags and eddying into the dug-outs. Urgent messages were telephoned back to the batteries as the Germans were seen assembling in front of their main trench. The enemy waited ten minutes or so before attacking, and when they did come on were driven back by our guns and the rifles of the men who were still able to stand upright.

For the Canadians stood fast. As long as the Empire endures the story of their fight shall live. Stifled like wasps in a nest, battered incessantly by a terrific bombardment which increased in intensity as the day wore on, they held out grimly. The Highlanders in the wood west of St. Julien, badly enfiladed, as the flank was bent back here, got the full blast of the vapours, but they would not fall back. At one place where part of one battalion was forced to evacuate their trench, the survivors made an extraordinarily plucky attempt to reoccupy it in the face of a withering fire.

The Canadian left—the 3rd Canadian Brigade—was sorely pressed. Once the brigade sent word to its sister brigade—the 2nd Canadian Brigade—on its right that the Germans were advancing unchecked on its trenches. Two platoons were despatched as reinforcements, and some of the Northumberland Fusiliers under Lieutenant Hardy. One of this officer’s reports was so characteristic of the circumstances of this epic fight and of the spirit in which our men went through with it that I think it is worth quoting textually. Here it is:

“The greater part of the officers and men are asphyxiated by gas. I understand that the enemy is on three sides of me. Unless I am reinforced fairly well, it will be impossible to do anything great.”

You observe no trace of panic, no heroics; just a blasé suggestion that, failing reinforcements, the “Fighting Fifth” might not be able to live up to its fine record and do anything great.

Soon after noon word reached the Canadian left that it was to fall back. But the Brigadier, hearing that the other brigade was going to counter-attack, decided to stay where he was and await developments. He communicated this decision to his troops, whereupon the officers sent back word to say they would hang on as long as they had a man to line the parapet.

It now became clear that St. Julien and the wood could no longer be held. The Canadian left had withstood all through the day of the 23rd furious onslaughts from three sides, and a fresh gas attack on the morning of the 24th settled the question. The left brigade fell back on a line running from St. Julien to Fortuin whilst awaiting the arrival of reinforcements from a British Division, which was coming up with all speed through a deadly zone of shell-fire. This was the morning of the 24th. By this time the Germans to the north had succeeded in establishing themselves on the west bank of the canal, having captured Steenstraat and some works south of Lizerne from the French.

On the 23rd Sir John French had had an important interview with General Foch, one of the most brilliant of the French Generals, who commands the left group of French Armies. General Foch gave the British Generalissimo a clear account of what had happened, informed him of his intention to make good the original line, and requested him to allow the British troops to hold on until the necessary reinforcements could arrive. Sir John French agreed to do this, but stipulated that he could not suffer his troops to remain in their present exposed position for an unlimited period of time.

It was now imperative to hold the Germans at all costs. There were two highly critical periods in the battle, and the first began now with April 24. On the canal bank Geddes’s detachment, reinforced by some battalions of the 13th Brigade, had been making a series of small attacks on the Germans at a heavy price but with good effect, for the Germans never got through here. The Lahore Division of the Indian Corps subsequently relieved Geddes’s gallant troops at the very moment that their intrepid leader, his work done, paid the supreme sacrifice. He was killed by a shell on the 26th in the upper room of a house in which the General commanding the 13th Brigade had established his headquarters, and where Geddes spent the night. The shells were bursting continually about the vicinity when Colonel Geddes arrived, and he was killed by one which entered the breakfast-room the next morning. The General commanding the 13th Brigade had a providential escape, as he had left the room to fetch a map a few seconds before.

The retirement of the Canadian left from St. Julien on the 24th had exposed the flank of the Canadian Brigade on the right, and it was essential to stop the gap. By this time General Hull’s 10th Brigade of the 4th Division, which was coming up to reinforce the Canadians, had reached the canal, and was on its way to Wieltje, where it arrived at 2.30 a.m. the following morning. It had been placed under the orders of the General commanding the Canadian Division, who sent an urgent message asking the brigade to attack St. Julien immediately.

It was a desperately difficult undertaking. The night was extremely dark, the ground, which had not been reconnoitred, was honeycombed with trenches and strewn with barbed wire, and, moreover, the artillery had not been able to “register”—that is to say, get its range of the terrain. Just before the attack was launched word came back that some Canadians were still holding out in the village of St. Julien. Therefore the place could not be shelled. The guns, however, opened on the wood west of the village.

It was half-past four in the morning when the attack got away. The 7th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, a Territorial battalion that was on its trial that day, led with splendid dash on the right, the 1st Warwicks on the left. They were followed on right and left respectively by the 1st Royal Fusiliers and the 2nd Dublins, whilst the 2nd Seaforths were ordered to connect with General Riddell’s Brigade of the Northumbrian Division, which had been sent up to relieve the Canadians.

As soon as our men got out of their trenches they were met by a terrific machine-gun and rifle fire at close quarters, whilst the German heavy guns in the rear spouted a continual torrent of shells over the fields through which the assault was delivered. Our men dropped left and right, but they never wavered, and the Irish Fusiliers and the Dublins, Irishmen all, fighting shoulder to shoulder, actually got into the outskirts of St. Julien. The scattered ruins, the maze of trenches, and the barbed wire strung out everywhere, seriously delayed these two battalions and checked our advance. Two battalions of a brigade of the Northumberland Division, supporting the Dublins, lost their direction. These men had only been a few days in France, and were advancing over country which was totally unknown to their officers and themselves. On the left the Warwicks and on the other flank the Highlanders got to within 70 yards of the German trenches in front of the wood. Here they were hung up, and could make no further progress. They dug in, and were “properly hammered,” in the words of one who was there, by German high-explosive shells. Nevertheless, by this gallant attack, the gap between the Canadians east of St. Julien and north of Fortuin was filled.

The next day another attack on St. Julien was delivered, but also without success. General Riddell, commanding the Northumberland Brigade of the Northumbrian Division, received a pressing order from the Canadians to attack with the Lahore Division and a battalion of General Hull’s Brigade. There had been no time to reconnoitre. It was for this brigade a “boost in the dark,” but the urgency of the crisis admitted of no delay. So our men went forward again, three battalions of the Northumberland Fusiliers and the Indians, straight into an inferno of shell and rifle fire. All through the afternoon they struggled on under a terrific bombardment, the worst that the battle had brought forth up to that time. At half-past three the gallant Riddell was killed by a bullet as he was going up to see for himself the position of his battalions, who had dug themselves in 200 yards away from St. Julien.

Let us pause a minute here, and contemplate the work of this North Country Territorial Division. Landed in France on April 19, five days later the stout North Countrymen, the majority of whom were miners from Northumberland, Yorkshire, and Durham, were undergoing an ordeal of fire which tried the nerves of our hardiest veterans. They knew nothing of the country, they had had no practical experience of war. In the ordinary course of events they would have had a progressive course of acclimatization in the field before taking their turn of duty in the firing-line as a divisional unit. “Had they been only a couple of months in France,” a competent observer said to me after the battle, “their losses would not have been so heavy. There are things about this war which no amount of careful training at home can teach. But the need for reinforcements was imperative, and they had to go into the fight. They never flinched from their ordeal. They fought and died like men.”

That was a Territorial division, if there ever was one, men of the same mould, of the same speech, mostly led by the men they were wont to follow in their civilian callings. In battle, says the old German song, a man must depend on himself. That is what the Northumbrian Division did. On them, the untried battalions of but five days’ active service, devolved the proud honour of serving the Empire as a homogeneous unit, and they did not shirk the call. The mind dwells with a thrill on the advance of those sturdy, thick-set fellows suddenly confronted with the most hideous side of modern war, yet accepting the ordeal stolidly, unflinchingly, with many a rough word of encouragement and comfort bandied from mouth to mouth in their broad northern speech.

The abandonment of St. Julien had placed the Canadian right in a precarious position. Their position on the Gravenstafel ridge, which had now become the acute angle of the salient, was untenable. Another brigade of the Northumbrian Division having come up to their relief with great difficulty, the Canadians fell back on the night of the 26th to behind the Hannabeek stream. Alter that the Canadian Division was withdrawn, its place being taken by the Lahore Division, part of the 4th Division, and the Northumbrian Division.

