Part 5

The 1st Guards Reserve Regiment of the 1st Guards Division, which was much weakened in the fighting on the Somme and afterward was sent to La Bassée, lost thirty-six officers, including a regimental commander and one battalion commander. These losses are affecting inevitably the outlook of the German troops on the prospects of their continued offensive.

Prisoners from divisions which suffered most confess they have no further enthusiasm for fighting, and that their regiments can only be made to attack by stern discipline and the knowledge that they must fight on or be shot for desertion.

On the other hand, the best German troops, especially those now attacking in Flanders, like the Alpine Corps and 11th Bavarian Division, are elated and full of warlike spirit.

Even their prisoners profess to believe they are winning the war and will have a German peace before the year is out.

Desperate Fighting for Ypres

_The Germans vainly launched desperate attacks of unexampled fury against the British and French lines in the Ypres region on April 29. Mr. Gibbs in his cable dispatch of that date thus refers to these assaults:_

It becomes clearer every hour that the enemy suffered a disastrous defeat today. Attack after attack was smashed up by the British artillery and infantry, and he has not made a foot of ground on the British front.

The Border Regiment this morning repulsed four heavy assaults on the Kemmel-La Clytte road, where there was extremely hard fighting, and destroyed the enemy each time.

One of the enemy's main thrusts was between Scherpenberg and Mont Rouge, where they made a wedge for a time and captured the crossroads, and it was here that a gallant French counterattack swept them back.

The British had no more than a post or two in Voormezeele this morning, and the enemy was there in greater strength, and sent his storm troops through this place, but was never able to advance against the fire of the British battalions.

His losses began yesterday, when his troops were seen massing on the road between Zillebeke and Ypres in a dense fog, through which he attempted to make a surprise attack. This was observed by low-flying planes, and his assembly was shattered by gunfire. After a fierce shelling all night, so tremendous along the whole northern front that the countryside was shaken by its tumult, German troops again assembled in the early morning mist, but were caught once more in the British bombardment.

At 3 o'clock a tremendous barrage was flung down by the German gunners from Ypres to Bailleul, and later they began the battle by launching first an attack between Zillebeke Lake and Meteren. South of Ypres they crossed the Yser Canal by Lock 8, near Voormezeele, which was their direction of attack against the British, while they tried to drive up past Locre against the French on the three hills.

The successful defense has made the day most bloody for many German regiments.

Enemy's Attacks Futile

In order to turn them if frontal attacks failed against the French, German storm troops--they are now called grosskampf, or great offensive troops--were to break the British lines on the French left between Locre and Voormezeele and on the French right near Merris and Meteren. That obviously was the intention of the German High Command this morning, judging from their direction of assault.

So far they have failed utterly. They failed to break or bend the British wings on the French centre, and they failed to capture the hills, or any one of them, defended by the French divisions.

They have attacked again and again since this morning's dawn, heavy forces of German infantry being sent forward after their first waves against Scherpenberg and Voormezeele, which lies to the east of Dickebusch Lake, but these men have been slaughtered by the French and British fire and made no important progress at any point.

For a time the situation seemed critical at one or two points, and it was reported that the Germans had been storming the slopes of Mont Rouge and Mont Noir, but one of the British airmen flew over these hills at 200 feet above their crests, and could see no German infantry near them.

Round about Voormezeele, North Country and other English battalions had to sustain determined and furious efforts of Alpine and Bavarian troops to drive through them by weight of numbers, after hours of intense bombardment, but the men held their ground and inflicted severe punishment upon the enemy.

All through the day the German losses have been heavy under field-gun and machine-gun fire, and the British batteries, alongside the French seventy-fives, swept down the enemy's advancing waves and his masses assembled in support at short range.

There is no doubt that the French guarding the three hills have fought with extreme valor and skill. For a brief period the Germans apparently were able to draw near and take some of the ground near Locre, but an immediate counterattack was organized by the French General, and the line of French troops swung forward and swept the enemy back. Further attacks by the Germans north of Ypres and on the Belgian front were repulsed easily, and again the enemy lost many men.

French and British Valor

_On April 30 Mr. Gibbs confirmed the details of the disastrous German defeats on the two preceding days and gave these further particulars:_

It was the valor of Frenchmen as well as Englishmen which yesterday inflicted defeat upon many German divisions, and the Allies fought side by side, and their batteries fired from the same fields and their wounded came back along the same roads, and the khaki and blue lay out upon the same brown earth.

I have already given an outline of yesterday's battle, how, after a colossal bombardment, the German attack early in the morning from north of Ypres to south of Voormezeele, where English battalions held the lines, and from La Clytte past the three hills of Scherpenberg, Mont Rouge, and Mont Noir, which French troops held to the north of Meteren, where the English joined them; again, how the English Tommies held firm against desperate assaults until late in the evening; how the enemy made a great thrust against the French, driving in for a time between Scherpenberg and Mont Noir until they were flung back by a French counterattack.

