Another shell and then another burst in the forest beyond us. After one of them there were a pause, a splitting crack, and a swoosh and collapse as a big tree came down. Its fall scared up some little animal, a rabbit or squirrel, which pattered about and seemed lost, and bolted into the road and then saw us and bolted back. My one thought was: “O God, why don’t these génies hustle and clear the road, so that we can get past? Do they want to keep us here till we are blown to pieces?”
They bent down at the wreck, lifted some planks of the wagon and hove them aside, so as to free the body of the driver.
“He got it on the brow,” said one. “That’s bad, that!”
“Yes,” said another. “They killed my cousin so, in Champagne, in the Battle of the Marne.”
“He’s dead,” said a third to me. “You needn’t take him to the poste.” They pitched some of the wreck into the shell-hole, and presently the road was clear, but for parts of the horse; an engineer waved us forward. About half a dozen shells burst right over the road in front of us, and at each burst there came a whi-i-i-i-i-ng in the air that I had not heard before. One of the génies laughed.
“Shrapnel!” he said. “That’s pretty, that!”
“That’s the bullets of the shrapnel scattering,” said the commandant; “and I can’t get her to start. It’s a hell of a place to go en panne in!” En panne means hove-to, stopped, without way, and, at the Front, broken down.
I thought “Now I am done! I shall be killed here. I shall be blown to pieces here in this road. Damn this dirty enemy who began this war; I shan’t even see them!”
There came a shrapnel fairly close. If it had been high-explosive I might have bolted, but shrapnel seemed quite friendly, and I got hold of myself and I said:
“Did she get a bit of éclat in front?”
When I had said that I found that I could turn my back on the enemy and see about patching the car. It was nothing; we had her going in a minute.
“Bonne chance!” said one of the génies; a little dud shell went into the wood and nosed the earth about.
“Some shooting tonight!” said the commandant.
The Attack
When we were away from the engineers the darkness closed in upon us for what seemed a long time; we went uphill as before, as blind as the dead. The shells seemed to miss the next bit of road; they went over it and burst in the wood beyond, thirty yards below us. It seemed very safe after the last piece. We came up on to what was a kind of neck between two bulges of mountain, and as we came round onto it we caught the roar of the battle, now dead near and banging like the Fourth. I had never heard such a racket, but even as we went it quickened to a rolling drumming, and immediately every gun within miles took up the song and let out for all it was worth, and every hill and valley and col sent back a different echo, till the roar shook and rocked and hit the head.
“That’s an attack,” said the commandant. “Do you hear the mitrailleuses? Here we are at the poste.”
I could see nothing, but by the flash torch I could make out a cleared space with a kind of cave built into the hill, and a very neat pine railing in front of it. There was a garden there, with little paved alleys and a summerhouse in it – all made by the soldiers. Someone cried out “Attention!” and I got out of the way of two stretcher-bearers who were carrying a man who kept saying: “Oh, là là! Oh, là là.”
I thought, when they had passed, that that was over; but it was only the beginning of a procession of stretcher-bearers, all coming very slowly, in the midnight, step by cautious step, on their plod from the trenches to the road and down to the poste. I cannot describe their plod. It was slower than a funeral march. First the bearers groped with their feet for a footing in the dark, then made good the footing with their other feet. I thought: “Imagine travelling like that, in the front communication trenches, with shells bursting all round! And these stretcher-bearers are elderly men – married men with families, or priests and monks. They go right up to the first line day in, day out; in a midnight attack like this they work all night as well. I should be a cur to be afraid simply to go along a road in an ambulance.”
All this time many shells were passing overhead, so many that I could not think of each one; there was some comfort in that. Then a fair number failed to burst, which was a great comfort; but even so the racket was terrific. There were a lot of ambulances parked at the roadside in a line, ready to go down when filled. I put my hand on the side of one of them – it was trembling, just like an animal. The commandant asked me if I would like to see the poste.
We went into the mouth of the cave to a low hall or cellar, vaulted with iron, and ceiled above the iron with many feet of timber balks, sandbags, earth and stones. The floor of the hall was already covered with stretchers. I suppose there were twenty stretchers at my feet; in the room beyond, where they were operating, there were others; and outside, in the terrace or kind of garden, they were laying down more. The place was lit with an oil lamp. The light seemed to have an attraction for the wounded men. Many of them stared at it. No doubt it caught their eyes when they were brought in out of the dark, and they were still too dazed to be able to look away.
I don’t know that I was shocked or horrified or terrified, but I was moved right down to the heart. Nothing that I could say was any good, nothing I could do to help. Then I looked at those men and heard a sort of whimper of pain pass like a message across them, and I thought: “There are beautiful human beings, finer fellows than I; and some devils have been doing this to them.”
What the Sign Meant
The médecin-chef – surgeon in charge – of the poste came from his operating table to peer at us. He waved to the commandant, called out that he was too busy, and went back to the table. There was a smell of ether, and the air seemed full of iodine. I don’t know what they were doing in there, but I saw great shadows moving and heard a thick voice cursing; I suppose someone was being anaesthetized. It was my first sight of surgery of war. These things cannot be described; they have to be felt.
