CHAPTER XX

A VIVID PICTURE OF WAR

THE BATTLE OF NEUVE CHAPELLE -- A SURPRISE PREPARED--“HELL BROKE LOOSE”--A HORRIBLE THIRTY-FIVE MINUTES -- TRENCHES FILLED WITH DEAD -- HOARSE SHOUTS AND THE GROANS OF THE WOUNDED -- INDESCRIBABLE MASS OF RUINS RUINS--“SMEARED WITH DUST AND BLOOD.”

One of the most vivid word-pictures of what war means in all its horror was told by an eye-witness of the battle of Neuve Chapelle in which the British soldiers dislodged the Germans from an important position. He said:

“The dawn, which broke reluctantly through a veil of clouds on the morning of Wednesday, March 10, 1915, seemed as any other to the Germans behind the white and blue sandbags in their long line of trenches curving in a hemicycle about the battered village of Neuve Chapelle. For five months they had remained undisputed masters of the positions they had here wrested from the British in October. Ensconced in their comfortably-arranged trenches with but a thin outpost in their fire trenches, they had watched day succeed day and night succeed night without the least variation from the monotony of trench warfare, the intermittent bark of the machine guns--rat-tat-tat-tat-tat--and the perpetual rattle of rifle fire, with here and there a bomb, and now and then an exploded mine.

A SURPRISE PREPARED

“For weeks past the German airmen had grown strangely shy. On this Wednesday morning none were aloft to spy out the strange doings which as dawn broke might have been descried on the desolate roads behind the British lines.

“From ten o’clock of the preceding evening endless files of men marched silently down the roads leading towards the German positions through Laventie and Richebourg St. Vaast, poor shattered villages of the dead where months of incessant bombardment have driven away the last inhabitants and left roofless houses and rent roadways. . . .

“Two days before, a quiet room, where Nelson’s Prayer stands on the mantel-shelf, saw the ripening of the plans that sent these sturdy sons of Britain’s four kingdoms marching all through the night. Sir John French met the army corps commanders and unfolded to them his plans for the offensive of the British Army against the German line at Neuve Chapelle.

“The onslaught was to be a surprise. That was its essence. The Germans were to be battered with artillery, then rushed before they recovered their wits. We had thirty-six clear hours before us. Thus long, it was reckoned (with complete accuracy as afterwards appeared), must elapse before the Germans, whose line before us had been weakened, could rush up reinforcements. To ensure the enemy’s being pinned down right and left of the ‘great push,’ an attack was to be delivered north and south of the main thrust simultaneously with the assault on Neuve Chapelle.”

After describing the impatience of the British soldiers as they awaited the signal to open the attack, and the actual beginning of the engagement, the narrator continues:

“HELL BROKE LOOSE”

“Then hell broke loose. With a mighty, hideous, screeching burst of noise, hundreds of guns spoke. The men in the front trenches were deafened by the sharp reports of the field-guns spitting out their shells at close range to cut through the Germans’ barbed wire entanglements. In some cases the trajectory of these vicious missiles was so flat that they passed only a few feet above the British trenches.

“The din was continuous. An officer who had the curious idea of putting his ear to the ground said it was as though the earth were being smitten great blows with a Titan’s hammer. After the first few shells had plunged screaming amid clouds of earth and dust into the German trenches, a dense pall of smoke hung over the German lines. The sickening fumes of lyddite blew back into the British trenches. In some places the troops were smothered in earth and dust or even spattered with blood from the hideous fragments of human bodies that went hurtling through the air. At one point the upper half of a German officer, his cap crammed on his head, was blown into one of our trenches.

A HORRIBLE THIRTY-FIVE MINUTES

“Words will never convey any adequate idea of the horror of those five and thirty minutes. When the hands of officers’ watches pointed to five minutes past eight, whistles resounded along the British lines. At the same moment the shells began to burst farther ahead, for, by previous arrangement, the gunners, lengthening their fuses, were ‘lifting’ on to the village of Neuve Chapelle so as to leave the road open for our infantry to rush in and finish what the guns had begun.

“The shells were now falling thick among the houses of Neuve Chapelle, a confused mass of buildings seen reddish through the pillars of smoke and flying earth and dust. At the sound of the whistle--alas for the bugle, once the herald of victory, now banished from the fray!--our men scrambled out of the trenches and hurried higgledy-piggledy into the open. Their officers were in front. Many, wearing overcoats and carrying rifles with fixed bayonets, closely resembled their men.

