From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917 Part 14

Our gunners smothered his batteries whenever he revealed them to the airmen. Those flying men have been wonderful. A kind of exaltation of spirits took possession of them, and they dared great risks and searched out the enemy's squadrons far over his lines. In five days from June 1 forty-four separate machines were sent cras.h.i.+ng down, and this morning, very early, flocks of aeroplanes went out to blind the enemy's eyes and report the progress of battle. In the darkness queer monsters moved up close to our lines, many of them crawling singly over the battlefields under cover of woods and ruins. They were the Tanks, ready to go into action on a great day of war, when their pilots and crews have helped by high courage to victory.

Last night all was ready. Men knowing the risks of it all--for no plans are certain in war--had a sense of oppression, strained by poignant anxiety. Many men's lives were on the hazard of all this. The air was heavy, as though nature itself were full of tragedy. A summer fog was thick over Flanders, and the sky was livid. Forked lightning rent the low clouds, and thunder broke with menacing rumblings. Rain fell sharply, and on the conservatory of a big Flemish house where officers bent over their maps and plans the rain-drops beat noisily. But the storm pa.s.sed and the night was calm and beautiful. Along the dark roads, and down the leafy lanes, columns of men were marching, and bra.s.s bands played them through the darkness. Guns and gun-limbers moved forward at a sharp pace. "Lights out" rang the challenges of the sentries to the staff cars pa.s.sing beyond the last village where any gleam was allowed, and nearer to the lines ma.s.ses of men lay sleeping or resting in the fields before getting orders to go forward into the battle zone. All through the night the sky was filled with vivid flashes of bursting sh.e.l.ls and with steady hammer-strokes of guns, and from an observation-post looking across the shoulder of Kemmel Hill, straight to Wytschaete and the Messines Ridge, I watched this bombardment and waited for that moment when it should rise into a mad fury of gun-fire before our men lying in these dark fields should stumble forward. During those hours of waiting in the soft warm air of the night I thought of all I had heard of the position in front of us. "It's a Gibraltar," said an officer who was there in the early days of the war. "The enemy will fight his hardest for the Messines Ridge," said another officer, whose opinion has weight. "He has stacks of guns against us." Such thoughts made one s.h.i.+ver, though the night was warm, so warm and moist that wafts of scent came up from the earth and bushes. A full moon had risen, veiled by vapours until they drifted by and revealed all her pale light in a sky that was still faintly blue, with here and there a star. The moon through all her ages never looked down upon such fires of man-made h.e.l.l as those which lashed out when the bombardment quickened. That was just before three o'clock. For two hours before that fires had been lighted in the German lines by British sh.e.l.l-fire--big rose-coloured smoke-clouds with hearts of flame--and all round the salient and the Messines Ridge our guns flashed redly as they fired, and their sh.e.l.l-bursts scattered light against which the trees were etched sharply. I could hear the rattle of gun-wagons along the distant roads, and the tuff-tuff of an engine driving very close up to the firing-lines, and above the great loudness of our gun-fire the savage whine of German shrapnel coming over in quick volleys. The drone of a night-flying aeroplane pa.s.sed overhead. The sky lightened a little, and showed black smudges like ink-blots on blue silk cloth where our kite-balloons rose in cl.u.s.ters to spy out the first news of the coming battle. The c.o.c.ks of Flanders crowed, and two heavy German sh.e.l.ls roared over Kemmel Hill and burst somewhere in our lines. A third came, but before its explosion could be heard, all the noise there had been, all these separate sounds of guns and high explosives and shrapnel were swept up into the tornado of artillery which now began.

The signal for its beginning was the most terribly beautiful thing, the most diabolical splendour, I have seen in war.

Out of the dark ridges of Messines and Wytschaete and that ill-famed Hill 60, for which many of our best have died, there gushed out and up enormous volumes of scarlet flame from the exploding mines and of earth and smoke, all lighted by the flame, spilling over into fountains of fierce colour, so that all the countryside was illumined by red light.

Where some of us stood watching, aghast and spellbound by this burning horror, the ground trembled and surged violently to and fro. Truly the earth quaked. A New Zealand boy who came back wounded spoke to me about his own sensations. "I felt like being in an open boat on a rough sea.

It rocked up and down this way and that."

Thousands of British soldiers were rocked like that before they scrambled up and went forward to the German lines--forward beneath that tornado of sh.e.l.ls which crashed over the enemy's ground with a wild prolonged tumult just as day broke, with crimson feathers unfolding in the eastern sky, and flights of airmen following other flights above our heroes.

Rockets rose from the German lines--distress signals flung up by men who still lived in that fire zone--white and red and green. They were calling to their gunners, warning them that the British were upon them.