Some battalions of the Durham Light Infantry of the Northumbrian Division which carried out the relief came in for a most tremendous hammering from German 8-inch guns. One battalion on the Gravenstafel ridge repelled an attack delivered by several German battalions at 2 p.m. on the 26th, losing all save one officer and fifty men, but then had to retire. The Germans, pressing forward, started to envelop, so our men fell back in good order to behind the Hannabeek stream. Other battalions of this regiment were sent to stop a gap where the Germans, pushing on after the Canadian retirement, had broken through at Zevenkote. They, too, suffered heavily from the terrific German bombardment, and, indeed, never caught a glimpse of the enemy at all. On the evening of April 26 they dug themselves in on a line near Zevenkote to the left of the railway-line skirting Zonnebeke.

The retirement of the Canadians from the Gravenstafel ridge had created a grave situation for the brigade on its right, the left-hand brigade of the 28th Division, which, you will remember, was holding the centre of the salient. When the Canadians fell back, the Royal Fusiliers’ flank was left “in the air,” as the saying goes. The 11th Brigade of the 4th Division, which had come to the relief of the Canadians, arrived most providentially, and the Hampshires were rushed up to get connection with the “Seventh” in their perilous position.

On the 25th the Germans delivered a furious attack against the East Surreys and the Middlesex, but the Londoners stood firm and beat the Boche back to his trenches, the Surreys capturing a number of prisoners. The order was to hold the line at all costs, and it was held. Both battalions behaved splendidly, but one must make particular mention of the gallantry of the 8th Middlesex, a Territorial battalion, which stood its first taste of modern war with admirable coolness.

All next day the Germans kept up a tremendous bombardment, and a gap appeared between the Hampshires and the Royal Fusiliers, the point of least resistance of our line here. It was eventually filled by the Shropshire Light Infantry at dusk. Some battalions of the Northumbrian Division were brought in to reinforce the line here.

Meanwhile on the extreme left the French had carried out their promise, and had counter-attacked. In conjunction with our gallant Indian troops, who fought most stoutly in this battle, they were able to push the enemy farther north. The French recaptured Lizerne, and made some progress at Steenstraat and Het Sas; but the Germans, profiting by the north-easterly breeze, which unexpectedly held in their favour during the greater part of the three weeks’ fighting, made free use of their gas-fumes, and little real progress was realized. All through the 27th, 28th, 29th, and 30th the Germans kept up a tremendous bombardment right round the curve of the salient. Our line now ran from the canal straight across the Ypres-Langemarck Road in front of St. Julien, through Fortuin to Zevenkote, and thence bent round Zonnebeke (for Broodseinde had had to be abandoned), through the Polygon Wood, back to Hill 60. The Germans made full use of their superiority of artillery, and swept the trenches with a never-ending deluge of heavy projectiles and mortar bombs, while all the roads leading through Ypres to the front were sprayed day and night with fire.

Not Meissonnier, nor Détaille, nor Werner, nor even Verestchagin, I believe, could have thrown on canvas an adequate impression of the awful ordeal which these endless days of pitiless bombardment imposed on our troops. They could have painted you a picture of the British in the trenches running through green fields and pastures and woods, with the wrecks of cottages and churches dotted about the landscape, and the grey ruins of Ypres, seen through bursts of black and white smoke, in the background. They could have shown you our men, unshorn, unwashed, their eyes shining whitely out of their faces, begrimed, burnt by the sun, standing at the parapet firing steadily, or digging, filling sandbags and piling them up to close the breaches rent in the parapet by the enemy’s shells bursting on every side. They could have shown you the dead, the pitilessly mangled, the hideously limp victims of the shells; they might have conveyed by a touch of the brush the indifference with which men in the firing-line will pass to and fro before the yet warm bodies of their comrades. They could have shown you the wounded, quiet, dull-eyed, the long processions of the stretcher-bearers dodging their way down to houses and barns and churches and stables, where, under the Cross of Geneva, the doctors were working swiftly and silently, without fuss.

But they could never have conveyed to you the overwhelming, unimaginable truth—that this little sketch of a few yards of trench must be repeated over miles and miles of front, with the same dusty figures at the parapet, the same headless and armless dead, the same suffering wounded, the same rain of shells, if one would bring home an impression of the second battle of Ypres.

One reads that the endurance of the men was wonderful. But one does not understand. I saw the men who came alive out of that hell in the salient, and they were as men transfigured. Not that they were shaken, depressed, or, on the other hand, exultant. They were just uncannily quiet, sitting about in the sunshine, rather limp, like men recovering from supreme fatigue. Talking to them, one felt somehow that their characters had changed; that they would never look on life again as they had done in the past; that they had acquired a new seriousness of mind, as though their glimpse into the dark valley had sobered them. And they all had a puckered, strained look about the eyes, the look one sometimes sees in men who have spent their lives in the open under a tropical sun. At first these symptoms used to puzzle me. They did after the battle of Ypres. Afterwards I found out that they were the badge of the modern battle, and that, with a week of rest and change of scene, they pass away.

The ruthless bombardment with which the Germans occupied the last days of April were the preliminary to a fresh onslaught on the troops holding the northern part of the salient. In the meantime, the French counter-attacks having made no progress, Sir John French, in accordance with his arrangement with General Foch, decided that he could not afford to hold on any longer to our present exposed position. He therefore gave orders to Sir Herbert Plumer, who was directing the operations of the army engaged in defending the salient, to fall back upon a new line which had already been prepared in anticipation of this emergency. The effect of the withdrawal was to diminish considerably the arc of the salient, the whole of the centre falling back to a line starting east of Wieltje on the Ypres-Fortuin Road, running across the Ypres-Frezemberg Road south of Frezemberg, cutting through the Ypres-Thourout railway-line, and then the Ypres-Menin Road east of Hooge.

Before the withdrawal could be begun, however—the day was May 2—the Germans, having obtained fresh supplies of chlorine gas in tank waggons from Belgium, launched a gas attack from St. Julien against the 12th and 10th Brigades, which, with the 11th Brigade, were holding the line round this village and down to Fortuin. By this time our men were provided with respirators of a sort, as the result of the appeal made by the army, and magnificently responded to by the women of Britain. Unfortunately the respirators were of rather a rudimentary pattern—they have since been replaced by an entirely efficacious model—and they did not serve wholly to protect our men from the poisonous fumes. Notably the 2nd Lancashire Fusiliers and the Essex Regiment got the full blast of the noxious vapours. Despite many acts of individual gallantry shown by officers and men of the Lancashire Fusiliers, they could not hold the trench, and the line was forced back.

It was here that Jack Lynn won the Victoria Cross, conferred posthumously, for this brave fellow did not survive his gallant action. He was in the machine-gun pit when the deadly cloud approached, but without waiting to adjust his respirator he kept his machine-gun playing on the dense billows of greenish-yellow smoke. The cloud caught him and eddied about him, but his fingers never left the button of the gun, which barked on incessantly as the dimly descried forms of the Germans appeared creeping over the open. Choking and gasping as he was, Lynn hoisted his machine-gun on the parapet, and there, amid a storm of bullets, a lonely figure in a trench full of dead and dying, he kept his gun going on the enemy till he collapsed. The German infantry could not face the storm of fire, and returned to their trenches.

Lynn had collapsed by his gun when his comrades found him. They took him to a dug-out, half-conscious, but even then, when a machine-gun started barking near by, that gallant spirit struggled to regain his feet to get back to “his gun.” He died there in the sunset, with the din of battle ringing in his ears, only a Liverpool van-boy, “jes’ a little bet of a chaap,” one of his mates told me afterwards, but a man with a mighty soul.

The 2nd Seaforths were also badly gassed, but with true Scottish tenacity they stuck to their trenches until relief came. It was not long delayed. The Cavalry Division in support sent up the 4th Hussars, who executed a splendid charge side by side with the 7th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders (Territorials), who had already done so well at St. Julien. Hussars and Highlanders went forward, head down, through the gas fumes straight into the Germans, ambling to what they imagined was an easy triumph. There was some swift and silent slaying, and the Germans went back the way they had come with sorely diminished numbers. Said General Hull to me afterwards with a chuckle: “We got the Boches on the hop that time.”