TRENCHES FILLED WITH DEAD

“It was from the center of our attacking line that the assault was pressed home soonest. The guns had done their work well. The trenches were blown to irrecognizable pits dotted with dead. The barbed wire had been cut like so much twine. Starting from the Rue Tilleloy the Lincolns and the Berkshires were off the mark first, with orders to swerve to right and left respectively as soon as they had captured the first line of trenches, in order to let the Royal Irish Rifles and the Rifle Brigade through to the village. The Germans left alive in the trenches, half demented with fright, surrounded by a welter of dead and dying men, mostly surrendered. The Berkshires were opposed with the utmost gallantry by two German officers who had remained alone in a trench serving a machine gun. But the lads from Berkshire made their way into that trench and bayoneted the Germans where they stood, fighting to the last. The Lincolns, against desperate resistance, eventually occupied their section of the trench and then waited for the Irishmen and the Rifle Brigade to come and take the village ahead of them. Meanwhile the second thirty-ninth Garhwalis on the right had taken their trenches with a rush and were away towards the village and the Biez Wood.

HOARSE SHOUTS AND THE GROANS OF THE WOUNDED

“Things had moved so fast that by the time the troops were ready to advance against the village the artillery had not finished its work. So, while the Lincolns and the Berks assembled the prisoners who were trooping out of the trenches in all directions, the infantry on whom devolved the honor of capturing the village, waited. One saw them standing out in the open, laughing and cracking jokes amid the terrific din made by the huge howitzer shells screeching overhead and bursting in the village, the rattle of machine guns all along the line, and the popping of rifles. Over to the right where the Garhwalis had been working with the bayonet, men were shouting hoarsely and wounded were groaning as the stretcher-bearers, all heedless of bullets, moved swiftly to and fro over the shell-torn ground.

“There was bloody work in the village of Neuve Chapelle. The capture of a place at the bayonet point is generally a grim business, in which instant, unconditional surrender is the only means by which bloodshed, a deal of bloodshed, can be prevented. If there is individual resistance here and there the attacking troops cannot discriminate. They must go through, slaying as they go such as oppose them (the Germans have a monopoly of the finishing-off of wounded men), otherwise the enemy’s resistance would not be broken, and the assailants would be sniped and enfiladed from hastily prepared strongholds at half a dozen different points.

INDESCRIBABLE MASS OF RUINS

“The village was a sight that the men say they will never forget. It looked as if an earthquake had struck it. The published photographs do not give any idea of the indescribable mass of ruins to which our guns reduced it. The chaos is so utter that the very line of the streets is all but obliterated.

“It was indeed a scene of desolation into which the Rifle Brigade--the first regiment to enter the village, I believe--raced headlong. Of the church only the bare shell remained, the interior lost to view beneath a gigantic mound of debris. The little churchyard was devastated, the very dead plucked from their graves, broken coffins and ancient bones scattered about amid the fresher dead, the slain of that morning--grey green forms asprawl athwart the tombs. Of all that once fair village but two things remained intact--two great crucifixes reared aloft, one in the churchyard, the other over against the château. From the cross that is the emblem of our faith the figure of Christ, yet intact though all pitted with bullet marks, looked down in mute agony on the slain in the village.

“SMEARED WITH DUST AND BLOOD”

“The din and confusion were indescribable. Through the thick pall of shell smoke Germans were seen on all sides, some emerging hall dazed from cellars and dugouts, their hands above their heads, others dodging round the shattered houses, others firing from the windows, from behind carts, even from behind the overturned tombstones. Machine guns were firing from the houses on the outskirts, rapping out their nerve-racking note above the noise of the rifles.

“Just outside the village there was a scene of tremendous enthusiasm. The Rifle Brigade, smeared with dust and blood, fell in with the Third Gurkhas with whom they had been brigaded in India. The little brown men were dirty but radiant. Kukri in hand they had very thoroughly gone through some houses at the cross-roads on the Rue du Bois and silenced a party of Germans who were making themselves a nuisance there with some machine guns. Riflemen and Gurkhas cheered themselves hoarse.”