World War I - 9 Book Collection: Nelson's History of the War, The Battle of Jutland & The Battle of the Somme - Buchan John

Скачать книгу

the haze—the guns flashed incessantly, and there was that tense expectancy which precedes a great battle. Troops were everywhere on the move, and the shifting of ammunition dumps nearer to the firing-line foretold what was coming. There was a curious exhilaration everywhere. Men felt that this at last was the great offensive, that this was no flash in the pan, but a movement conceived on the grand scale as to guns and men which would not cease until a decision was reached. But, as the hours passed in mist and wet, it seemed as if the fates were unpropitious. Then, on the last afternoon of June, there came a sudden change. The pall of cloud cleared away and all Picardy swam in the translucent blue of a summer evening. That night the orders went out. The attack was to be delivered next morning three hours after dawn.

      The first day of July dawned hot and cloudless, though a thin fog, the relic of the damp of the past week, clung to the hollows. At halfpast five the hill just west of Albert offered a singular view. It was almost in the centre of the section allotted to the Allied attack, and from it the eye could range on the left up and beyond the Ancre glen to the high ground around Beaumont Hamel and Serre; in front to the great lift of tableland beyond which lay Bapaume; and to the right past the woods of Fricourt to the valley of the Somme. All the slopes to the east were wreathed in smoke, which blew aside now and then and revealed a patch of wood or a church spire. In the foreground lay Albert, the target of an occasional German shell, with its shattered Church of Notre Dame de Bebrieres and the famous gilt Virgin hanging head downward from the campanile. All along the Allied front, a couple of miles behind the line, captive balloons, the so-called “sausages,” glittered in the sunlight. Every gun on a front of twenty-five miles was speaking, and speaking without pause. In that week’s bombardment more light and medium ammunition was expended than the total amount manufactured in Britain during the first eleven months of war, while the heavy stuff produced during the same period would not have kept our guns going for a single day. Great spurts of dust on the slopes showed where a heavy shell had burst, and black and white gouts of smoke dotted the middle distance like the little fires in a French autumn field. Lace-like shrapnel wreaths hung in the sky, melting into the morning haze. The noise was strangely uniform, a steady rumbling, as if the solid earth were muttering in a nightmare, and it was hard to distinguish the deep tones of the heavies, the vicious whip-like crack of the field-guns and the bark of the trench-mortars.

      About 7.15 the bombardment rose to that hurricane pitch of fury which betokened its close. Then appeared a marvellous sight, the solid spouting of the enemy slopes—as if they were lines of reefs on which a strong tide was breaking. In such a hell it seemed that no human thing could live. Through the thin summer vapour and the thicker smoke which clung to the foreground there were visions of a countryside actually moving— moving bodily in debris into the air. And now there was a new sound—a series of abrupt and rapid bursts which came gustily from the first lines, like some colossal machine-gun. These were the new trench mortars—those wonderful little engines of death. There was another sound, too, from the North, as if the cannonading had suddenly come nearer. It looked as if the Germans had begun a counterbombardment on part of the British front line.

      The staff officers glanced at their watches, and at half-past seven precisely there came a lull. It lasted for a second or two, and then the guns continued their tale. But the range had been lengthened everywhere, and from a bombardment the fire had become a barrage. For, on a twenty-five mile front, the Allied infantry had gone over the parapets.

      CHAPTER II.

       THE FIRST STAGE.

       Table of Contents

      The point of view of the hill-top was not that of the men in the front trenches. The crossing of the parapets is the supreme moment in modern war. What has been the limit suddenly becomes the starting point. The troops are outside defences, moving across the open to investigate the unknown. It is the culmination of months of training for officers and men, and the least sensitive feels the drama of the crisis. Most of the British troops engaged had twenty months before been employed in peaceable civilian trades. In their ranks were every class and condition— miners from north England, factory hands from the industrial centres, clerks and shop-boys, ploughmen and shepherds, Saxon and Celt, college graduates and dock labourers, men who in the wild places of the earth had often faced danger, and men whose chief adventure had been a Sunday bicycle ride. Nerves may be attuned to the normal risks of trench warfare and yet shrink from the desperate hazard of a charge into the enemy’s line.

      But to one who visited the front before the attack the most vivid impression was that of quiet cheerfulness. These soldiers of Britain were like Cromwell’s Ironsides, they “knew what they fought for and loved what they knew.” There were no shirkers and few who wished themselves elsewhere. One man’s imagination might be more active than another’s, but the will to fight, and to fight desperately, was universal. With the happy gift of the British soldier they had turned the ghastly business of war into something homely and familiar. They found humour in danger and discomfort, and declined to regard the wildest crisis as wholly divorced from their normal life. Accordingly they took everything as part of the day’s work, and awaited the supreme moment without heroics and without tremor, confident in themselves, confident in their guns, and confident in the triumph of their cause. There was no savage lust of battle, but that far more formidable thing—a resolution which needed no rhetoric to support it. Norfolk’s words were true of every man of them:

      “As gentle and as jocund as to jest

       Go I to fight. Truth hath a quiet breast.”

      A letter written before the action by a young officer gives noble expression to this joyful resolution. He fell in the first day’s battle and the letter was posted after his death:—

      “I am writing this letter to you just before going into action to-morrow morning about dawn.

      “I am about to take part in the biggest battle that has yet been fought in France, and one which ought to help to end the war very quickly.

      “I never felt more confident or cheerful in my life before, and would not miss the attack for anything on earth. The men are in splendid form, and every officer and man is more happy and cheerful than I have ever seen them. I have just been playing a rag game of football in which the umpire had a revolver and a whistle.

      “My idea in writing this letter is in case I am one of the ‘costs,’ and get killed. I do not expect to be, but such things have happened, and are always possible.

      “It is impossible to fear death out here when one is no longer an individual, but a member of a regiment and of an army. To be killed means nothing to me, and it is only you who suffer for it; you really pay the cost.

      “I have been looking at the stars, and thinking what an immense distance they are away. What an insignificant thing the loss of, say, 40 years of life is compared with them! It seems scarcely worth talking about.

      “Well, good-bye, you darlings. Try not to worry about it, and remember that we shall meet again really quite soon.

      “This letter is going to be posted if . . . Lots of love. From your loving son,

      “Qui procul hinc

       Ante diem periit,

       Sed miles, sed pro Patria.”

      The British aim in this, the opening stage of the battle, was the German first position. The attached map shows its general line. In the section of assault, running from north to south, it covered Gommecourt, passed east of Hebuterne, followed the high ground in front of Serre and Beaumont Hamel, and crossed the Ancre a little to the north-west of Thiepval. It ran in front of Thiepval, which was very strongly fortified, east of Authuille, and just covered the hamlets of Ovillers and La Boisselle. There it ran about a mile and a quarter east of Albert. It then passed south round the woodland village of Fricourt, where it turned at right angles to the east, covering Mametz and Montauban. Half-way between Maricourt and Hardecourt it turned south again, covered Curlu, crossed the Somme at the wide marsh near the place called Vaux, covered

Скачать книгу