Fighting went on all that day and the next. It was essential to conceal from the enemy our withdrawal, which was timed to begin after dark. The continual counter-attacks delivered by these brigades effectually contrived to mask our intentions from him. As a result we were able to withdraw the whole centre of our line and take up the new position we had prepared almost without a casualty, and without the Germans being a penny the wiser. In fact, they continued to pour a devastating fire into our empty trenches until 3.30 on the afternoon following the withdrawal.

The retirement began at 10 p.m. on the night of May 3. The arrangement was that, first, part of the infantry should withdraw, followed after an interval by a portion of the remainder, each battalion leaving behind twenty picked shots to man the parapet and pick off any German that showed himself. It was a most delicate undertaking. The least mistake would have betrayed our move to the Germans. At some places—for instance, at Broodseinde—the trenches were only ten yards apart. Talking and smoking were forbidden. Our men just slipped away in silence through the darkness, the officers hoping in their hearts that they might get away undiscovered.

With a muttered “Good-night and good luck” to the lonely figures left at the parapet, looking out over the dreary expanse between the trenches, where spasmodic flares vouchsafed a glimpse from time to time of gaping shell-holes, a wild tangle of barbed wire and dead in uniforms brown and green, the first batch of troops silently filed out of the trenches. What a crew they were, with an eight-days’ beard, unwashed and unkempt, their faces and uniforms smeared with clay! With that peculiar hitch that Tommy gives to his pack behind when he starts off, they trudged out into the black night, their backs turned to the enemy.

Thus to turn the back on danger and face the unknown, worn out with fatigue and hunger, shaken by the loss of many dear comrades—what a test of discipline! The men were admirable; their officers were magnificent. The success of the withdrawal was, first and last, the work of the Regimental Officer, as those most qualified to speak readily attest. With most of the field officers killed or wounded or gassed, it was primarily the subaltern, the boy fresh from a public school or the Varsity, from Sandhurst or the O.T.C., or, in the Territorials, the young clerk or business man, who led his men down over unreconnoitred ground through the rain and the darkness, steeling them against the danger that always threatened by a fine display of nonchalance and good-humour.

Nothing was left behind. All the arms and ammunition and supplies that could not be taken away were destroyed. They tell of a Colonel who did away with a box of kippers rather than let them fall into the hands of the Germans. To his surprise at breakfast the next morning in the new line the kippers appeared on the breakfast-table (an ammunition-box on the bottom of a trench). The Regimental Sergeant-Major confessed that the sacrifice had been too great. He could not bring himself to take any chance of making a present of the kippers to the Germans. So he had clandestinely rescued them.

At midnight the last men quitted our front trenches, and, going “as they pleased,” made off through the pouring rain to rejoin their comrades. A private in the 2nd Cheshires got left behind. He remained at his post at the parapet with a waterproof sheet over his shoulders, firing at intervals at the German parapet opposite him. Presently he noticed that the trench had grown very still. He left his post and went round the adjacent traverse. Nobody there! He went round the traverse on his other side. Again a vista of empty trench! He hurried down the trenches for a hundred yards or so, and found that everyone had gone. He was, as he put it afterwards, “left to face the whole blooming German Army alone.” He lost no time in joining the retirement.

Many of the wounded of the days of heavy fighting had been taken to the ruined villages of Frezemberg and Zonnebeke, where the doctors tended them by candlelight in the cellars. During the evening, in anticipation of the withdrawal, by hook and by crook, seventy-six motor ambulances were got together. From dusk until half an hour after midnight, it had been found impossible to remove a single wounded man, as each would have had to be carried by hand over marshy ground through inky darkness, and without lights, for no lights could be shown. The Germans were shelling both villages heavily, and I should like to pay a tribute here to the splendid courage of the motor-ambulance drivers who sat imperturbably at the steering-wheel of their cars in the open street and waited for the wounded, with shells falling fast about them.

The evacuation of the wounded at Zonnebeke was the work of Colonel Ferguson, R.A.M.C., and of Major Waggett, R.A.M.C., the throat specialist of Harley Street. Thanks to the untiring devotion of these two officers, every wounded man was safely got away, with the exception of a few men with shattered limbs whom it would have been dangerous to move, and who were left behind with comforts and medicines, and two R.A.M.C. orderlies to tend them. Every man of the R.A.M.C., doctors and orderlies alike, worked like Trojans that night, and added fresh laurels to the rich harvest which the corps has gleaned already in this war.

On our right centre, where the men had stood for days a very heavy bombardment, the troops were very loth to fall back. Some of the men left insulting messages addressed to the “Germs,” as they call them, pinned on to the trenches. One man was seen going round “tidying up” his section of trench, “just to leave things clean for the Germs,” as he naïvely explained!

The enemy did not let us remain in peace for long. After a few days’ shelling, during which it was observed that his 6-inch howitzers were “registering,” at 5.30 on the morning of May 8, he made a sledgehammer attempt to smash in the front of the 5th Corps. He started as usual with a terrific bombardment from north of Passchendaele and from Zonnebeke, which gradually concentrated on the front of the 28th Division between north and south of Frezemberg.

The General commanding this division told me that it was the most terrible bombardment he had ever listened to. The German shooting was marvellously accurate, and their guns simply wiped out our trench line. “This fire,” in the blunt phrase of Sir John French’s despatch, “completely obliterated the trenches and caused enormous losses.”

It was an awful ordeal. The men who came out of it alive told me in awed voices that the shelling was like machine-gun fire, an incessant rain of high-explosive shells that fairly plastered the whole of the ground. The din was ear-splitting, the earth trembled, the air was unbreathable with the fumes from the explosives, and in the space of a minute or two the trenches were reduced to broken heaps of rubbish crowded with dead and wounded men. At one place a trench became impassable with the dead, so the survivors filled it in and planted a cross on top—surely the finest grave for a soldier!

A heavy infantry attack followed the bombardment. It was too much for our men. Some battalions had been for a fortnight in the firing-line without the chance of a wash (“A lick and a promise was all the cleaning up we did,” a Colonel of one of these battalions said to me afterwards, “and, by Jove! it was a long promise”), with a scant supply of drinking-water, and salt beef and hard biscuit the only food. Most wires were cut, and the only connection between the firing-line and the Brigade Headquarters in many cases was by orderly. The gallantry of the despatch-bearers in these terrible days was beyond all praise. They were shot down by the dozen, but there were never lacking volunteers “to have a shot” at getting through when no word had come back from the last man sent back.

Isolated, battered, worn, our men could do no more. The line broke. First it went on the right of a brigade near Frezemberg. It was 10.15 on May 8. Then the centre of the same brigade gave, and then part of the left of the brigade in the next sector to the south. It was here that the Princess Pat.’s Light Infantry, the colours that their graceful patroness had embroidered for them with her initials flying throughout the battle over their regimental headquarters, sustained their trial by fire. Their own Record Officer has given to the world their story of matchless heroism, has told how they held their fire-trench until it was annihilated, then fell back to their support trench, and held it until the Shropshires relieved them, a battered handful, 150 strong. I have seen the peaceful graveyard near Voormezeele where many of the dead of that gallant stand are sleeping, and it was as though the soul of the Empire was beating beneath the rows of white crosses.

North of the Frezemberg Road that Saturday morning the first battalion of the 1st Suffolks trod the blood-stained path to glory. They held out in their trenches under the terrific bombardment and against repeated assaults by the Germans until they were surrounded and overwhelmed. Of the 500 men that went into action of that gallant regiment, only seven emerged unhurt. North of the Frezemberg Road the 1st Yorkshire Light Infantry, which the army dubs the “ K.O.Y.L.I.’s,” likewise got a terrible hammering. Supported by a company of Monmouth Territorials, they stayed on till night, when the 12th London Regiment (The Rangers) going up to relieve were practically destroyed by shell-fire, only seventy surviving.

