XXIX The Harvest of Villages
High and low visibilities—Low Visibility a pro-German—High Visibility and his harvest smile—Thirty villages taken by the British—The 25th of September—The Road of the Entente—Twelve miles of artillery fire—Two villages taken—Combles—British and French meet in a captured village—English stubbornness—Dugouts holding a thousand men—Capture of Thiepval.
Always we were talking of the two visibilities, high and low. I thought of them as brothers with the same meteorological parent, one a good and the other an evil genius. Every morning we looked out of doors to see which had the stage. Thus, we might know whether or not the “zero” of an attack set for to-day would be postponed, as it was usually if the sun gave no sign of appearing, though not always; sometimes the staff gave those who tried to guess what was in its mind a surprise.
Low Visibility, a pro-German who was in his element in the Ypres salient in midwinter, delighted in rain, mist, fog and thick summer haze—anything that prevented observers from seeing the burst of shells, transformed shell-craters into miniature lakes and fields into mire to founder charges, and stalled guns.
High Visibility was as merry as his wicked brother was dour. He sent the sunlight streaming into your room in the morning, washed the air of particles enabling observers to see shell-bursts at long range, and favored successful charges under accurate curtains of fire—the patron saint of all modern artillery work, who would be most at home in Arizona where you could carry on an offensive the year around.
During September his was a glad harvest smile which revealed figures on the chalk welts a mile away as clearly as if within a stone’s throw under the glasses and limned the tree-trunks of ruined villages in sharp outlines. He was your companion now when you might walk up the Ridge and, standing among shell-craters still as a frozen sea where but lately an inferno had raged, look out across the fields toward new lines of shell fire and newly won villages on lower levels. He helped to make the month of September when he was most needed the most successful month of the offensive, with its second great attack on the 25th turning the table of losses entirely against the Germans and bringing many guests to the prisoners’ inclosures.
These were days that were rich with results, days of harvest, indeed, when the ceaseless fighting on the Ridge and the iron resolution of a commander had its reward; when advances gathered in villages till the British had taken thirty and the French, with fresh efforts after their own chipping away at strong points, also had jumping-off places for longer drives as they swung in with their right on the Somme in combination with British attacks.
The two armies advanced as one on the 25th. The scene recalled the splendor of the storming of Contalmaison which, if not for its waste and horror, might lead men to go to war for the glory of the panorama—glorious to the observer in this instance when he thought only of the spectacle, in a moment of oblivion to the hard work of preparation and the savage work of execution. Our route to a point of observation for the attack which was at midday took us along the Road of the Entente, as I called it, where French battalions marched with British battalions, stately British motor trucks mixed with the lighter French vehicles, and Gaul sat resting on one side of the road and Briton on the other as German prisoners went by, and there was a mingling of blue and khaki which are both of low visibility against the landscape yet as distinct as the characters of the two races, each with its own way of fighting true to racial bent yet accomplishing its purpose.
Just under the slope where we sat the British guns linked up with the French. To the northward the British were visible right away past Ginchy and Guillemont to Flers and the French clear to the Somme. We were almost midway of a twelve-mile stretch of row upon row of flashes of many calibers, the French more distinct at the foot of a slope fearlessly in the open like the British, a long machine-loom of gunnery with some monsters far back sending up great clouds of black smoke from Mt. St. Quentin which hid our view of Péronne.
Now it was all together for the guns in the preliminary whirlwind, with soixante-quinzes ahead sparkling up and down like the flashes of an automatic electric sign, making a great, thrumming beat of sound in the valley, and the 120’s near by doing their best, too, with their wicked crashes, while the ridges beyond were a bobbing canopy of looming, curling smoke. The units of the two armies might have been wired to a single switchboard with heartbeats under blue and khaki jackets timed together in the final expression of entente cordiale become entente furieuse.
The sunlight had the golden kindness of September and good Brother High Visibility seemed to make it a personal matter to-day against the Kaiser. Distinct were the moving figures of the gunners and bright was the gleam of the empty shells dropping out of the breach of the soixante-quinze as the barrel swung back in place and of the loaded shells going home; distinct were paths and trenches and all the detail of the tired, worn landscape, with the old trenches where we were sitting tumbling in and their sides fringed with wild grass and weeds, which was Nature’s own little say in the affair and a warning that in a few years after the war she and the peasant will have erased war’s landmarks.
The lifting of the barrage as the infantry went in was signaled to the eye when the canopy of shell-smoke began to grow thin and gossamery for want of fresh bursts and another was forming beyond, as if the master hand at such things had lifted a long trail of cloud from one set of crests to another; only, nature never does things with such mathematical precision. All in due order to keep its turn in the program the German artillery began to reply according to its system of distribution, with guns and ammunition plentiful but inferior in quantity to the French. They did not like that stretch of five hundred yards behind a slope where they thought that the most troublesome batteries were, and the puffs of shrapnel smoke thickened dimming the flashes from the bursting jackets until a wall of mist hung there. A torrent of five-point-nines was tearing up fresh craters with high explosives back of other gun positions, and between the columns of smoke we saw the French gunners going on unconcerned by this plowing of the landscape which was not disturbing them.
