XII The Storming of Contalmaison
The mighty animal of war makes ready for another effort—New charts at headquarters—The battle of the Somme the battle of woods and villages—A terrible school of war in session—Mametz—A wood not “thinned”—The Quadrangle—Marooned Scots—“Softening” a village—Light German cigars—Going after Contalmaison—Aeroplanes in the blue sky—Midsummer fruitfulness and war’s destruction—Making chaos of a village—Attack under cover of a wall of smoke—A melodrama under the passing shells.
If the British and the French could have gone on day after day as they had on July 1st they would have put the Germans out of France and Belgium by autumn. Arrival at the banks of the Rhine and even the taking of Essen would have been only a matter of calculation by a schedule of time and distance. After the shock of the first great drive in which the mighty animal of war lunged forward, it had to stretch out its steel claws to gain further foothold and draw its bulky body into position for another huge effort. Wherever the claws moved there were Germans, who were too wise soldiers to fall back supinely on new lines of fortifications and await the next general attack. They would parry every attempt at footholds of approach for launching it; pound the claws as if they were the hands of an invader grasping at a window ledge.
At headquarters there was a new chart with different colored patches numbered by the days of the month beginning July 1st, each patch indicating the ground that had been won on that day. Compare their order with a relief map and in one-two-three fashion you were able to grasp the natural tactical sequence; how one position was taken in order to command another. Sometimes, though, they represented the lines of least resistance. Often the real generals were the battalions on the battle front who found the weak points and asked permission to press on. The principle was the same as water finding its level as it spreads from a reservoir.
I have often thought that a better name for the battle of the Somme would be the battle of woods and villages. Their importance never really dawned on the observer until after July 1st. Or, it might be called the battle of the spade. Give a man an hour with a spade in that chalky subsoil and a few sandbags and he will make a fortress for himself which only a direct hit by a shell can destroy. He ducks under the sweep of bullets when he is not firing and with his steel helmet is fairly safe from shrapnel while he waits in his lair until the other fellow comes.
Thus the German depended on the machine gun and the rifle to stop any charge which was not supported by artillery fire sufficient to crush in the trenches and silence his armament. When it was, he had his own artillery to turn a curtain of fire onto the charge in progress and to hammer the enemy if he got possession. This was obviously the right system—in theory. But the theory did not always work out, as we shall see. Its development through the four months that I watched the Somme battle was only less interesting than the development of offensive tactics by the British and the French. Every day this terrible school of war was in session, with a British battalion more skilful and cunning every time that it went into the firing-line.
Rising out of the slopes toward the Ridge in green patches were three large woods, not to mention small ones, under a canopy of shell-smoke, Mametz, Bernafay and Trônes, with their orgies of combat hidden under their screens of foliage. They recall the Wilderness—a Wilderness lasting for days, with only one feature of the Wilderness lacking which was a conflagration, but with lachrymatory and gas shells and a few other features that were lacking in Virginia. In the next war we may have still more innovations. Ours is the ingenious human race.
It is Mametz with an area of something over two hundred acres that concerns us now. The Germans thought highly of Mametz. They were willing to lose thousands of lives in order to keep it in their possession. For two years it had not been thinned according to French custom; now shells and bullets were to undertake the task which had been neglected. So thick was the undergrowth that a man had to squeeze his way through and an enemy was as well ambushed as a field mouse in high grass.
The Germans had run barriers of barbed wire through the undergrowth. They had their artillery registered to fringe the woods with curtains of fire and machine guns nestling in unseen barricades and trenches. Through the heart of it they had a light railway for bringing up supplies. All these details had been arranged in odd hours when they were not working on the main first- and second-line fortifications during their twenty months of preparation. I think they must have become weary at times of so much “choring,” judging by a German general’s order after his inspection of the second line, in which he said that the battalions in occupation were a lazy lot who were a disgrace to the Fatherland. After the battle began they could add to the defenses improvements adapted to the needs of the moment. Of course, large numbers of Germans were killed and wounded by British shell fire in the process of “thinning” out the woods; but that was to be expected, as the Germans learned during the battle of the Somme.
How the British ever took Mametz Wood I do not understand; or how they took Trônes Wood later, for that matter. A visit to the woods only heightened perplexity. I have seen men walk over broken bottles with bare feet, swallow swords and eat fire and knew that there was some trick about it, as there was about the taking of Mametz.
The German had not enough barbed wire to go all the way around the woods, or, at least, British artillery would not let him string any more and he thought that the British would attack where they ought to according to rule; that is, by the south. Instead, they went in by the west, where the machine guns were not waiting and the heavy guns were not registered, as I understand it. A piece of strategy of that kind might have won a decisive battle in an old-time war, but I confess that it did not occur to me to ask who planned it when I heard the story. Strategists became so common on the Somme that everybody took them as much for granted as that every battalion had a commander.
Mametz was not taken with the first attack. The British were in the woods once and had to come out; but they had learned that before they could get a proper point d’appui they must methodically “clean up” a small grove, a neighboring cemetery, an intricate maze of trenches called the Quadrangle, and a few other outlying obstacles. In the first rush a lot of Tyneside Scots were marooned from joining in the retreat. They fortified themselves in German dugouts and waited in siege, these dour men of the North. When the British returned eighty of the Scots were still full of fight if short of food and “verra well” otherwise, thank you. At times they had been under blasts of shells from both sides, and again they had been in an oasis of peace, with neither British nor German gunners certain whether they would kill friend or foe.