At half-past three in the afternoon a strong counter-attack made by the 1st Yorks and Lancs, the 3rd Middlesex, the 2nd East Surrey Regiment, the 2nd Dublin Fusiliers, and the 1st Warwicks, reached Frezemberg, but was eventually driven back, and finally remained on a line running north and south through Verlorenhoek. The Middlesex lost their Colonel, who, as he fell, cried, in the words of the Middlesex Colonel killed at Albuera: “Die hard, boys!” A charge by the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders side by side with the 1st East Lancs towards Wieltje connected up the old trench-line with the ground won by the counter-attack.

May 9 and 10 saw the continuation of the hellish bombardment. The enemy, who had lost heavily on the 8th, notably against the 2nd Essex Regiment, which let a party of Germans come close up to their trenches and then simply wiped them out, furiously attacked the trenches of the 2nd Gloucester and the 2nd Cameron Highlanders, but were repulsed with heavy casualties. There was ding-dong fighting of the severest description about the trenches on either side of the Ypres-Menin Road, where a gas attack delivered on the 10th was driven back by the 2nd Cameron Highlanders, the 9th Royal Scots (Territorials), and the 3rd and 4th King’s Royal Rifles. The Rhodesian detachment serving with the 3rd K.R.R.’s had their baptism of fire in this fight, and suffered very heavily.

The following day the Germans concentrated their artillery fire on a point a little more to the north, against the 2nd Cameron Highlanders and the 1st Argyll and Sutherland; but the Scotsmen, as tenacious as ever, gave a good account of themselves, though the Germans attacked in force. A brilliant charge by the Royal Scots “Terriers” ejected them from a section of trench in which they had gained a footing. In the afternoon there were two more spells of shelling, each followed by an attack, but the first attack was beaten off, and, though the Germans gained ground in the second, the lost trenches were recovered during the night.

Meanwhile desperate fighting had been proceeding in the northern part of the salient, where, as has been seen, the Germans were making a tremendous effort to smash in our line. A great rambling Flemish homestead, situated west of the Wieltje-St. Julien Road, and called by our men “Shell-trap Farm,” was the centre of some of the hardest fighting of the war. The place owed its curious name to the sheer incredible number of shells which the Germans fired into the old red-brick buildings surrounded by a deep, broad moat. At one period 117 shells a minute were counted at this spot. Nevertheless, “Shell-trap Farm” proved too much for the authorities who regulate the nomenclature of places on the map, and a fiat went forth that the place should be known as “Mouse-trap Farm.”

As “Shell-trap Farm,” however, it will remain in the memory of the men who fought there. The farm changed hands several times during the fighting, finally remaining in our possession. With its wrecked walls, its shell-pitted front and splintered shutters, and its floors strewn with empty cartridge-cases, it reminds one of the Maison de la Dernière Cartouche on the field of Sedan.

The Germans got into the farm, but the 2nd Essex got them out in quick time. The enemy was shelling heavily at the time, but the Essex, advancing “as they pleased,” literally dodged the shells and rushed the farm. Theirs was a most inspiriting charge, and the Rifle Brigade, whom they passed on their way up, were so thrilled that they stood up in their trenches and gave the Essex a cheer. Presently the Germans regained possession of “Shell-trap Farm.” Then the East Lancs drove them out. By this time the farm and its approaches were a shambles, and the moat was full of dead men.

We held the farm that night. The next morning it was lost again. This time a Territorial battalion—the 5th South Lancs—won it back for us, and kept it. While the South Lancs were in possession a shell came into the farm, and laid out every officer and non-commissioned officer in the place. Thereupon a private sprang into the moat, swam across, and reported the situation to the commanding officer at Regimental Headquarters. The message he took back with him to “Shell-trap Farm” was that the Colonel hoped the men would hang on. Presently a bandolier was flung out across the moat bearing the Territorials’ reply. It ran: “We shall hold out.”

The 1st Hampshires beat off one German attack by killing every man that approached within fifty yards of their trenches. They and the men of the 1st Rifle Brigade and the 1st Somerset Light Infantry actually stood up on the parapets and defied the Germans to come on! The London Rifle Brigade, that holds so high a place among the London Territorial regiments, here earned battle honours that in years to come will figure proudly on its colours. They were practically overwhelmed by shell-fire, but stuck to their trenches through it all. They kept sending back cheerful messages to the rear. “Our trenches are irrecognizable,” ran one such report, “but we are quite cheerful.” When it was suggested to them that it might be as well if they evacuated their trenches, which were falling in on them, the reply was that they would be damned if they would. It was in this fighting that young Douglas Belcher, salesman of Waring and Gillow’s, of Oxford Street, won the Victoria Cross by holding a section of trench with a few comrades when the Germans had forced back the cavalry on one side of him. His daring bluff saved our left flank, and his decoration was indeed well earned. But I have anticipated.

The battle was nearing its close. What result had the Germans gained by their unprecedented expenditure of ammunition? By their “unquestionably serious losses”? (Sir Herbert Plumer, quoted in Sir John French’s despatch). Certainly they had inflicted casualties, very heavy, enormous casualties, on us, and had gained ground in the salient, which, however, had exposed us to danger as long as we held it. But they had not broken our line, despite two tremendous blows (those of April 24 and May 8), nor had they in any sense of the word defeated the French or the British armies. Our line was intact. Their effort had failed. No wonder that there has been less written in the German newspapers about the second battle of Ypres than about any other engagement of the war. For this two motives are responsible—the one the desire to hide from the German public the fact that the initial advantage was won by a treacherous breach of the Hague Convention, the second the desire to conceal what must be reckoned tantamount to a German defeat, since the plan of the German Generals was not realized.

On the night of May 12 our line was reorganized, the 28th Division, which on May 8 had undergone such a tremendous ordeal, being withdrawn, its place being taken by two cavalry divisions, dismounted, which, with the artillery and engineers of the division relieved, formed, under the command of General de Lisle, what was known as “De Lisle’s Force.”

At 4.30 on the morning of May 13 the Germans opened the heaviest bombardment yet experienced in the battle on the trenches occupied by two cavalry brigades on a line running from the Ypres-Roulers railway to the Bellewaarde Lake. The Germans shelled mercilessly the whole triangle between the railway and the lake, while Bellewaarde Wood was enveloped in dense masses of smoke from the bursting shells. The cavalry trenches were simply obliterated (one of the lessons of this battle is that no trench will stand a really heavy bombardment). The 3rd Dragoon Guards were buried, and though the North Somerset Yeomanry held on with magnificent endurance, the line could not be held, and here we fell back about 800 yards. The Royals (1st Dragoons) were rushed up to reinforce, and suffered heavily on the way. Presently news came back that on the right the Life Guards had been buried in their trenches, and had had to fall back, but that the Leicester Yeomanry were holding out. The 2nd Essex Regiment managed to fill one of the gaps by a fine charge, and held out until relieved by the cavalry supports.

A counter-attack was organized. It was preceded by a very heavy bombardment of the German positions with all available guns firing high-explosive shells. Then—it was 2.30 p.m.—the attack went forward. It was led by the 10th Hussars, who went forward with such splendid dash that at the sight of them the gallant Leicester Yeomanry, reduced in numbers as they were, could not restrain themselves, but tumbled out of their trenches and joined in the rush. The Essex Yeomanry and the Blues (Royal Horse Guards) also took part in the attack. The behaviour of the Blues has been described to me as particularly fine. These magnificent men went forward under a very heavy fire of shrapnel and high-explosive as steady as on parade. The Germans were routed out of the trenches they had won from us. The Germans fairly bolted, in some instances with the cavalry after them.

Our armoured motor-cars, great heavy vehicles, played a part in this counter-attack. It was, I believe, their début in the war. Some of them, under Lieutenant Cadman, dashed down the chaussées and opened fire on the Germans in their trenches in the roadside woods. For a little while it was as though we had returned to the war in the open. But the position we had won was untenable.

The trenches were merely holes half filled with dead and débris, and the German shell-fire was pitiless. So our men had to fall back to “an irregular line in rear, principally the craters of shell-holes,” to quote Sir Herbert Plumer once more. That night our line remained intact in its former position, with the exception of a small distance lost by one cavalry division. Later the line was advanced, and fresh trenches dug slightly in the rear of the original line, but in a less exposed position.

