In that most bloody battle of “First Ypres,” one English battalion was obliterated, another was remade two and a half times between October and Christmas, a third, which went in 987 strong, came out 70 strong; in a fourth, an officer who returned to duty after two months in hospital, found only one man left who had been in the battalion two months before; all the rest had gone.
After that battle, the mud set in, and stopped all great movements of men and guns. Both sides dug and fortified the lines they were holding, and the war became an affair of siege, until the spring.
Then the enemy launched a third attack against us, which was by much the most dangerous attack of the early months of the war. He began this attack by an intense bombardment of the English and French lines near Ypres. Then, at nightfall, in the April evening, while this bombardment was at its height, he let loose a great green cloud of chlorine gas, which floated across the No Man’s Land to our lines. Whenever this gas reached the lines it choked the men dead, by a death which is unspeakably terrible, even for this war.
The men watched the gas coming. They thought that it was a smokescreen or barrage, designed to hide the advance of enemy infantry. Suddenly they found the green cloud upon them, and their comrades choking and retching their lives away in every kind of agony. For a while there was a panic. The men in the front lines were either killed or put out of action. The communication trenches were filled with choking and gasping men, flying from the terror and dropping as they fled. Night was falling. It was nearly dark, and the whole area was under an intense enemy shellfire. The line was broken on a front of four and a half miles; and for the time it seemed as though the whole front would go.
The gas had come just at the point where the French and the English armies joined each other; at a point, that is, where all words of command had to be given in several languages, and where any confusion was certain to be intensified tenfold; there were many Colonial and native troops there, Turcos, Indians, Senegalese, Moroccans, as well as Canadians, French and English. All the troops there were shaken by this unexpected and terrible death, against which they had no guard.
Then a few officers, whose names, perhaps, we may never know, gathered together the stragglers and the panic-stricken, and called to them to put handkerchiefs and caps and rags of blankets and strips of shirt in front of their faces, and with these as respirators they marched the men back into that cloud of death, and though many were killed in the attempt, enough survived to hold the line, and so we were saved for the third time.
All nations use gas now, but that was the first time it was used. It is a very terrible thing. I have seen many men dying of it. It rots the lungs and the victims gasp away their lives. There is a saying, “If you sell your soul to the Devil, be sure you get a good price.” The use of that gas was a selling of the soul, and yet the price gotten in exchange was nothing. They had our line broken with it and for weeks they could have beaten us by it. It was weeks before our men had proper respirators in any number. I do not know why they didn’t beat us then; nobody knows. Some think that it was because their General Staff did not trust their chemists.
Just at the time when the gas attack was preparing outside Ypres, a little army of the Allies was landing on the Gallipoli Peninsula, “to assist the passage of the fleets through the Dardanelles.”
I have been asked about the Gallipoli campaign. People have complained to me that it was a blunder. I don’t agree. It had to be undertaken; to keep Bulgaria quiet, to keep Greece from coming in against us, to protect Egypt and to draw the Turkish Army from the Caucasus, where Russia was hard-pressed. People say, “Well, at least it was a blunder to attack in the way you did.” I say that when we did attack, we attacked with the only men and the only weapons we had, and in the only possible places.
In war one has to attempt many things, not because they are wise or likely to succeed, but because they have to be done. In this war, we had to attempt them with insufficient means, because we were unprepared for war.
Consider what that attempt meant.
In the original scheme, the Russians were to co-operate with us, by landing 40,000 men on the shores of the Bosphorus, so as to divert from us a large force of enemy soldiers. We brought our men 3,000 miles across the sea, and we said to them, in effect, “There are the Turks, entrenched, with machine guns and guns and shells. You have only rifles. We have no guns nor shells to give you. Now land on those mined beaches, and take those trenches. The Russians will help to some extent; it will not be so hard.” So the men went ashore and took those trenches. Nine days after they were ashore, we learned that the Russians could not land any men on the Bosphorus, and that we were alone in the venture. And then we said to our survivors, “The Russians can’t come to help you, after all. We have no guns nor shells to give you. We are so hard-pressed in France that we can’t send you any reinforcements. The enemy is entrenched with plenty of guns, and lots of shells, but you’ve got rifles, so go and take those trenches, too.” So the men went and took them. Then we said, in effect, “Men and guns are needed in France, we can’t send you any more just yet.” So everything was delayed, till the men and guns were ready, and then, when they were ready, the enemy was ready, too, and dysentery was raging and it was very hot, and there was little to drink, and it is a God-forgotten land to fight in, so we did not win the Peninsula, nor anything else, except honour from thinking men.
I know that every man who was in Gallipoli, is and will be prouder of having been there, than of anything in his life, past, present, or to come. Our men kept a flag flying there to which the beaten men of all time will turn in trial.