In the night the French, who had now regained all the ground that had been temporarily in the enemy's hands, made a general counterattack and succeeded in advancing their line to a depth of about fifteen hundred yards beyond the line of the three hills, which thereby was made more secure against future assaults.

Deadly Machine-Gun Work

Meanwhile throughout the day the English battalions had been sustaining heavy assaults, breaking the enemy against their front. The Leicesters, especially, had fierce fighting about Voormezeele, where, as I told yesterday, the enemy was in the centre of the village. German storm troops advanced against our men here and along other parts of the line with fixed bayonets, but in most places, except Voormezeele, where there was close fighting, they were mowed down by Lewis-gun fire before they could get near. Line after line of them came on, but lost heavily and fell back.

Over the ground east of Dickebusch Lake some Yorkshire troops saw these groups of field gray men advancing upon them, and the glint of their bayonets, wet in the morning mist, and swept them with bullets from the Lewis guns and rifles until heaps of bodies were lying out there on the mud flats in the old Ypres salient. The most determined assaults were concentrated upon the 25th Division, but it held firm and would not budge, though the men had been under fearful fire in the night bombardment, and their machine gunners kept their triggers pressed, and bullets played upon the advancing Germans like a stream from a garden hose.

The troops in the whole division yielded no yard of ground and they hold that they killed as many Germans as any battalion in this battle. It was a black day for Germany. More than ten German divisions, probably thirteen, seem to have been engaged in this attempt to smash our lines and encircle the three hills. They included some of the enemy's finest divisions, so they lost quality as well as quantity in this futile sacrifice of man-power--man-power which seems to mean nothing in flesh and blood and heart and soul to men like Ludendorff, but is treated as a material force like guns and ammunition and used as cannon fodder.

Brilliant French Fighters

_Referring to the French troops in this battle, Mr. Gibbs wrote:_

Today again I have been among the thousands of French soldiers. It is splendid to see them because of their fine bearing. They are men in the prime of life, not so young as some of the British and with a graver look than one sees on British faces, when they have not yet reached the zone of fire. They are men who have seen all that war means during these years of agony and hope and boredom and death. They have no illusions. They stare into the face of death unflinchingly and shrug their shoulders at its worst menace and still have faith in victory.

So I read them, if any man may read the thoughts that lie behind those bronzed faces with the dark eyes and upturned mustaches under the blue painted helmets or the black Tam o' Shanters.

They are not gay or boisterous in their humor, and they do not sing like the British as they march, but they seem to have been born to this war, and its life is their life, and they are professionals.

The Tricolor passes along the roads of France and Flanders, and French trumpets ring out across the flat fields below Scherpenberg, and all the spirit of the French fighting men, who have proved themselves great soldiers in this war, as for thousands of years of history, is mingled with our own battalions. Together yesterday they gave the German Army a hard knock.

The British Guards

_In his cable of May 1 Mr. Gibbs gave details of the extraordinary heroism of the British Guards. He related incidents which had occurred April 11 to 14, after the Germans had broken through the Portuguese in their efforts to widen the gap between Armentières and Merville by gaining the crossings of the Lys._

The Grenadier, Irish, and Coldstream Guards were sent forward along the Hazebrouck-Estaires road when the situation was at its worst, when the men of the 15th Division and other units had fought themselves out in continual rearguard and holding actions, so that some of those still in the line could hardly walk or stand, and when it was utterly necessary to keep the Germans in check until a body of Australian troops had time to arrive. The Guards were asked to hold back the enemy until those Australians came and to fight at all costs for forty-eight hours against the German tide of men and guns which was attempting to flow around the other hard pressed men, and that is what the Guards did, fighting in separate bodies with the enemy pressing in on both flanks.

Greatly outnumbered, they beat back attack after attack, and gained precious hours, vital hours, by the most noble self-sacrifice. A party of Grenadiers were so closely surrounded that their officer sent back a message saying:

"My men are standing back to back and shooting on all sides."

The Germans swung around them, circling them with machine guns and rifles and pouring a fire into them until only eighteen men were left. Those eighteen, standing among their wounded and their dead, did not surrender. The army wanted forty-eight hours. They fixed bayonets and went out against the enemy and drove through him. A wounded Corporal of Grenadiers, who afterward got back to the British lines, lay in a ditch, and the last he saw of his comrades was when fourteen men of them were still fighting in a swarm of Germans.

