Chapter 10

Submerging a simple farming hamlet in this kind of a tempest was only part of the plan of the gunners, who cut a pattern of fire elsewhere in keeping with the patterns of the German trenches, placing a curtain of fire behind the town and another on the edge, and at other points not a curtain but steady hose-streams of fire. Answering German shells revealed which of the chalky scars on the slope was the British first-line trench, and from this, as steam from a locomotive runs in a flying plume along the crest of a railway cutting, rose a billowing wall of smoke which was harmless, not even asphyxiating, its only purpose being to screen the infantry attack, with a gentle breeze sweeping it on into the mantle over Contalmaison as the wind carries the smoke of a prairie fire. Lookout Mountain was known as the battle in the clouds, where generals could not see what their troops were doing. Now all battles are in a cloud.

From the first-line British trench the first wave of the British attack moved under cover of the smoke-screen and directly you saw that the shells had ceased to fall in Contalmaison. Its smoke mantle slowly lifting revealed fragmentary walls of that sturdy, defiant chateau still standing. Another wave of British infantry was on its way. Four waves in all were to go in, each succeeding one with its set part in supporting the one in front and in mastering the dugouts and machine gun positions that might have survived.

With no shells falling in Contalmaison, the bomb and the bayonet had the stage to themselves, a stage more or less hemmed in by explosions and with a sweep of projectiles from both sides passing over the heads of the cast in a melodrama which had "blessed little comedy relief," as one soldier put it. The Germans were already shelling the former British first line and their supports, while the British maintained a curtain of fire on the far side of the village to protect their infantry as it worked its way through the débris, and any fire which they had to spare after lifting it from Contalmaison they were distributing on different strong points, not in curtains but in a repetition of punches. It was the best artillery work that I had seen and its purpose seemed that of a man with a stick knocking in any head that appeared from any hole.

Act III. now. The British curtain of fire was lifted from the far edge of the village, which meant that the infantry according to schedule should be in possession of all of the village. But they might not stay. They might be forced out soon after they sent up their signals. When the Germans turned on a curtain of fire succeeding the British fire this was further evidence of British success sufficient to convince any skeptic. The British curtain was placed beyond it to hold off any counter-attack and prevent sniping till the new occupants of the premises had "dug themselves in."

The Germans had not forgotten that it was their turn now to hammer Contalmaison, through which they thought that British reserves and fresh supplies of bombs must come; and I saw one of the first "krumps" of this concentration take another bite out of the walls of the chateau.

By watching the switching of the curtains of fire I had learned that this time Contalmaison was definitely held; and though they say that I don't know anything about news, I beat the _communiqué_ on the fact as the result of my observation, which ought at least to classify me as a "cub" reporter.

XIII

A GREAT NIGHT ATTACK

Following hard blows with blows--Trônes Woods--Attack and counter-attack--A heavy price to pay--"The spirit that quickeneth" knew no faltering--Second-line German fortifications--A daringly planned attack--"Up and at them!"--An attack not according to the scientific factory system--The splendid and terrible hazard--Gun flashes in the dark numerous as fireflies--Majestic, diabolical, beautiful--A planet bombarding with aerolites--Signal flares in the distance--How far had the British gone?--Sunrise on the attack--Good news that day.

Of all the wonderful nights at the front that of July 13th-14th was distinctive for its incomparable suspense. A great experiment was to be tried; at least, so it seemed to the observer, though the staff did not take that attitude. It never does once it has decided upon any daring enterprise. When you send fifty thousand men into a charge that may fail with a loss of half of their number or may brilliantly succeed with a loss of only five per cent., none from the corps commanders and division commanders, who await results after the plans are made, down to the privates must have any thought except that the plan is right and that it will go through.

There is no older military maxim than to follow up any hard blow with other blows, in order that the enemy may have no time to recuperate; but in moving against a frontal line under modern conditions the congestion of transport and ammunition which must wait on new roads and the filling in of captured trenches makes a difficult problem in organization. Never had there been and never were there necessary such numbers of men and such quantities of material as on the Somme front.

The twelve days succeeding July 1st had seen the taking of minor position after position by local concentrations of troops and artillery fire, while the army as a whole had been preparing for another big attack at the propitious moment when these preliminary gains should justify it.

Half a tactical eye could see that the woods of Mametz, Bernafay and Trônes must be held in order to allow of elbow room for a mass movement over a broad front. The German realized this and after he had lost Mametz and Bernafay he held all the more desperately to Trônes, which, for the time being, was the superlative horror in woods fighting, though we were yet to know that it could be surpassed by Delville and High Woods.