Their high lamps were burning as lost hopes in G.o.d or man, and then falling low and burning out. Presently there were no more of them, but others which were ours in places which had been German. Smoke drifted across and mingled with the morning mist. One could see nothing but a bank of fog thrust through with short stars of light. The first definite news that I had was from German prisoners, who came down in batches, carrying our wounded when any help was needed for our own stretcher-bearers. They described how our men came close behind the barrage, some of them, by a kind of miracle, in advance of the barrage.

The Germans had not expected the attack for another two days, and last night were endeavouring to relieve some of their exhausted troops by new divisions, the 3rd Bavarians relieving the 24th Saxons, and the 104th Infantry Reserve the 23rd Bavarians. They lost heavily on the way up to the lines by our fire, and were then, after a few hours, attacked by our waves of infantry.

The story of this great battle and great victory--for it is really that--cannot be told in a few lines, and it is too soon yet to give exact details of the fighting. But from the reports that have now come in from all parts of the battle front it is good enough to know that everywhere our men have succeeded with astonis.h.i.+ng rapidity, and that the plan of battle has been fulfilled almost to the letter and to the time-table. The New-Zealanders reached and captured Messines in an hour and forty minutes after the moment of attack, in spite of heavy fighting in German trenches, where many of the enemy were killed. Irish troops, Nationalists and Ulstermen, not divided in politics on the battlefield, but vying with each other in courage and self-sacrifice, stormed their way up to Wytschaete, and after desperate resistance from the enemy captured all that is left of the famous White Chteau, which for years our soldiers have watched through hidden gla.s.ses as a far high place like the castle of a dream. By midday our men were well down farther slopes of the ridge, while our field-batteries rushed up the ridge behind them to take up new positions. Farther north along the shoulder of the Ypres salient our English troops of the 19th, 41st, 47th, and 23rd Divisions advanced along a line including Battle Wood, south of Zillebeke, and now hold all but a small part of it. Meanwhile the Germans are ma.s.sing troops at Warneton and its neighbourhood, as though preparing a heavy counter-attack, and are sh.e.l.ling Messines Ridge with some violence. For to-day at least, in spite of fierce fighting that must follow, our men have achieved a victory, with light losses considering the severity of their task. The evil spell of the Ypres salient is broken. The salient itself is wiped out, and if we can hold the Messines Ridge, Ypres and its countryside will no longer exact that toll of death which for nearly three years has been a curse to us. The roads and fields are under a glare of suns.h.i.+ne as I write, and down them, through the dust and the fierce heat, come troops of German prisoners, exhausted and nerve-broken, but glad of life. And pa.s.sing them come the walking wounded who attacked them in their tunnels at dawn to-day and conquered. The lightly wounded men are happy and proud of their victory.

"We New-Zealanders can afford to be a little c.o.c.ky," said one of these bronzed fellows with eyes of cornflower blue. "My word, I'm glad we had the luck." He was wounded in the foot, but the man just hugged the news of victory. "We shall be no end stuck up," he said, and then he laughed in a simple way, and said, "I'm glad New Zealand did so well--that's natural. But they tell me the Irish were splendid, and the Australians could not be held back. It's good to have done the job, and I hope it will help on the end."

That New-Zealander spoke the thought of thousands who have been fighting in this battle. They have a right to be proud of themselves, for they have broken the curse of the salient and relieved it of some of its horror.

II

THE SPIRIT OF VICTORY

JUNE 8

I have never seen the spirit of victory so real and so visible among great bodies of British troops since this war began. It s.h.i.+nes in the eyes of our officers and men to-day up in the fighting zone and in the fields and woods below Wytschaete and Messines, where they are resting and sleeping after the battle, regardless of the great noise of gun-fire which is still about them. Our men have a sense of great achievement, something big and definite and complete, in this capture of Messines Ridge. They knew how formidable it was to attack, and they count their cost--the price of victory--as extraordinarily light. Many brave men have fallen, and along the roads come many ambulances where p.r.o.ne figures lie with their soles up as a reminder that no battle may be fought without this traffic flowing back; but the proportion of lightly wounded was high and the number of wounded amazingly low among most battalions. I met one company of Irish Fusiliers to-day who took their goal without a single casualty and marched into Wytschaete without firing a shot. That was a rare episode. But on all sides I hear astonishment that our losses were so small considering the immensity of their task. It is this which makes the men glad of victory--not having it clouded by such heavy sacrifices of life as in the battles of the Somme. "We got off light," said an Irish boy to-day; "we had the best of luck."

All along the way to Wytschaete, where I went through places which two days ago still lived up to the reputation of evil names--Suicide Corner, V.C. Walk, Sh.e.l.l Farm--and in woods like the Bois de Rossignol, where the death-birds came screaming until a moment before yesterday's dawn, officers and men, generals, brigadiers, sergeants, privates, spoke of victory with an enthusiasm that made their eyes alight. An officer reined in his horse and leaned over his saddle to speak to me. "It was a great day for Ireland," he said. Yesterday another man, with an arm in a sling, also used the words "a great day," but said, "It's a great day for New Zealand." And another officer, speaking of the way in which all our men went forward to victory, English troops advancing with their old unbroken courage in spite of hard fighting through a year of war, said: "This is the best thing our armies have ever done, the most complete and absolute success. It all went like clockwork."