Going in from the west while the Germans had their curtains of fire registered elsewhere, the British grubbed their way in one charge through most of Mametz and when night fell in the midst of the undergrowth, with a Briton not knowing whether it was Briton or German lying on the other side of a tree-trunk, they had the satisfaction of possessing four big guns which the Germans had been unable to withdraw, and had ascertained also that the Germans had a strong position protected by barbed wire at the northern end of the woods.
“This will require a little thinking,” as one English officer said, “but of course we shall take it.”
The purchase on Mametz and the occupation of Bailiff’s Wood, the Quadrangle, La Boisselle and Ovillers-la-Boisselle brought the circle of advancing British nearer to Contalmaison, which sat up on the hills in a sea of chalk seams. Contalmaison was being gradually “softened” by the artillery. The chateau was not yet all down, but after each bite by a big shell less of the white walls was visible when the clouds of smoke from the explosion lifted. Bit by bit the guns would get the chateau, just as bit by bit a stonemason chips a block down to the proper dimensions to fit it into place in a foundation.
A visit to La Boisselle on the way to Contalmaison justified the expectation as to what was in store for Contalmaison. I saw the blackened and shell-whittled trunks of two trees standing in La Boisselle. Once with many others they had given shade in the gardens of houses; but there were no traces of houses now except as they were mixed with the earth. The village had been hammered into dust. Yet some dugouts still survived. Keeping at it, the British working around these had eventually forced the surrender of the garrison, who could not raise their heads to fire without being met by a bullet or a bomb-burst from the watchful besiegers.
“Slow work, but they had to come out,” was the graphic phrase of one of the captors, “and they looked fed up, too. They had even run out of cigars”—which settled it.
Oh, those light German cigars! Sometimes I believe that they were the real mainstay of the German organization. Cigars gone, spirit gone! I have seen an utterly weary German prisoner as he delivered his papers to his captor bring out his last cigar and thrust it into his mouth to forestall its being taken as tribute, with his captor saying with characteristic British cheerfulness, “Keep it, Bochy! It smells too much like a disinfectant for me, but let’s have your steel helmet”—the invariable prize demanded by the victor.
The British had already been in Contalmaison, but did not stay. “Too many German machine guns and too much artillery fire and not enough men,” to put it with colloquial army brevity. It often happened that a village was entered and parts of it held during a day, then evacuated at night, leaving the British guns full play for the final “softening.” These initial efforts had the result of reconnaissances in force. They permitted a thorough look around the enemy’s machine gun positions so as to know how to avoid their fire and “do them in,” revealed the cover that would be available for the next advance, and brought invaluable information to the gunners for the accurate distribution of their fire. Always some points important for future operations were held.
“We are going after Contalmaison this afternoon,” said a staff officer at headquarters, “and if you hurry you may see it.”
As a result, I witnessed the most brilliant scene of battle of any on the Somme, unless it was the taking of Combles. There was bright sunshine, with the air luminously clear and no heat waves. From my vantage point I could see clear to the neighborhood of Péronne. The French also were attacking; the drumhead fire of their soixante-quinze made a continuous roll, and the puffs of shrapnel smoke hung in a long, gossamery cloud fringing the horizon and the canopy of the green ridges.
Every aeroplane of the Allies seemed to be aloft, each one distinct against the blue with shimmering wings and the soft, burnished aureole of the propellers. They were flying at all heights. Some seemed almost motionless two or three miles above the earth, while others shot up from their aerodromes.
Planes circling, planes climbing, planes slipping down aerial toboggan slides with propellers still, planes going as straight as crows toward the German line to be lost to sight in space while others developed out of space as swift messengers bound for home with news of observations, planes touring a sector of the front, swooping low over a corps headquarters to drop a message and returning to their duty; planes of all types, from the monsters with vast stretch of wing and crews of three or more men, stately as swans, to those gulls, the saucy little Nieuports, shooting up and down and turning with incredible swiftness, their tails in the air; planes and planes in a fantastic aerial minuet, flitting around the great sausage balloons stationary in the still air.
With ripening grain and sweet-smelling harvests of clover and hay in the background and weeds and wild grass in the foreground, the area of vegetation in the opulence of midsummer was demarked from the area of shell-craters, trenches and explosions. You had the majesty of battle and the desolation of war; nature’s eternal seeding and fruiting alongside the most ruthless forms of destruction. In the clear air the black bursts of the German high explosives hammering Mametz Wood, as if in revenge for its loss, seemed uglier and more murderous than usual; the light smoke of shrapnel had a softer, more lingering quality; soldiers were visible distinctly at a great distance in their comings and goings; the water carts carrying water up to the first line were a kind of pilgrim circuit riders of that thirsty world of deadly strife; a file of infantry winding up the slope at regular intervals were silhouettes as like as beads on a string. The whole suggested a hill of ants which had turned their habits of industry against an invader of their homes in the earth, and the columns of motor trucks and caissons ever flowing from all directions were as a tide, which halted at the foot of the slope and then flowed back.
There were shell-bursts wherever you looked, with your attention drawn to Contalmaison as it would be to a gathering crowd in the thick of city traffic. All the steel throats in clumps of woods, under cover of road embankments, in gullies and on the reverse side of slopes, were speaking. The guns were giving to Contalmaison all they had to give and the remaining walls of the chateau disappeared in a fog like a fishing smack off the Grand Banks. Super-refined, man-directed hell was making sportive chaos in the village which it hid with its steaming breath cut by columns of black smoke from the H.E.’s and crowned with flashes of shrapnel; and under the sun’s rays the gases from the powder made prismatic splendor in flurries and billows shot with the tints of the rainbow.
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.