Outside they were loading up the ambulances, so we bore a hand and soon loaded up ours. Ours were three bad cases who lay very still. One of them was a head case, whom we had to lift with the extreme of care, since one touch might be death to him. We were told to take another road down the mountain; so we set off.
Going down was like going up – a groping in a blackness – but that there was less forest by this road. The first part of the way was fairly clear, open moorland, with a kind of lightness or snow blink on it, so that we could see. It was not a snow blink, though, but the glare of war. In all the sky above this moorland was a ruddy running glimmer of flashes, which never really stopped. It was like summer lightning, only ruddier and more constant. Then at intervals, all along it, star shells went up, and stopped in the air like the toys tossed up by a conjurer. I liked the star shells, for when they were aloft I could see where we were going; but they were dreadful for all that, and the racket from where they came, always slackening and quickening, was terrible.
When we had gone about a quarter of a mile we came to a crossways where some companies of soldiers were halted. Right at the crossways there was a lantern on the stump of a tree. A sergeant was standing by the light calling a roll, and men were answering to it. On the top of the stump was a big white placard or direction pointer, pointing toward the battle.
We stopped there for some minutes while the troops mustered and took their several roads. While we waited I read the writing on the pointer. It was Centre de Résistance. I asked the commandant what it meant.
“That?” he said. “It means that that bit of hill over there must be held at all costs, and that these men going to it must not leave it alive. Every man must die at his post, rather!”
Presently we were able to move forward on our way down to the valley. Once or twice, on our way down, the cocks in the hen-roosts, roused by our passing, flapped their wings on their perches and crowed at us.
[source: The
Saturday Evening Post, 21 July 1917, pp.8 – 9 and pp.58 – 59]
The Old Front Line or The Beginning of The Battle of The Somme
TO
NEVILLE LYTTON
Chapter I
This description of the old front line, as it was when the Battle of the Somme began, may someday be of use. All wars end; even this war will someday end, and the ruins will be rebuilt and the field full of death will grow food, and all this frontier of trouble will be forgotten. When the trenches are filled in, and the plough has gone over them, the ground will not long keep the look of war. One summer with its flowers will cover most of the ruin that man can make, and then these places, from which the driving back of the enemy began, will be hard indeed to trace, even with maps. It is said that even now in some places the wire has been removed, the explosive salved, the trenches filled, and the ground ploughed with tractors. In a few years’ time, when this war is a romance in memory, the soldier looking for his battlefield will find his marks gone. Centre Way, Peel Trench, Munster Alley, and these other paths to glory will be deep under the corn, and gleaners will sing at Dead Mule Corner.
It is hoped that this description of the line will be followed by an account of our people’s share in the battle. The old front line was the base from which the battle proceeded. It was the starting-place. The thing began there. It was the biggest battle in which our people were ever engaged, and so far it has led to bigger results than any battle of this war since the Battle of the Marne. It caused a great falling back of the enemy armies. It freed a great tract of France, seventy miles long, by from ten to twenty-five miles broad. It first gave the enemy the knowledge that he was beaten.
Very many of our people never lived to know the result of even the first day’s fighting. For them the old front line was the battlefield, and the No Man’s Land the prize of the battle. They never heard the cheer of victory nor looked into an enemy trench. Some among them never even saw the No Man’s Land, but died in the summer morning from some shell in the trench in the old front line here described.
It is a difficult thing to describe without monotony, for it varies so little. It is like describing the course of the Thames from Oxford to Reading, or of the Severn from Deerhurst to Lydney, or of the Hudson from New York to Tarrytown. Whatever country the rivers pass they remain water, bordered by shore. So our front line trenches, wherever they lie, are only gashes in the earth, fenced by wire, beside a greenish strip of ground, pitted with shell-holes, which is fenced with thicker, blacker, but more tumbled wire on the other side. Behind this further wire is the parapet of the enemy front line trench, which swerves to take in a hillock or to flank a dip, or to crown a slope, but remains roughly parallel with ours, from seventy to five hundred yards from it, for miles and miles, up hill and down dale. All the advantages of position and observation were in the enemy’s hands, not in ours. They took up their lines when they were strong and our side weak, and in no place in all the old Somme position is our line better sited than theirs, though in one or two places the sites are nearly equal. Almost in every part of this old front our men had to go up hill to attack.
If the description of this old line be dull to read, it should be remembered that it was dull to hold. The enemy had the lookout posts, with the fine views over France, and the sense of domination. Our men were down below with no view of anything but of stronghold after stronghold, just up above, being made stronger daily. And if the enemy had strength of position he had also strength of equipment, of men, of guns, and explosives of all kinds. He had all the advantages for nearly two years of war, and in all that time our old front line, whether held by the French or by ourselves, was nothing but a post to be endured, day in day out, in all weathers and under all fires, in doubt, difficulty, and danger, with bluff and makeshift and improvisation, till the tide could be turned. If it be dull to read about and to see, it was, at least, the old line which kept back the tide and stood the siege. It was the line from which, after all those months of war, the tide turned and the besieged became the attackers.