Fought Back to Back

The Coldstream Guards were surrounded in the same way and fought in the same way. The army had asked for forty-eight hours until the Australians could come, and many of the Coldstreamers eked out the time with their lives. The enemy filtered in on their flanks, came crawling around them with machine guns, sniped them from short range and raked them from ditches and upheaved earth.

The Coldstream Guards had to fall back, but they fought back in small groups, facing all ways and making gaps in the enemy's ranks, not firing wildly, but using every round of small-arms ammunition to keep a German back and gain a little more time.

Forty-eight hours is a long time in a war like this. For two days and nights the Irish Guards, who had come up to support the Grenadiers and Coldstreamers, tried to make a defensive flank, but the enemy worked past their right and attacked them on two sides. The Irish Guards were gaining time. They knew that was all they could do, just drag out the hours by buying each minute with their blood. One man fell and then another; but minutes were gained, and quarters of hours and hours.

Small parties of them lowered their bayonets and went out among the gray wolves swarming around them, and killed a number of them until they also fell. First one party and then another of these Irish Guards made those bayonet charges against men with machine guns and volleys of rifle fire. They bought time at a high price, but they did not stint themselves nor stop their bidding because of its costliness.

The brigade of Guards here and near Vieux Berquin held out for those forty-eight hours, and some of them were fighting still when the Australians arrived, according to the timetable.

Carnage Near Locre

_Mr. Gibbs, in a dispatch dated May 3, gave these vivid descriptions of the fighting in the Locre-Dranoutre-Kemmel region:_

On April 24 the German bombardment was intensified and spread over a deep area, destroying villages, tearing up roads, and making a black vomit of the harrowed fields. Dranoutre, Locre, Westoutre, and other small towns were violently bombarded. That night the French discovered that the Germans were preparing an attack for the next morning, to be preceded by a gas bombardment. The officers warned all their men, and they stood on the alert with gas masks when at 3:30 in the morning thousands of gas shells fell over them, mixed with high explosives of all calibres up to the monster twelve-inch, which burst like volcanic eruptions.

In the intensity of bombardment several officers who fought at Fleury said: "This is the most frightful thing we have seen. Verdun was nothing to it."

All the French troops jammed on gas masks, and on one day put them on fifty times, only removing them when the wind, which was fairly strong, blew away the poison fumes until other storms of shells came. For nearly a week they wore them constantly, sleeping in them, officers giving orders in them, and the men fighting and dying in them and charging with the bayonet in them. It was worth the trouble and suffering, for this French regiment between Locre and Dranoutre had only twelve gas casualties.

That morning the German attack fell first on Kemmel Hill, which they turned from the north, and two hours later, the bombardment continuing all along the line, they developed a strong attack against Dranoutre in the south in order to take Locre and turn the French right. Until evening the troops on Kemmel Hill, with a small body of British, still held out with great devotion in isolated positions, but by 8 o'clock that morning Kemmel Hill was entirely cut off.

Other British Units in Danger

This was a severe menace to their comrades at Locre and southward, because both their flanks were threatened. They did heroic things to safeguard their right and left, which again and again the enemy tried to pass. I have already told in a previous message how a gallant French officer and a small company of men made a counterattack at Dranoutre and held the post there against all odds.

Up by Locre the commandant of the left battalion found machine-gun fire sweeping his left flank, and his men had to face left to defend their line. Small parties of Germans with machine guns kept filtering down from the north and established themselves on the railway in order to rake the French with an enfilade fire.

One French company, led by devoted officers, counterattacked there five times with the bayonet into the sweep of those bullets, and by this sacrifice saved their flank. Another company advanced to hold the hospice. There was desperate fighting day after day, so that its ruins, if any bits of wall are left, will be as historic as the château at Vermelles, or other famous houses of the battlefields.

French and Germans took it turn and turn about, and although the enemy sent great numbers of men to garrison this place they never were able to hold it long, because always some young French Lieutenant and a handful of men stormed it again and routed the enemy. When it was taken last on April 29, the day of the enemy's severe defeat, the French captured 100 prisoners in the cellars there, and they belonged to fourteen battalions of four regiments of three divisions, showing the amazing way in which the enemy's divisions have been flung into confusion by the French fire.

Under Constant Shellfire

On the morning of April 26 French companies made six attacks, and in the afternoon two more, and though their losses were heavy, that evening both the village and hospice of Locre stayed in their hands. That night, their men being exhausted for a time after so many hours under fire, they withdrew their line a little to the Locre-Bailleul road by the Château of Locre and west of Dranoutre in order to reorganize a stronger defense. The German bombardment slackened on the morning of April 28 owing to fog, and those few hours on that day and one other were the only respite these French troops had from the incessant and infernal gunfire when, owing to open warfare, "en rase campagne," as the French call it, as in 1914, without a complete system of trenches or dugouts or other artificial cover, they were much exposed.