In Trônes the Germans met attack with counter-attack again and again. The British got through to the east side of the woods, and in reply the Germans sent in a wave forcing the British back to the west, but no farther. Then the British, reinforced again, reached the east side. Showers of leaves and splinters descended from shell-bursts and machine guns were always rattling. The artillery of both sides hammered the approaches of the woods to prevent reinforcements from coming up.

In the cellars of Guillemont village beyond Trônes the Germans had refuges for concentrating their reserves to feed in more troops, whose orders, as all the prisoners taken said, were to hold to the last man. Trônes Wood was never to be yielded to the British. Its importance was too vital. Grim national and racial pride and battalion pride and soldierly pride grappled in unyielding effort and enmity. The middle of the woods became a neutral ground where the wounded of the different sallies lay groaning from pain and thirst. Small groups of British had dug themselves in among the Germans and, waterless, foodless, held out, conserving their ammunition or, when it was gone, waiting for the last effort with the bayonet.

For several days the spare British artillery had been cutting the barbed wire of the second line and smashing in the trenches; and the big guns which had been advanced since July 1st were sending their shells far beyond the Ridge into villages and crossroads and other vital points, in order to interfere with German communications.

The Thiepval-Gommecourt line where the British had been repulsed on July 1st had reverted to something approaching stalemate conditions, with the usual exchange of artillery fire, and it was along the broader front where the old German first line had been broken through that the main concentrations of men and guns were being made in order to continue the advance for the present through the opening won on July 1st. The price paid for the taking of the woods and for repeated attacks where initial attacks had failed might seem to the observer--unless he knew that the German losses had been equally heavy if not heavier since July 1st--disproportionate not only to the ground gained but also to general results up to this time which, and this was most important, had demonstrated, as a promise for the future, that the British New Army could attack unremittingly and successfully against seasoned German troops in positions which the Germans had considered impregnable.

"The spirit that quickeneth" knew no faltering. Battle police were without occupation. There were no stragglers. With methodical, phlegmatic steadiness the infantry moved up to the firing-line when its turn came.

The second-line German fortifications, if not as elaborate, were even better situated than the first; not on the crest of the Ridge, of course, where they would be easily swept by artillery blasts, but where the latest experience demonstrated that they could make the most of the commanding high ground with the least exposure. Looking through my glasses I could see the portion of the open knoll stretching from Longueval to High Wood which was to be the object of the most extensive effort since July 1st.

As yet, except in trench raids over narrow fronts, there had been no attempt to rush a long line under cover of darkness because of the difficulty of the different groups keeping touch and identifying their objectives.

The charge of July 1st had been at seven-thirty in the morning. Contalmaison had been stormed in the afternoon. Fricourt was taken at midday. When the bold suggestion was made that over a three-mile front the infantry should rush the second-line trenches in the darkness, hoping to take the enemy by surprise, it was as daring a conception considering the ground and the circumstances as ever came to the mind of a British commander and might be said to be characteristic of the dash and so-called "foolhardiness" of the British soldier, accustomed to "looking smart" and rushing his enemy from colonial experiences. Nelson had the "spirit that quickeneth" when he turned his blind eye to the enemy. The French, too, are for the attack. It won Marengo and Austerlitz. No general ever dared more than Frederick the Great, not even Cæsar. Thus the great races of history have won military dominion.

"Up and at them!" is still the shibboleth in which the British believe, no less than our pioneers and Grant and Stonewall Jackson believed in it, and nothing throughout the Somme battle was so characteristically British as not only the stubbornness of their defense when small parties were surrounded, but the way in which they would keep on attacking and the difficulty which generals had not in encouraging initiative but in keeping battalions and brigades from putting into practice their conviction that they could take a position on their own account if they could have a chance instead of waiting on a systematic advance.

Thus, an attack on that second line on the Ridge after the Germans had had two weeks of further preparation was an adventure of an order, in the days of mechanical transport, aeroplanes and indirect artillery fire when all military science is supposed to be reduced to a factory system, worthy of the days of the sea-rovers and of Clive, of Washington's crossing of the Delaware or of the storming of Quebec, when a bold confidence made gamble for a mighty stake.

So, at least, it seemed to the observer, though, as I said, the staff insisted that it was a perfectly normal operation. The Japanese had made many successful night attacks early in the Russo-Japanese war, but these had been against positions undefended by machine gun fire and curtains of artillery fire. When the Japanese reached their objective they were not in danger of being blasted out by high explosives and incidentally they were not fighting what has been called the most highly trained army on earth on the most concentrated front that has ever been known in military history.