As you know, in 1915, the war settled down into a struggle between opposing lines of trenches, with daily shelling and sniping and occasional raiding, mining and bombing. The next great attack was the attack on Verdun, when the enemy launched an army of specially fed, trained and rested soldiers, under a hail of shells, to break through the French lines. That attack lasted with little intermission for four months, and it did not break the line. It very nearly broke it, but not quite. Perhaps nothing can break the line of a free people sworn to hold the gates for freedom. Often in that fight, little bodies of French and German soldiers were shut off for days together by shellfire, men died from hunger and thirst in the wreck of the forts, and those parties of French and Germans would count heads to see which side had won.
And while the attack was at its height, and while Verdun was still in danger, the English and French together counter-attacked in force on a line of 25 miles, further to the north, in the Department of the Somme, and beat the enemy out of his main position there. That put an end to the attack on Verdun. The Battle of the Somme gave another use for the enemy’s men and guns. The city was saved. And a great deal more than the city; for the battle of the Somme beat the enemy out of a strip of France 65 miles long by from 12 to 20 deep, where today the great battle of this war is being fought.
This Battle of the Somme was an attack upon some of the most elaborate field fortifications ever made. On the right of the attack, where the French attacked, much of the ground is flat, and without good defensive position, but on the left, where the English attacked, the ground is a succession of rolling chalk downland, rising some hundreds of feet above little valleys. On this rolling downland, the enemy had dug himself in, when he was strong and we were weak. He had made himself so strong there, that he openly boasted that his position was impregnable. He had all the good positions there. His line was so placed, that it was almost always a little above us, and he worked to improve these positions night and day for nearly two years.
Perhaps not many here have seen a first-rate enemy field fortification. I’ll try to explain what the Somme position was like.
As you know, the main defence in a modern line is the front line system of trenches.
In front of his front line, the enemy had a very elaborate strong tangle of wire, about 4 feet high and 40 yards across, each wire as thick as a double rope yarn and with
16 barbs to the foot.
Hidden in this wire, under the ground, in converted shell-holes, or in very cunningly contrived little pits, were stations for machine gunners. Some of these stations were connected with the enemy trenches by tunnels, so that the gunners could crawl to them under cover.
In some places, the ground of the wire entanglement was strewn with trip-wire, so near the ground as to be invisible, yet high enough to catch the feet. In the trip-wire were spikes to transfix the men who caught in the trip-wire and fell.
Behind the wire tangle were the enemy first line trenches.
These were immense works, designed as permanent field fortresses. They were always well-made and well-sited. In many important points of the line they were twelve feet deep, and strongly revetted with plank and wicker. At intervals of about 50 yards, in some parts of the line, were little concrete forts for observers and machine guns. These forts were so well-concealed that they could not be seen from without. The slit for the observer or for the machine gun to fire through is very tiny, and well-hidden in the mud of the trench parapet.
These forts were immensely strong, and very small. A man inside one could only be destroyed by the direct hit of a big shell or by the lucky chance of a bullet coming through the narrow slit. You must remember that one cool soldier with a machine gun has in his hands the concentrated destructive power of 40 or 50 rifle men.
In the wall of the trench parapets on this front line, at intervals of 30 to 40 yards, were shafts of stairs leading down 20 or 30 feet into the earth. At the bottom of the shafts were great underground living rooms, each big enough to hold 50 or 100 men. In some places shafts led down another 20 feet below these living rooms to a second level or storey of dugouts.
These places were fairly safe in normal times, though apt to be foul and ill smelling. In bombardments the men kept below in the dugouts, out of danger from the shells, till the instant of the attack, when they could race up the stairs in time to man the fire step, and to get their machine guns into action. During the intense bombardments, the shafts and stairs were blown in, and a good many of the enemy were buried alive in these dugouts. Our men, when they had captured these trenches, usually preferred to sleep in the trenches, not in the dugouts, as they said that they would rather be killed outright than buried alive.
In some parts of the battlefield of the Somme, the ground is channelled with deep, steeped-sided, narrow gullies in the chalk, sometimes 40 feet deep and only 40 feet across, like great natural trenches. Three of these gullies were made into enemy arsenals and barracks of immense strength and capacity. These were, the tunnel at St. Pierre Divion, dug into the chalk, so that some thousands of men could live underground within one-quarter mile of the front line, in perfect safety; the barracks at the Y Ravine, about a mile further north, and the barracks in Quarry Gulley, near the Y Ravine. In all these immense underground works, the enemy had elaborate homes, lit with electricity, hung with cretonne and panelled with wood. Little stairs led from these dwellings to neat machine gun posts overlooking the front line. In one of these elaborate underground dwellings there were cots for children and children’s toys, and some lady’s clothes. It was thought that the artillery general who lived there had had his family there for the weekend.