May 13 may be reckoned the last day of the second battle of Ypres. It is too early to say how many men “went west” in the interval that elapsed between the April evening when we blew up the mines on Hill 60 and the May afternoon when almost for the first time for twenty-six days the inferno of fire abated in the woods and pastures about Ypres. It was not a battle like the first battle of Ypres, when our men met the flower of the Prussian Army face to face, and withstood a succession of onslaughts delivered with an incredible disregard of human life. The second battle of Ypres was a battle of machinery, in which the German infantry skulked behind their gas-cylinders and machine-guns, and waited for their heavy guns to prepare for them victory at a cheap price.

The moral of the battle, brought home to every man that took part in it, was that the ultimate victory in this war will lie with the nation that best organizes itself to provide its armies with the sinews of war. If at Neuve Chapelle we bitterly felt our shortage of shells, at Ypres we realized even more intensely the enormous advantage which the enemy’s superiority in artillery and high-explosive ammunition gave him. The fighting at Neuve Chapelle and Ypres, and later on at the Fromelles ridge, showed us that the principal weapon of modern warfare is the heavy gun, and gave us due warning that the next German attempt to break our line will be preceded and accompanied by an artillery bombardment even severer than that inferno of fire which played for more than three weeks on the Ypres salient, and failed to pierce our front. Artillery fire can only be crushed by artillery fire, so we have our lesson. And because that lesson has at length been learnt, the thousands of Britons who made the supreme sacrifice at Ypres will not have died in vain.

CHAPTER IV
SILENT YPRES

“Et erit sui monumentum gloriosum.”

(Epitaph in the ruined Cathedral of St. Martin at Ypres.)

In years to come the name of Ypres will loom large in the annals of our race. Before the war it was known only to a few tourists who, sated with the more familiar art treasures of Belgium, had the curiosity or the time to take the steam tram out from Ostend or Menin to the quaint old city lying in the plain thrust up close to the French frontier. Such visitors had their pains well rewarded (and a two-hour journey by a Belgian steam tram along the flat and dusty Flemish roads merits some recompense). In Ypres they found a perfect jewel of an old-world Flemish city, small and self-contained, well preserved, the two or three principal streets lined with fine old houses with curiously wrought façades, leading to the splendid square, the Grand’ Place, or Groote Markt, as the bilingual street signs proclaimed, where the magnificent Hall of the Cloth-Makers, the far-famed Halle des Draps, with its noble tower and majestic front, quite dwarfed the charming Renaissance houses nestling about the square. From the distant plain the lofty towers of Ypres peeped forth in the summer sunshine above a fringe of greenery. The trees marked the old ramparts of the city, where the burgesses were wont to take the air in the evenings, and where the hearts and intertwined initials cut into the stout old trees still speak, amid the desolation of to-day, of love-making through the centuries.

All the stirring past of Ypres, once wealthiest and most powerful city of Flanders, was outlined in the noble buildings thrusting their heads up out of the undulating plain. Built in a sparsely populated region, there was no city, far and wide, to compare with the beauty, the luxury, and wealth of Ypres. It stood proudly alone, superbly beautiful among ugly surroundings, its ramparts all about, a broad moat where swans glided idly among the water-lilies on the one side, the Yser Canal, bearing trade to Ostend on its sluggish waters, on the other. Ypres feared no comparison with the cities far about. Neither Courtrai nor Menin nor Lille nor Béthune nor St. Omer, nor even Arras, could match with this perfect jewel of old Flemish civilization.

Square and solid to the four winds of heaven, which in winter blow lustily across these mournful plains, stood the Gothic tower of the Cathedral of St. Martin, where Bishop Jansen, most renowned of heretics, sleeps his untroubled sleep in the shadow of the high-altar. Near by rose the massive red-brick keep of the Abbey of Thérouanne, last survival of a powerful and wealthy foundation transferred to Ypres when Elizabeth ruled in England. The lofty Renaissance roof of St. Nicholas, the graceful spire of St. Pierre, the high fabric of St. Jacques, looked down from other parts of the city on the ancient gabled houses clinging close together in the narrow cobbled streets. The splendid old houses of the Ypres guilds, rich and independent and free, told of the days when the cloth-makers and lace-workers of Ypres were renowned throughout Europe, before pestilence and internal dissension and wars dethroned the city from its high estate.

There was a delightful intimacy in this old-world Flemish city. Even in the names of the streets you saw it—the Street of Paradise, a narrow thread of an opening between two ancient gabled houses with a glimpse of waving foliage at the end; the Street of the Pots, where doubtless the tinsmiths once sat and hammered before their shop-doors; the Street of the Mice, survival of some legend of the Middle Ages; the Street of the Moon, derived probably from a shop or inn sign. A fine old almshouse, with gaudily painted statues in niches on the outside, the Hospice Belle, a refuge for old women founded in the days of the Plantagenets by a pious noblewoman of Ypres, Christine de Guines, stood in the Rue de Lille, a perfect background to a Jan Steen or Pieter Brueghel painting. In every street the elaborately decorated fronts and carved doors were silent witness of centuries of prosperity and ease, the fatal fat years that brought ruin to Belgium.

But above all and before all, first and foremost, pride and heart of the city as it was its centre, rose the fair square tower of the Cloth Hall, with its four richly decorated pinnacles in the Gothic style and great golden clock. The heavy hand of the nineteenth-century restorer, taking his cue from the smug iconoclasts of Victoria and Louis Philippe, had played havoc with the interior rooms, great, lofty halls with fine old wooden roofing. The walls had been decorated with frescoes in the best “Sham Castle” style, illustrating the history of the city. But nothing, not even the modern statues set in niches to replace the statues destroyed by the armies of the Directoire, could spoil the majestic harmony, the perfection of line, of the great three-storied façade with its corner-turrets, a vast towering front such as you might have seen nowhere else in the world.

The years that have gone “with the old world to the grave,” as Henley sang, swept all the horrors of warfare over Ypres, yet the city survived. Often in bygone days the sky above Ypres had reddened with the flames of the buildings set alight by the conqueror, while the narrow streets ran with the blood of the hapless inhabitants massacred by a ruthless victor. Popular riots, fighting between the nobles and the Guilds, an awful visitation of the Black Death—the same plague that ravaged England in the fourteenth century and affected our entire national life as deeply as Magna Carta itself—and a succession of sieges, destroyed the one-time commercial supremacy of Ypres. Over against the Lille Gate of the city there still stands, amid the rack and ruin of to-day, a humble little house with a gabled front of timber, probably the most ancient building in the city, that has witnessed most of the exciting happenings of Ypres’ storied past: the burning of the outlying parts of the town by the English and the burghers of Ghent in 1383; the devastations of the Iconoclasts, most fantastic of sects, in 1566; the sack of the city by the Gueux in 1578; its capture by the soldiers of Alexander Farnese in 1584; and by the French, who obtained possession of Ypres four times in the seventeenth century and held it until 1715.

Harried by fire and sword, the Ypres weavers fled from their homes, and many came to England, where the so-called Wipers Tower at Rye is, I believe, a token of the hospitality they received in our islands. Now once again, after many centuries, the hand of fate has bound together the threads of England and the ancient Flemish town so close that, as long as England endures, the name of Ypres shall signify a stern ordeal bravely borne and willing faithfulness even unto death.

The graves of our dead, the heroes of the two great battles which raged about this placid city, the dead of the fierce assaults, the daily toll of the trenches, lie in a vast semicircle about Ypres. Ypres was already a sacred name to us, while its towers and pinnacles yet stood, and life pulsated as of old in the congested streets of the quaint old town. Now, in its ruins heaped up in a funeral pyre over the corpses of its hapless civilians slain by German monster shells, it is, more than ever, a fane for ever holy to Englishmen, who in days to come shall know no greater pride than to say, “I was at Ypres!”

It was in the chill wet days of October that our army first came to Ypres. We had fought the great battles of the Marne and the Aisne, and Sir John French had executed that wonderfully adroit and silent move from the Aisne to the left of the Allied line to hold the Germans off the Channel ports. The Seventh Division, fresh from its ineffectual attempt to save Antwerp—ineffectual because too late—had been placed under Sir John French’s orders and was operating eastward of Ypres. Sir Douglas Haig, beloved of Corps Commanders, Sir John French’s trusted Chief of Staff in South Africa, was sent to take his First Army Corps through Ypres towards Thourout, with the idea of sweeping the Germans eastward with the help of the French.