"There were ten big shells a second," one of these officers told me, "and that lasted, with only two short pauses, for six days all through the battle, and other shells were uncountable."

The enemy had brought up light artillery and trench mortars almost to his front lines in Dranoutre Wood and other places and attempted to take the French in an enfilade fire from Kemmel, but by this time many French guns were in position, reinforcing the British artillery, and on the 28th they opened up and killed great numbers of the enemy.

Allied aviators saw long columns of Germans on the roads by Neuve Eglise and in Dranoutre Wood, and signaled to the guns to range on these human targets. The guns answered. Masses of Germans were smashed by the fire and panicstricken groups were seen running out of Dranoutre Wood.

Night of Horror for Germans

That night the Germans seemed to be relieving their troops, and again the French and British guns flung shells into them, and for the enemy it was a night of death and horror; but the next day, the 29th, the enemy made reply by a prolonged bombardment, more intense even than before, and then attacked with new troops all along the line. But the French also had many fresh troops in line--not those I met yesterday--who at 2 o'clock in the morning went forward into attack and took back the village. This defeated the enemy's plan of turning the French left.

All through that day the enemy's desperate efforts to break through were shattered, and that night the French held exactly the same ground as before and had caused enormous losses to the German divisions, at least 40 per cent. of their strength, as it is reckoned on close evidence.

That night even the German guns stopped their drumfire, as though Sixt von Arnim's army was in mourning for its dead. It was a night of strange and uncanny silence after the stupendous tumult, but for those French regiments who had been holding the line for nearly a week it had been a day of supreme ordeal.

Preparing for Another Advance

_There were no general engagements during the preceding five days nor up to May 18, but incessant artillery fire was kept up and raids were constantly made. On May 5 Mr. Gibbs described the difficulties encountered by the Germans in preparing for a new advance:_

The enemy has many divisions, both up in the Flemish fields and on the Somme, divisions in line and divisions in reserve--divisions crowded in reserve--and there are few roads for them down which to march. There is not much elbow room for such masses to assemble, and not much cover in trenches or dugouts from high explosives or shrapnel. So we pound them to death, many of them to death and many of them to stretcher cases, and relief comes up, gets wildly mixed with the divisions coming down, and at night there is mad confusion in the ranks of marching men and transport columns, which gallop past dead horses and splintered wagons and wrecks of transport columns, and among the regimental and divisional staffs, trying to keep order in the German way when things are being smashed into chaos, while the Red Cross convoys are over-loaded with wounded and unable to cope with all the bodies that lie about.

This is what is happening behind the German lines--I have not overdrawn the picture, believe me--and it is upsetting somewhat the plans of the high German officers who are arranging things from afar through telephones, down which they shout their orders.

"The Drums of Death"

_In his dispatch of May 9 the following was written to describe the difficulties of the Germans in reorganizing their battered forces:_

From many points the British have complete observation of the enemy's positions there, as he has of theirs from the other side of the way, and, needless to say, they are making use of this direct view by flinging over storms of shells whenever his transport is seen crawling along the tracks of the old Somme battlefields or his troops are seen massing among their shell craters.

The town of Albert itself, where once until recent history the golden Virgin used to lean downward with her babe outstretched above the ruins, is now a death trap for the German garrisons there and for any German gunners who try to hide their batteries among the red brick houses. By day and night their positions are pounded with high explosives and soaked in asphyxiating gas.

I went within 2,000 yards of it yesterday, and saw the heaviest work of the British upon it. It was a wonderful May day, as today is, and the sun shone through a golden haze upon the town. As I looked into Albert and saw the shells smashing through, and then away up the Albert-Bapaume road, past the white rim of the great mine crater of La Boiselle to the treeless slopes of Posières, and over all that ground of hills and ditches to the high, wooded distant right, with its few dead stumps of trees, it was hard to believe that all this was in the area of the German Army, that the white, winding lines freshly marked upon this bleak landscape were new German trenches, and that the enemy's outposts were less than 2,000 yards from where I stood.

Fritz Having a "Thin Time"

Some siege gunners were lying on their stomachs and observing the enemy's lines for some monsters I had seen on my way up, monsters that raised their snouts slowly, like elephants' trunks, before bellowing out with an earthquake roar, annihilating all one's senses for a second. Some of the men passed the remark to me that "Albert isn't the town it was" and that "Fritz must be having a thin time there." They also expressed the opinion that the Albert-Bapaume road was not a pleasant walk for Germans on a sunny afternoon.

I did not dispute these points with them, for they were beyond argument. Big shells were smashing into Albert and its neighborhood from many heavy batteries, raising volcanic explosions there, and shrapnel was bursting over the tracks in white splashes.