But "Up and at them!" Sir Douglas Haig, who had "all his nerve with him," said to go ahead. At three-thirty a.m., a good hour before dawn, that wave of men three miles long was to rush into the night toward an invisible objective, with the darkness so thick that they could hardly recognize a figure ten yards away. Yet as one English soldier said, "You could see the German as soon as he saw you and you ought to be able to throw a bomb as quickly as he and a bayonet would have just as much penetration at three-thirty in the morning as at midday."

When I saw the battalions who were to take part in the attack marching up I realized, as they did not, the splendid and terrible hazard of success or failure, of life or death, which was to be theirs. Along the new roads they passed and then across the conquered ground, its uneven slopes made more uneven by continued digging and shell fire, and disappeared, and Night dropped her curtain on the field with no one knowing what morning would reveal.

The troops were in position; all was ready; all the lessons learned from the attack of July 1st were to be applied. At midnight there was no movement except of artillery caissons; gunners whose pieces two hours later were to speak with a fury of blasts were sound asleep beside their ammunition. The absolute order in this amazing network of all kinds of supplies and transport contributed to the suspense. Night bombardments we had already seen, and I would not dwell on this except that it had the same splendor by night that the storming of Contalmaison had by day.

The artillery observer for a fifteen-inch gun was a good-humored host. He was putting his "bit," as the British say, into Bazentin-le-Petit village and the only way we knew where Bazentin was in the darkness was through great flashes of light which announced the bursting of a fifteen-hundred-pound shell that had gone hurtling through the air with its hoarse, ponderous scream. All the slope up to the Ridge was merged in the blanket of night. Out of it came the regular flashes of guns for a while as the prelude to the unloosing of the tornado before the attack.

Now that we saw them all firing, for the first time we had some idea of the number that had been advanced into the conquered territory since July 1st. The ruins and the sticks of trees of Fricourt and Mametz with their few remaining walls stood out spectral in the flashes of batteries that had found nesting places among the débris. The whole slope had become a volcanic uproar. One might as well have tried to count the number of fireflies over a swamp as the flashes. The limitation of reckoning had been reached. Guns ahead of us and around us and behind us as usual, in a battle of competitive crashes among themselves, and near by we saw the figures of the gunners outlined in instants of weird lightning glow, which might include the horses of a caisson in a flicker of distinct silhouette flashed out of the night and then lost in the night, with the riders sitting as straight as if at drill. Every voice had one message, "This for the Ridge!" which was crowned by hell's tempest of shell-bursts to prepare the way for the rush by the infantry at "zero."

The thing was majestic, diabolical, beautiful, absurd--anything you wished to call it. Look away from the near-by guns where the faces of the gunners were illumined and you could not conceive of the scene as being of human origin; but mixing awed humility with colossal egoism in varying compounds of imagination and fact, you might think of your little group of observers as occupying a point of view in space where one planet hidden in darkness was throwing aerolites at another hidden in darkness striking it with mighty explosions, and the crashes and screams were the sound of the missiles on their unlighted way.

It was still dark when three-thirty came and pyrotechnics were added to the display, which I could not think of as being in any sense pyrotechnical, when out of the blanket as signals from the planet's surface in the direction of some new manoeuver appeared showers of glowing red sparks, which rose to a height of a hundred feet with a breadth of thirty or forty feet, it seemed at that distance. One shower was in the neighborhood of Ovillers, one at La Boisselle and one this side of Longueval. Then in the distance beyond Longueval the sky was illumined by a great conflagration not on the fireworks program, which must have been a German ammunition dump exploded by British shells.

It was our planet, now, and a particular portion of it in Picardy. No imaginative translation to space could hold any longer. With the charge going in, the intimate human element was supreme. The thought of those advancing waves of men in the darkness made the fiery display a dissociated objective spectacle. On the Ridge more signal flares rose and those illumining the dark masses of foliage must be Bazentin Wood gained, and those beyond must be in the Bazentin villages, Little Bazentin and Big Bazentin, though neither of them, like most of the villages, numbering a dozen to fifty houses could be much smaller and be called villages.

This was all the objective. Yes, but though the British had arrived, as the signals showed, could they remain? It seemed almost too good to be true. And that hateful Trônes Wood? Had we taken that, too, as a part of the tidal wave of a broad attack instead of trying to take it piecemeal?

Our suspense was intensified by the thought that this action might be the turning-point in the first stage of the great Somme battle. We strained our eyes into the darkness studying, as a mariner studies the sky, the signs with which we had grown familiar as indicative of results. There was a good augury in the comparatively slight German shell fire in response, though we were reminded that it might at any minute develop with sudden ferocity.

Now the flashes of the guns grew dim. A transformation more wonderful than artillery could produce, that of night into day, was in process. Not a curtain but the sun's ball of fire, undisturbed by any efforts of the human beings on a few square miles of earth, was holding to his schedule in as kindly a fashion as ever toward planets which kept at a respectful distance from his molten artillery concentration.