Ypres, with its snug houses and intimate streets, must have made a comforting impression on our troops, the war-worn veterans of Mons, the Marne, and the Aisne, as they tramped in from beneath the sighing poplars of the Poperinghe road. The city yet sheltered people when our troops came through; moreover, the 87th French Territorial Division was billeted in the town. How many of the Englishmen, whose eyes were gladdened by the sight of the old-world houses and smiling prosperity of the ancient city, were destined never to return through the Menin Gate, beyond which in the wooded plain the greatest battle of the war was raging! In the churches and convents of the city, particularly in the Chapel of the Irish Ladies of Ypres, where was hanging the British standard captured by Clare’s Dragoons fighting with the French at Ramillies, many a prayer went up in those days for the army fighting so steadfastly without the city against overwhelming odds.

The roads from Ypres radiate like spokes of a wheel. To pass from westward to eastward of Ypres you must go through the city. During the fight all the immense activity of the rear of an army, redoubled in intensity when a battle is in progress, went on in and about Ypres, whose century-old houses, with their red roofs and overhanging gables, will be ever associated with the battle in the minds of those who fought there. For three weeks, while our thin line resisted the mighty smashes of the flower of the German army, the guns drummed almost unceasingly in the distance, and the little motor ambulances came whirring over the uneven cobble-stones of the city, bearing in the wounded to the field dressing-station, an unending procession of pain.

Ypres could not remain unscathed in the battle. Soon the German batteries took the proud towers of the Cloth Hall and St. Martin’s for their goal, and amid a rain of shells pouring into the city, the luckless inhabitants, once again after centuries, were compelled to fly for safety out along the bare and dusty road that leads to Poperinghe.

The Poperinghe road! Who of our army in the field that has ever passed along it will ever forget that hideous highway—the road of pain for many, the road of death for many, the road of glory for all? I have traversed it in all weathers and in all conditions, and never have I seen it without a feeling almost of dread, the sensation of treading on ground sanctified by the feet of heroes going to their death.

Straight and ugly and flat, lined with tall poplars with bushy tops, set in the centre with uneven pavé worn bright by the wheels of a thousand motor-cars and lorries and carts, the Poperinghe road has been the silent witness of all the vicissitudes of the stupendous struggles which have raged about Ypres. On its polished pavé the emotions of a million men have been ground fine by the relentless wheels of the chariot of war. Men have passed along that road into battle, their hearts singing with the thrill of great deeds standing before, and along it have returned from the front pale, silent forms, the Angel of Death their escort—or have returned no more.

I have met them going into action along that road, in the blazing heat of noonday, tramping steadily in the thick dust of the footpath lining the pavé, tunics unbuttoned, sweat streaming down their begrimed faces. I have seen them returning, lying very still in the motor ambulances, with the stolid philosophy of wounded men, or else stifling in the ghastly grip of the asphyxiating gas.

Not even 17-inch shells blindly dropped at arbitrary intervals will permanently separate the Fleming from his home. Therefore, as soon as the German bombardment of Ypres slackened, the refugees came streaming back to find a great slice cut out of the tower of the Cloth Hall, the tower and roof of St. Martin’s irreparably damaged, and many houses in different quarters of the town considerably battered.

When I paid my first visit to Ypres in March—it was, I remember, during the battle of Neuve Chapelle which was raging far to the south—the city was full of life. British, French, and Belgian troops were billeted there. There was a fine medley of khaki, bleu horizon, as the new powder-blue of the French Army is called, and the variegated hues of the uniforms of the braves Belges. The soldiers had fraternized with one another and with the populace. All the small boys were wearing puttees, all the small girls, and some of the grown-up ones, British Army badges, whilst there appeared to reign a fine spirit of Socialism with regard to the rations of the three armies. Everybody, soldiers and civilians alike, seemed to be subsisting on bully-beef, singe (as the French soldier calls his tinned meat), the famous plum-and-apple jam of the British Expeditionary Force, and ration biscuits. English cigarettes and newspapers were for sale in the shops, and here and there on shutters or on doors were inscribed in more or less idiomatic English notices to the effect that washing was done, or that eggs and milk were for sale.

Whether it was the premonition that I should never see Ypres again as a populated city, I know not, but the fact remains that every detail of that brief visit to the city in March remains engraved on my memory. The streets were swarming with soldiers and children. Huge lorries of our Mechanical Transport grunted through the streets; mounted police clop-clopped over the cobbles; the women, lineal descendants of the lace-workers of the Middle Ages, sat at their half-doors, and plied the funny little wooden cocoons by means of which the renowned Ypres lace is made. Only the Grand’ Place, with the torn tower and gaping roof of the Cloth Hall, and the battered belfry of St. Martin’s, the damaged Lunatic Asylum where a Red Cross hospital was installed, and here and there a roofless house or a shell-hole torn in a façade, remained to tell of the stern struggle which had raged about the city.

I roamed through the empty and battered rooms of the Cloth Hall, and picked up from the floor great flakes of the ugly frescoes which had decorated the walls. I had a perfectly prosaic tea in a little teashop on the Grand’ Place before motoring away through the crowded streets into the gathering darkness. Thus I left Ypres, peaceful and busy, and, to tell the truth, I think, rather basking in the sunshine of publicity brought to the old place after so many centuries by the historic events of which it was the centre. Two months were to elapse before I saw Ypres again. Then Ypres was dead.

In the smiling country of the Mendips, in Somersetshire, there stands a little village church alone by itself in the fields, remote from the village to which it has given its name. In my schoolboy days in Somersetshire they used to tell me that that church—the name of which has gone from me—was the last survival of one of the villages devastated by the Black Death when it ravaged England in the fourteenth century.

They said, I remember, that the villagers could not plough the fields about the ancient church, for the stones and bricks of the vanished hamlet were still lying just beneath the surface. In later years men had built another village to take the place of that which was dead, but had placed it away from the original site, so that only the little church remained amid the fallow fields to speak to future generations of a little corner of England razed from the face of the earth.

The picture of that little Somersetshire church came drifting back to me over a long span of years when I went back to Ypres on a sunny morning in May, a week or so after the second great attempt of the Germans, reinforced by asphyxiating gas, to burst their way through to the sea had failed. “Lucia e morte, la bella Lucia!” runs the old Italian song. Ypres, beautiful Ypres, was dead, and Death had strewn all the approaches to the city with the hideous emblems of his trade.

From April 24 to May 13 a second great struggle had raged about Ypres, where our line bent out in a wide salient round the city. Ypres was shelled incessantly throughout the battle with artillery of the heaviest calibre, and our reinforcements, rushed up from other parts of the line, met on their way into Ypres the long and melancholy procession of refugees again seeking safety in flight, while the huge German “fat Berthas,” as the Boches call their 17-inch shells, exploded noisily in the emptying city.

I remember arriving in Lisbon at three o’clock on a bright moonlit October night on the day following the revolution. The Sud-Express, which brought me down from Paris, was the first train into the Portuguese capital since the overthrow of the Monarchy. The Central Station was battered by artillery fire, the houses in the Avenida da Liberdade were torn and pitted with shell-holes, and the city lay absolutely silent and deserted, the ruins hard and black in the brilliant white moonlight. Lisbon on that October night is the only city I have seen that even approximately resembled Ypres as I found it on that sunny May morning. Even so the resemblance was fallacious, for the battered corner of Lisbon which met my eyes on my arrival represented practically the whole of the damage done, and the prevailing silence was the silence of night, whereas Ypres was all destroyed, and the silence was the silence of death.

Neither St. Pierre, Martinique, nor Messina, nor Kingston, Jamaica—as I have it on the authority of men who visited those places after their destruction by earthquake, and who have also seen Ypres—produced on the mind such an overwhelming impression as the spectacle of this fair city of Flanders smitten with death all standing as it were. An earthquake or a cyclone will all but obliterate a city, will sweep across it, and leave a vast jumble of ruins in its passage. Bombardment, on the other hand, even the heaviest, will seldom wipe out the line of the streets, and the capricious path of the shells will leave standing single relics that recall in a flash all the beauty, all the intimacy, of the city that has passed away.