Far off on the plain where a British ammunition train was visible the German loosed more anger, whipping the fields into geysers; but the caissons moved on as if this were a signal of all aboard for the next station without the Germans being aware that their target was gone. A British battery advancing at another point evidently was not in view of the Germans two thousand yards away, though good Brother High Visibility gave our glasses the outline of the horses at five thousand yards.
Thus, you watched to see what the Germans were shooting at, with suspense at one point and at another the joy of the observer who sees the one who is “it” in blind man’s buff missing his quarry. Some shrapnel searching a road in front and a scream overhead indicated a parcel of high explosives for a village at the rear. In Morval where houses were still standing, their white walls visible through the glasses, there was a kind of flash which was not that of a shell but prolonged, like a windowpane flaming under the sun, which we knew meant that the village was taken, as was also Gueudecourt we learned afterward.
Reserves were filing along a road between the tiers of guns, helmets on the backs of heads French fashion when there is no fire, with the easy marching stride of the French and figures disappeared and reappeared on the slope as they advanced. Wounded were coming along the winding gray streak of highway near where we sat and a convoy of prisoners passed led by a French guard whose attitude seemed to have an eye-twinkling of “See who’s here and see what I’ve got!” Not far away was a French private at a telephone.
“It goes well!” he said. “Rancourt is taken and we are advancing on Frégicourt. Combles is a ripe plum.”
All the while Combles had been an oasis in the shell fire, the one place that had immunity, although it had almost as much significance in the imagination of the French people as Thiepval in that of the English. They looked forward to its storming as a set dramatic event and to its fall as one of the turning-points in the campaign. Often a position which was tactically of little importance, to our conception, would become the center of great expectations to the outside world, while the conquest of a strong point with its nests of machine guns produced no responsive thrill.
Combles was a village and a large village, its size perhaps accounting for the importance associated with it when it had almost none in a military sense. Yet correspondents knew that readers at the breakfast table would be hungry for details about Combles, where the taking of the Schwaben Redoubt or Regina Trench, which were defended savagely, had no meaning. Its houses were very distinct, some being but little damaged and some of the shade trees still retaining their branches. This town nestling in a bowl was not worth the expenditure of much ammunition when what the Germans wanted to hold and the Anglo-French troops to gain was the hills around it. Rancourt was the other side of Combles, which explains the plum simile.
The picturesque thing was that the British troops were working up on one side of Combles and the French on the other side; and the next morning after the British had gathered in some escaping Germans who seemed to have lost their way, the blue and the khaki met in the main street without indulging in formal ceremonies and exchanged a “Good morning!” and “Bon jour!” and “Here we are! Voyla! Quee pawnsays-vous!” and “Ça va bien! Oh, yais, I tink so!” and found big piles of shells and other munitions which the Germans could not take away and cellars with many wounded who had been brought in from the hills—and that was all there was to it: a march in and look around, when for glory’s sake, at least, the victors ought to have delivered congratulatory addresses. But tired soldiers will not do that sort of thing. I shall not say that they are spoiling pictures for the Salon, for there are incidents enough to keep painters going for a thousand years; which ought to be one reason for not having a war for another thousand!
As for Thiepval, the British staff, inconsiderate of the correspondents this time—they really were not conducting the war for us—did not inform us of the attack, being busy those days reaping villages and trenches after they were over the Ridge while High Visibility had Low Visibility shut up in the guardhouse. Besides, the British were so near Thiepval as the result of their persistent advances that its taking was only another step forward, one of savage fighting, however, in the same kind of operations that I have described in the chapter on “Watching a Charge.” The débris beaten into dust had been so scattered that one could not tell where the village began or ended, but the smudge was a symbol to the army no less than to the British public—a symbol of the boasted impregnability of the first-line German fortifications which had resisted the attack of July 1st—and its capture a reward of English stubbornness appealing to the race which is not unconscious of the characteristic that has carried its tongue and dominion over the world.
Point was given, too, by the enormous dugouts, surpassing previous exhibits, capable of holding a garrison of a thousand men and a hospital which, under the bursts of huge shells of the months of British bombardment, had been safe under ground. The hospital was equipped with excellent medical apparatus as well as anæsthetics manufactured in Germany, of which the British were somewhat short. The German battalion that held the place had been associated with the work of preparing its defenses and were practically either all taken prisoner or killed, so far as could be learned. They had sworn that they would never lose Thiepval; but the deeper the dugouts the farther upstairs men inside have to climb in order to get to the door before the enemy, who arrives at the threshold as the whirlwind barrage lifts.
As I have said, Thiepval was not on the very crest of the Ridge and on the summit the same elaborate works had been built to hold this high ground. We watched other attacks under curtains of fire as the British pressed on. Sometimes we could see the Germans moving out in the open from their dugouts at the base of the hill in St. Pierre Divion and driven to cover as the British guns sniped at them with shrapnel. Resistlessly the British infantry under its covering barrages kept on till the crest and all its dugouts and galleries were gained, thus breaking back the old first-line fortifications stage by stage and forcing the German into the open, where he must dig anew on equal terms.
The capture of Thiepval did not mean that its ruins were to have any rest from shells, for the German guns had their turn. They seemed fond of sending up spouts from a little pond in the foreground, which had no effect except to shower passing soldiers with dirty water. However much the pond was beaten it was still there; and I was struck by the fact that this was a costly and unsuccessful system of drainage for such an efficient people as the Germans to apply.