Behind all these works, were support and reserve trenches of equal strength, often fully wired in, but with fewer dugouts. Then about a mile or two miles behind the front line, on a great crest or table of high chalk downland, was the second line, stronger than the front line, on even more difficult ground, where you cannot walk a yard without treading on dust of English blood.
Words cannot describe the strength of that old fortified line. It was done with the greatest technical skill. If you went along it, you would notice here and there some little irregularity or strangeness, and then you would look about, till you could see what devilish purpose that little strangeness served. And there was always one. The little irregularity gave some little advantage, which might make all the difference in a battle. The little thing in war alters the destinies of nations. A grain of sand in the body of Napoleon altered the campaign of 1812. I know of one great and tragical battle in this war which was lost mainly through a sprained ankle.
Our old lines faced these great fortresses at a distance of about 200 yards. Our lines are nothing like the enemy lines. There were no deep dugouts. The wire was comparatively slight. The trenches were inferior. It looked as though the work of amateurs was pitted against the work of professionals. Yet the amateurs held the professionals.
When Lord Kitchener went to Gallipoli, he visited Anzac. At that time, life in Gallipoli was becoming anxious, because some 17-inch Skoda guns had been brought down by the Turks and were shelling the position. Our men had dug some dugouts 10 or 15 feet deep to protect them from these shells. They showed them to Kitchener with pride. Kitchener said, “Of course, they may do for Gallipoli, but they aren’t nearly deep enough for France. We never go down less than 30 feet in France.”
So, when the Peninsular men came to France, they came with the modest feeling that they knew nothing about modern war, nor about digging dugouts, and they went into the trenches expecting to see dugouts like Egyptian catacombs. They found that the only dugouts were pieces of corrugated iron with a few sandbags on the top and some shovelsful of mud over all.
In places where the two lines approached each other at a crest, there had been a two years’ struggle for the possession of the crest; for modern war is mainly a struggle for the post from which one can see. In all these places the space between the lines was a vast and ghastly succession of mine pits, fifty or a hundred feet deep, marked with the wrecks of old dugouts, and heads and hands and bodies, and sometimes half full of evil water.
Within the 16 mile limit of the English sector of the Somme field, there were in the enemy front line eight strongholds which the enemy boasted were impregnable.
The Battle of the Somme was the first real measuring of strength between the enemy and the English. In the early battles, the picked men of our race had met their picked men and held them. But the picked men were now dead, and the armies which fought on the Somme were the average mass of the race.
I must describe the Battle of the Somme. On the right, where the ground is flat and there is no real defensive position, the French caught the enemy by surprise, officers shaving in their dugouts, men at breakfast, gun teams going down to water. The French made a royal and victorious advance at once.
Our men attacking the strongholds where the enemy expected us, lost 50,000 men in the first day’s fighting and took in that day, the first of the eight impregnable forts.
I don’t think you realize what the Battle of the Somme became. It went on for eight and one half months of intense, bloody and bitter battles for small pieces of hill, for the sites of vanished villages, for the stumps of blasted woods and the cellars of obliterated farms.
We got the second of the eight impregnable forts on the fourth day, the third on the seventeenth day, the fourth and fifth on the seventy-sixth day, the sixth and strongest on the one hundred and twenty-eighth day, and the last two at the end.
I cannot tell you how bitter and bloody the fighting in that battle was. The fight for Delville Wood lasted for nearly two months, and in those two months, 400 shells fell every minute on Delville Wood, and not less than 300,000 men were killed and wounded there. That wood during the battle was a scene of death, bloodshed and smash such as cannot be imagined. You walked in the mud on the bones and the flesh of men and on fresh blood dripping out of stretchers. By the side of the track was a poor starved cat eating the brain of a man.
In High Wood they fought till the rags and bones of dead men hung from the wrecks of the trees. In Pozières, men lived for days and nights under a never-ceasing barrage designed to blow them off the ridge which they had won. They were buried and unburied and reburied by shells. There were 20,000 casualties on that ghastly table, and the shell-shock cases leaped and shook and twittered in ever
y clearing station.
Twenty thousand men were killed and wounded in the taking of the nest of machine guns in the subterranean fort of Mouquet Farm. Our men went down into the shafts of that fort and fought in the darkness underground there, till the passages were all seamed with bullets.
We lost half a million men in that great battle, and we had our reward. For in the winter of 1917, in the winter night a great and shattering barrage raged up along the front. It was the barrage which covered the attack on Miraumont and drove the enemy from the Ancre Valley. The next day came the news that Serre had fallen, and we went up and stood in Serre. And Gommecourt fell, and the rain of shells ceased upon Loupart and La Barque, and the news ran along like wildfire, that the enemy was going back.
John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works Page 34