The great battle that had raged for three weeks about Ypres had spread on all sides the disorder of war. The warm air was heavy with the stench of dead horses putrefying in the sun, their torn carcasses lying athwart the roads or sprawling in the fields where German shells had rent great holes in the grass or brown earth. The little houses by the roadside—squalid hovels of staring red brick, for the most part—bore abundant traces of the passage of our soldiers to and from the fight. Here a broken rifle lay resting against the post of a door hanging lamentably on a single hinge and giving a glimpse of wild confusion within—furniture overturned, crockery broken, mattresses disembowelled, with the sunshine streaming in through a shell-hole in the roof. There lay a crumpled khaki overcoat beside a tangled heap of webbing equipment, with empty cartridge-cases scattered around. Heaps of empty shell-cases, ranging from the huge cylinder of the 4·7 gun to the natty little tube of the light field-gun, were piled up in the farmyards where deep wheel-ruts, empty fuse-boxes, and all the litter of batteries, showed where the gun emplacements had been. Here and there I caught sight of a cheerful English face in the little roadside houses. Some of our men were billeted there. Some of the faces were lathered, and a great sound of splashing and a strong odour of fried bacon announced that the breakfast-hour was at hand.

A lonely sentry standing against the wall of a shattered estaminet, a dead horse lying in a pool of blood in a gutter, a long vista of empty streets lined with roofless houses, jagged beams projecting into the void, jets of bricks spouted out across the cobble-stones amid charred fragments of furniture, and a silence so absolute, so heavy, that one might almost hear it—this was what the Hun had left of Ypres. Here, indeed, was the tragedy of Belgium, the horror of Louvain, the crime of Dinant. But murdered Ypres, as it seemed to me, cried out more loudly to Heaven for vengeance than her slaughtered sisters. Her destruction had been wrought from afar, the destroyer could not enter, her citizens had left her, her saviour shunned her. The city was empty, desolate, her toppling walls bending forward as though in grief for her children buried beneath the ruins, for the utter obliteration of five centuries of work and planning to the end of prosperity, happiness, and beauty.

The city lay silent in the sunshine, and a subtle odour of death crept out of nooks and crannies, where swarms of noisome flies danced eternally in the sunbeams. But the air above me was full of noise. Our heavy shells were passing over and about the city with a prodigious reverberating bang that seemed to shake the vault of heaven, followed by long-drawn-out gurgling rushes like the beating of wings of a host of lost angels. Now and then the scream of shells became louder on a different note. Then the sound stopped of a sudden, and was swallowed up in a deafening explosion mingling with an orange flash and a pillar of black or white smoke. Not even dead might Ypres find mercy at the hands of her tormentors. Morning and evening the Germans shelled the empty shell of a city, demolishing the ruins, rekindling fires that had burnt themselves out.

I paid many visits to Ypres. The dead city fascinated me. Every visit was for me a pious pilgrimage to the place of sacrifice of the best of England’s sons. The crumbling, battered remnant of the Cloth Hall, the roofless nave of St. Martin’s, the ruined houses of the Guilds, the four-square tower of the Abbey of Thérouanne, sliced and rent but not demolished—all those relics of a beauty that was Flemish were to me Belgium’s offering to the memories of the men who had laid down their lives that a great crime might be atoned. Some day, maybe, we shall know how many shells the Germans hurled into Ypres. I know that in all my visits to the ruined city I never found a single house that had escaped unscathed, and I passed through every quarter of the town.

The atmosphere of Ypres was heavy with tragedy. Alone and unheeded I wandered from house to house—ever obsessed with the feeling that I was indecently intruding into another’s intimacy—amid the rich intérieurs of the old patrician families and the humble surroundings of the small shopkeepers. I rambled through the ancient cloisters of the Belle Hospice, where the exquisite Renaissance chapel had been destroyed save for a single delicate pillar still rearing its head aloft to where God’s blue heaven now formed the roof. I roamed through Ypres’ ruined churches, where the pigeons were fluttering to and fro over heaps of rubbish that on examination disintegrated themselves into fragments of old pictures, pieces of carved oak confessionals, remnants of prie-dieu, all dusted with the fine yellow powder scattered by the German high-explosive shells.

The sacristy of St. Martin’s, where the exquisitely embroidered sacred vestments still peeped out of their long, flat drawers, was ankle-deep in this dust. It lay over everything—on the linen sheets enveloping the magnificent copes on their wooden stands, on the Mass missals and vessels, on the old brass candelabra, even on the uniform of the Suisse cast hurriedly in a corner. One day I met an abbé who was seeking to salve what he could of the church treasures. With him was a Carmelite monk. The wizened old abbé and the tonsured monk in his brown and white habit dragging old pictures across the ruined square formed a picture that might have come straight out of the Middle Ages.

The fancy took me to see what the bombardment had left of the two museums of Ypres, containing valuable collections of old Flemish pottery and china and prints of the city. The Municipal Museum had been installed in the so-called Boucheries, a fine old colonnaded house opposite the Cloth Hall. The other had been housed in an old-world mansion, the Hotel Merghelynck, in the street that the French call the Rue de Lille and the Flemish the Rijssel-Straat, Rijssel being the Flemish name for Lille. Both museums were utterly destroyed. Whether the City Fathers of Ypres had removed the treasures of Ypres to a place of safety before the first bombardment I do not know, but of both museums only the blackened shell remained, the interior piled up high with an immense heap of bricks and charred rafters.

“Est-ce que mon lieutenant voudrait boire un coup?” a sour-visaged Belgian peasant asked me in Ypres one morning. The Germans were shelling the city heavily, and I was inquiring as to the danger spots. The peasant was loading a cart with furniture from a big house in the Rue d’Elverdinghe (one of the principal streets), with the assistance of a mate and under the indulgent eye of a Belgian gendarme. These three men, with my companion and myself, were, I believe, the only human beings in Ypres that day. Standing drinks to strangers is inexpensive in a deserted city where locks no longer serve to imprison bottles in their cellars, and anyway looting is discouraged in the British Army. So, to the speechless amazement of the Belgians, who pointed, with gestures significant of the delights awaiting us, to a large array of ancient, cobwebbed bottles set out on a buhl table, we refused to drink with them. But we went over the house, a treasure-house of old Flemish art, as fine a specimen of a patrician home of the Low Countries as one might wish to see.

The peasants were salving the treasures for the owner, who had fled for refuge to the village of Watou, some twenty miles away. Everything within was in the wildest disorder, and the peasants, with none too tender hand, were piling pell-mell into baskets and crates exquisite specimens of old Flemish pottery, tiles, blown-glass flagons, and wood-carving. I noticed on the floor a lovely old stone drinking-jug inscribed “Iper, 1506”—the sort of jug you see in a Teniers or Jan Steen painting. This family seemed to have thrown nothing away all through the centuries it had lived in the house. In one room a wonderful collection of old children’s toys was scattered about the floor—punchinellos and jack-in-the boxes, with clothes of faded chintz, and little model rooms, complete to the little clock on the wall, enclosed in boxes with glass sides. A shell had come through the roof of the library, a bright and sunny apartment on the top floor, with a charming outlook on the green surroundings of Ypres, and sent the bookshelves and their contents flying before it went on its way through another room on the floor below and out of the house. Old calf-bound tomes were scattered about the place in a smother of brick-dust.

Disaster sometimes overtook the salvage parties. Whilst dodging shells in Ypres one late afternoon, about the hour of the “evening hate,” as our army calls the German evening bombardment, I came upon a large blackened patch opposite the Cloth Hall. As it had not been there on my last visit, I examined it. I did not have to look very closely. The sickening stench of charred human flesh took me by the throat as I approached the patch. A scorched black bowler hat and some fragments of burnt cloth were, with that vapour of the charnel-house, all that were left to show that the remains of a man lay in that horrible heap. There were two charred skulls of horses, some blackened harness chains and calcined parts of a cart. Near by was a jagged lump of cast-iron shell, which lies by me as I write. The cart and horses of one of the salvage parties had obviously been overwhelmed by a shell which, after blowing up driver, horses, and cart, had started a fire which had utterly consumed what the explosion had left.