To most of the British soldiers who took part in the Battle of the Somme, the town of Albert must be a central point in a reckoning of distances. It lies, roughly speaking, behind the middle of the line of that battle. It is a knot of roads, so that supports and supplies could and did move from it to all parts of the line during the battle. It is on the main road, and on the direct railway line from Amiens. It is by much the most important town within an easy march of the battlefield. It will be, quite certainly, the centre from which, in time to come, travellers will start to see the battlefield where such deeds were done by men of our race.
It is not now (after three years of war and many bombardments) an attractive town; probably it never was. It is a small straggling town built of red brick along a knot of crossroads at a point where the swift chalk-river Ancre, hardly more than a brook, is bridged and so channelled that it can be used for power. Before the war it contained a few small factories, including one for the making of sewing-machines. Its most important building was a big church built a few years ago, through the energy of a priest, as a shrine for the Virgin of Albert, a small, probably not very old image, about which strange stories are told. Before the war it was thought that this church would become a northern rival to Lourdes for the working of miraculous cures during the September pilgrimage. A gilded statue of the Virgin and Child stood on an iron stalk on the summit of the church tower. During a bombardment of the town at a little after three o’clock in the afternoon of Friday, January 15, 1915, a shell so bent the stalk that the statue bent down over the Place as though diving. Perhaps few of our soldiers will remember Albert for anything except this diving Virgin. Perhaps half of the men engaged in the Battle of the Somme passed underneath her as they marched up to the line, and, glancing up, hoped that she might not come down till they were past. From someone, French or English, a word has gone about that when she does fall the war will end. Others have said that French engineers have so fixed her with wire ropes that she cannot fall.
From Albert four roads lead to the battlefield of the Somme:
In a north-westerly direction to Auchonvillers and Hébuterne.
In a northerly direction to Authuille and Hamel.
In a north-easterly direction to Pozières.
In an easterly direction to Fricourt and Maricourt.
Between the second and the third of these the little river Ancre runs down its broad, flat, well-wooded valley, much of which is a marsh through which the river (and man) have forced more than one channel. This river, which is a swift, clear, chalk stream, sometimes too deep and swift to ford, cuts the English sector of the battlefield into two nearly equal portions.
Following the first of the four roads, one passes the wooded village of Martinsart, to the village of Auchonvillers, which lies among a clump of trees upon a ridge or plateau top. The road dips here, but soon rises again, and so, by a flat tableland, to the large village of Hébuterne. Most of this road, with the exception of one little stretch near Auchonvillers, is hidden by high ground from every part of the battlefield. Men moving upon it cannot see the field.
Hébuterne, although close to the line and shelled daily and nightly for more than two years, was never the object of an attack in force, so that much of it remains. Many of its walls and parts of some of its roofs still stand, the church tower is in fair order, and no one walking in the streets can doubt that he is in a village. Before the war it was a prosperous village; then, for more than two years, it rang with the roar of battle and with the business of an army. Presently the tide of the war ebbed away from it and left it deserted, so that one may walk in it now, from end to end, without seeing a human being. It is as though the place had been smitten by the plague. Villages during the Black Death must have looked thus. One walks in the village expecting at every turn to meet a survivor, but there is none; the village is dead; the grass is growing in the street; the bells are silent; the beasts are gone from the byre and the gho
sts from the church. Stealing about among the ruins and the gardens are the cats of the village, who have eaten too much man to fear him, but are now too wild to come to him. They creep about and eye him from cover and look like evil spirits.
The second of the four roads passes out of Albert, crosses the railway at a sharp turn, over a bridge called Marmont Bridge, and runs northward along the valley of the Ancre within sight of the railway. Just beyond the Marmont Bridge there is a sort of lake or reservoir or catchment of the Ancre overflows, a little to the right of the road. By looking across this lake as he walks northward, the traveller can see some rolls of gentle chalk hill, just beyond which the English front line ran at the beginning of the battle.
A little further on, at the top of a rise, the road passes the village of Aveluy, where there is a bridge or causeway over the Ancre valley. Aveluy itself, being within a mile and a half of enemy gun positions for nearly two years of war, is knocked about, and rather roofless and windowless. A crossroad leading to the causeway across the valley once gave the place some little importance.
Not far to the north of Aveluy, the road runs for more than a mile through the Wood of Aveluy, which is a well-grown plantation of trees and shrubs. This wood hides the marsh of the river from the traveller. Tracks from the road lead down to the marsh and across it by military causeways.
On emerging from the wood, the road runs within hail of the railway, under a steep and high chalk bank partly copsed with scrub. Three-quarters of a mile from the wood it passes through the skeleton of the village of Hamel, which is now a few ruined walls of brick standing in orchards on a hillside. Just north of this village, crossing the road, the railway, and the river-valley, is the old English front line.
John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works Page 23