Out of the blanket which hid the field appeared the great welts of chalk of the main line trenches, then the lesser connecting ones; the woods became black patches and the remaining tree-trunks gaunt, still and dismal sentinels of the gray ruins of the villages, until finally all the conformations of the scarred and tortured slope were distinct in the first fresh light of a brilliant summer's day. Where the blazes had been was the burst of black smoke from shells and we saw that it was still German fire along the visible line of the British objective, assuring us that the British had won the ground which they had set out to take and were holding it.

"Up and at them!" had done the trick this time, and trick it was; a trick or stratagem, to use the higher sounding word; a trick in not waiting on the general attack for the taking of Trônes according to obvious tactics, but including Trônes in the sweep; a trick in the daring way that the infantry was sent in ahead of the answering German curtain of fire.

All the news was good that day. The British had swept through Bazentin Wood and taken the Bazentin villages. They held Trônes Wood and were in Delville and High Woods. A footing was established on the Ridge where the British could fight for final mastery on even terms with the enemy. "Slight losses" came the reports from corps and divisions and confirmation of official reports was seen in the paucity of the wounded arriving at the casualty clearing stations and in the faces of officers and men everywhere. Even British phlegm yielded to exhilaration.

XIV

THE CAVALRY GOES IN

The "dodo" band--Cavalry a luxury--Cavalry, however, may not be discarded--What ten thousand horse might do--A taste of action for the cavalry--An "incident"--Horses that had the luck to "go in"--Cavalrymen who showed signs of action--The novelty of a cavalry action--A camp group--Germans caught unawares--Horsemen and an aeroplane--Retiring in good order--Just enough casualties to give the fillip of danger to recollection.

Sometimes a squadron of cavalry, British or Indian, survivors of the ardent past, intruded in a mechanical world of motor trucks and tractors drawing guns. With outward pride these lean riders of burnished, sleek horses, whose broad backs bore gallantly the heavy equipment, concealed their irritation at idleness while others fought. They brought picturesqueness and warm-blooded life to the scene. Such a merciless war of steel contrivances needed some ornament. An old sergeant one day, when the cavalry halted beside his battalion which was resting, in an exhibit of affectionate recollection exclaimed:

"It's good to stroke a horse's muzzle again! I was in the Dragoon Guards once, myself."

Sometimes the cavalry facetiously referred to itself as the "Dodo" band, with a galling sense of helplessness under its humor; and others had thought of it as being like the bison preserved in the Yellowstone Park lest the species die out.

A cynical general said that a small force of cavalry was a luxury which such a vast army of infantry and guns might afford. In his opinion, even if we went to the Rhine, the cavalry would melt in its first charge under the curtains of fire and machine gun sprays of the rearguard actions of the retreating enemy. He had never been in the cavalry, and any squadron knew well what he and all of those who shared his views were thinking whenever it passed over the brow of a hill that afforded a view of the welter of shell fire over a field cut with shell-craters and trenches which are pitfalls for horses. Yet it returned gamely and with fastidious application to its practice in crossing such obstacles in case the command to "go in" should ever come. Such preparations were suggestive to extreme skeptics of the purchase of robes and the selection of a suitable hilltop of a religious cult which has appointed the day for ascension.

Excepting a dash in Champagne, not since trench warfare began had the cavalry had any chance. The thought of action was an hypothesis developed from memory of charges in the past. Aeroplanes took the cavalry's place as scouts, machine guns and rifles emplaced behind a first-line trench which had succumbed to an attack took its place as rearguard, and aeroplane patrols its place as screen.

Yet any army, be it British, French, or German, which expected to carry through an offensive would not turn all its cavalry into infantry. This was parting with one of the old three branches of horse, foot and gun and closing the door to a possible opportunity. If the Japanese had had cavalry ready at the critical moment after Mukden, its mobility would have hampered the Russian retreat, if not turned it into a rout. When you need cavalry you need it "badly," as the cowboy said about his six-shooter.

Should the German line ever be broken and all that earth-tied, enormous, complicated organization, with guns emplaced and its array of congested ammunition dumps and supply depots, try to move on sudden demand, what added confusion ten thousand cavalry would bring! What rich prizes would await it as it galloped through the breach and in units, separating each to its objective according to evolutions suited to the new conditions, dismounted machine guns to cover roads and from chosen points sweep their bullets into wholesale targets! The prospect of those few wild hours, when any price in casualties might be paid for results, was the inspiration of dreams when hoofs stamped in camps at night or bits champed as lances glistened in line above khaki-colored steel helmets on morning parade.