In past centuries Ypres has been Flemish, French, and Belgian in turn. Whatever her ultimate fate, whether the city be built up again on her ruins or suffered to remain as she is, a perpetual monument of Hunnish malice, henceforth and for all time Ypres will be as British as the impress of the place left on a hundred thousand brains can make it. Wherever I have been all along our winding line I have been plied with questions about Ypres. “We were there in October.” “I was dressed in the asylum there when I got pipped on the Zillebeke ridge.” “What about the Cloth Hall?” “Are the cavalry barracks destroyed?”

The British graves in Ypres—but a fraction of the endless graveyards which the defence of the city has filled in the plain and on the wooded slopes beyond the gates—are a further link between Ypres and the Empire. There is a cluster of wooden crosses in the fields over against the asylum, where I have seen orderlies digging fresh graves when I have passed that way. There are graves on the ramparts, old graves hastily dug in the leaf-mould by the shallow trenches thrown up by the French round the city in October, and new graves, the resting-place of men killed in and about the city when the trees were green with this year’s summer foliage.

Ypres is impregnated with the memory of the British Army. You will find its cartridges ground into the cobble-stones of the streets, you will find its rations strewn about the floors of the abandoned houses, you will find its billeting directions and inscriptions of all kinds scrawled on doors and walls. As I walked down the echoing streets of ruined houses, amid the ghastly odours of the dead wafted insidiously from choked cellars, with German shrapnel bursting viciously about, sent screaming over from two sides of the salient, I found myself thinking that not the tangible signs of the passage of our army, the abandoned equipment and stores, the simple graves, but the city itself, burned, battered, and blasted, is the most moving monument to the heroic self-sacrifice of our men. Rent and torn and blackened, “all tears, like Niobe weeping for her children,” Ypres, uncaptured still, stands, an indestructible witness to our unbroken line.

CHAPTER V
BILLETS IN THE FIELD

People at home often imagine that our troops live in the trenches. They do not. Generally speaking, they live in billets behind the line, and move into the trenches at regular intervals. They take their turn for duty in the trenches like policemen going on their beat. As a rule the procedure is for them to spend a fixed period in the front-line trenches, another period in reserve (living in billets behind the firing-line, which are occupied in rotation by the troops who, in this particular sector, are out of the trenches), and a further period resting somewhere in the rear. The turn for duty in the trenches is therefore something exceptional, requiring a special effort of endurance, for, if there is any liveliness, or, as we say out here, “frightfulness,” going, there may be no sleep for anybody for several days and nights on end, something demanding special preparations in the way of supplies of cigarettes and other luxuries likely to drop out if there is any difficulty about getting rations up.

The greater part of the life of our men at the front is therefore spent in billets in our zone of occupation. Naturally, these billets vary enormously. Roofless houses in ruined villages or dug-outs in the open in a country absolutely devoid of food of any kind are as like as not the sour lot of the troops awaiting their turn of duty in the trenches, though sometimes a village situated at no great distance from the firing-line will provide admirable accommodation for men just out of the firing-line. I dined one June evening with the officers of the famous Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry. I found them waiting their turn for duty in the trenches in a positively palatial mansion, the home of a wealthy French merchant of these parts.

I well remember the pride with which they showed me over their quarters. I saw their bedrooms, vast apartments with huge four-poster beds with heavy, old-fashioned ciels, and their bath-room, renowned throughout their division—a pleasant, clean, white-tiled place, with three different sizes of baths, as great an array of douches as you would find at a spa, and an apparatus for warming bath-towels. When I thought of other officers I had seen, painfully scrubbing themselves in a few inches of tepid water in a leaky canvas bath in the sordid surroundings of a filthy Flemish farm, I agreed that the “Princess Pat.’s” had every reason to bless the good fortune which had endowed them with a super-bathroom within a few miles of the firing-line.

Before dinner we walked round the garden. It was a kind of St. James’s Theatre garden scene, with masses of greenery and banks of flowering plants and great beds of flowers gushing over on to the exquisite stretch of soft green turf. As we strolled they told me of their charming host and hostess. The latter, it appeared, had given them their best rooms, and had installed for them a special kitchen, where their orderlies might mess about—as orderlies do all over the world—to their heart’s content. The model of charity and goodness, this French merchant and his lady wife every morning distributed handfuls of copper to the poor of the place who gathered in long files at their gates. On the Feast of the Sacred Heart in June the host and hostess, patterns of pious Catholics, sent a message, worded with charming diffidence, to the British officers asking them whether they would care to join in a service of prayer in the private chapel of the mansion. The Feast of the Sacred Heart had been set aside by the French Bishops as a special day of intercession for the victory of French arms. Of course the officers agreed. Presently you might have seen them assembled in the little chapel with the host and hostess and the members of their household, the stalwart forms of the Canadian officers, heroes of the stricken field of Ypres, kneeling in prayer to the God that knows not nations for the triumph of the right. Afterwards the host took his guests down to his little study, and there, in a bottle of his best wine, cobwebbed and reverently handled, the company drank success to the Allied arms.

In the billets near the front our men are birds of passage. One goes up to the trenches as light as possible, so everything that is not essential for the comfort of the inner and outer man in the highly uncomfortable surroundings of the front line is left behind. These squalid ruined houses in the wrecked villages behind the firing-line are sad places to visit when the battalion returning to them has been in action. There in the common room which the officers use both for messing and for sleeping you may see the kits and personal belongings of officers who will return to that billet no more. You may see letters there addressed to the dead, unopened, expectant, as though waiting to be unburdened of the messages of love and anxious inquiry they bear.

Ah, those empty billets at the front! Their atmosphere is charged with mourning. With what tense expression one sees in the face of men who have been through a modern artillery bombardment. The survivors sit about in silence, seeming almost to resent the presence of the new-comers drafted in from England without delay to take the places of their fallen comrades. This depression, however, is only a phase. It soon passes. Men get used to the loss of their comrades. But if you know them well you will find how hard, how defiant, how reckless it makes them.

A battalion that has “copped it,” as the soldiers say, is not allowed to sit about in billets and brood over its losses. For they will brood unless they are stirred up. After Neuve Chapelle Sir John French, going round the battalions that had taken part in that gallant fight, came upon some depleted billets, such as I have described, with the Colonel, one of the few officers surviving, sitting by the fire with his head between his hands, prone to overwhelming grief. The Commander-in-Chief is a man of heart and understanding. He talked to that Colonel as one soldier to another, and told him that the losses of his fine battalion were the price that had to be paid for victory. Then Sir John had the battalion paraded, and spoke to the men in the same sense.

This war gets you by the heart-strings when you see the awful gaps it tears in the ranks of men who have been closely associated for years. After that fight at Neuve Chapelle, when our losses were heavy, but not so heavy as in fights to come, I lunched with the Rifle Brigade in their billets close behind the firing-line. The battalion had been the first in the village of Neuve Chapelle, and over lunch (out of tin plates in a workman’s cottage) the Colonel and the officers gave me a most picturesque account of the Riflemen’s sweeping rush into the ruined village, and their adventures in getting the Germans out of the cellars and dug-outs.

It was a jolly meal. Five of the officers were there, beside the Colonel, including the machine-gun officer (formerly the Regimental Quartermaster-Sergeant), who had just got his commission. Three months later I lunched with the Colonel again. He had by that time become a Brigadier. Of all that merry luncheon-party, only he and the machine-gun officer (now a Captain with the Military Cross, and promoted Brigade Machine-Gun Officer) survived. The other three were dead, killed within a few hours of one another on the Fromelles ridge. The survivors at luncheon that day spoke of them with infinite affection, with obvious regret, but without any lamentation. Death has another aspect out here. It is often the matter of a fraction of an inch. One friend is taken and the other left. And the survivor “carries on,” only in his heart wondering “Why he and not I?”

Our men make longer stays in the billets situated farther away from the front than in those which are merely the jumping-off place for the trenches. Some of the cavalry spent months on end in the same billets, cursing this horseless war and chafing at their inaction. From time to time they took their turn in the trenches, and played their part manfully, as at Ypres on May 13, when the flower of the cavalry suffered cruel losses from a terrible German bombardment. But for the most part they carried on what was practically peace training in conditions which were depressing and monotonous to the last degree.