One great proof of victory is the relief of some of those deadly places in the salient under direct observation from Messines Ridge--screens of foliage which I pa.s.sed to-day are no longer needed, and one may walk openly in places where German eyes had been watching for men to kill for two years and a half. And another proof, written in human figures, is one huge ma.s.s after another of German prisoners, a thousand or more in each a.s.sembling place in the fields along the roadsides. They were lying and standing to-day in the suns.h.i.+ne, with coloured handkerchiefs tied above their heads, many of them stripped to the waist to air their s.h.i.+rts, some still wearing their heavy shrapnel helmets with sackcloth covering, all drowsed with fatigue and the prolonged strain of our sh.e.l.l-fire, so that they sleep with heads on knees or lying as though dead in huddled postures. They wake at intervals, asking for water, and then sleep again. There are such crowds of these field-grey men that they are astounded by their own numbers, and when questioned speak gloomily of the doom that is upon their rule.

"What do you think of it all?" asked an Irish officer of a German officer whom he captured in Wytschaete village. The man shook his head and said in good English, "We are done for." Another officer taken by English troops on the northern sector of the attack was frank in revealing his tragic thoughts when he heard the mines go up. He thought, so he says, "Thank Heaven the British are attacking. Now I can surrender. Yesterday my division had three good regiments, now they do not exist. This attack ought to end the war." Let us not base too much optimistic belief on such words by German prisoners.

In that northern part of the attack by the London battalions of the 47th and the Yorks.h.i.+res and other English troops of the 23rd Division, who started near Triangle Wood, there was bad ground for a.s.sembly before the battle known as the Mud-Patch. There were no trenches there, and our lads had to lie out all night in the open without any cover from the sh.e.l.l-fire. It seemed that the Germans saw them, and their commanding officer was in a fever of anxiety, thinking they were discovered and would be sh.e.l.led to death. But, as though expecting a raid from one point, the enemy only barraged round a group of mine-craters, from which our men had been withdrawn, because their shafts were packed with explosives ready to be touched off at dawn. In one mine-crater held by the Germans a shaft ran underneath called the Berlin Shaft--the way to Berlin, according to the Australians who dug it months ago. Above it was a half-company of Germans, and when the mine was blown at dawn not a man escaped. Beyond was the Damstra.s.se, where the enemy had deep trenches and strong emplacements in the hollow, so that our Generals were afraid of trouble here, but when our men came to it they found nothing but frightful ruin, obliterating all the trenches and redoubts, and the men who still lived there shouted: "Don't shoot, don't shoot, Kamerad!"

The taking of Wytschaete by the Irish Nationalists, with Ulster men next to them, was one of the great episodes of the battle, vying with the exploit of the men of New Zealand in carrying Messines Ridge. I went among them to-day up there by Wytschaete Wood across our old trenches and by "the great wall of China," built a few months ago as a barrier--a wonderful place of sand-bag defences and deep dug-outs. Not much is left of Wytschaete Wood, once 800 yards square, now a pitiful wreckage of broken stumps and tattered tree-trunks. The slopes of the ridge are all barren and tortured with sh.e.l.l-fire like the Vimy Ridge, and across it unceasingly went flights of heavy sh.e.l.ls, droning loudly as they pa.s.sed over the crest, and with all our heavy howitzers firing with thunderous ear-stunning strokes. But the Irish soldiers paid no heed to this noise of gun-fire, for the enemy was answering back hardly at all, and the battle-line had gone forward. An Irish major was asleep under a little bit of a copse within a few yards of a 6-in. howitzer, splitting the heavens with its sharp crack of sound, and he slept in his socks as sweetly as a babe in the cradle until wakened to speak to me, which made me sorry, because he had earned his rest. But he sat up smiling, and glad to talk of his Irish boys, who had done gloriously. Away off near a sinister little wood, where many men have died in the old days, sat the brigadier of the Irish troops, the South and West Country Irish who went through Wytschaete Wood and took the village. "Go and see my boys up in their trenches," he said; "they will tell you all they have done, and it was well done. Old Ireland has done great things."

The boys, as he called them, though some are old soldiers who fought at Suvla Bay, and the youngest of them are old in war and remember as far back in history as the days when they stormed through Guillemont and Ginchy, were sitting with German caps on their heads, and examining German machine-guns, and sorting all their souvenirs of battle. I talked with many of them, and they told their adventures of yesterday with a touch of Irish humour and a sparkle in their eyes. It was the little things of battle which they remembered most; the rations and soda-water they found in German dug-outs; the way they groped around for souvenirs as soon as they gained their ground. But stupendous still in their imagination was the drum-fire of our guns and the explosion of the mines.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE MESSINES RIDGE AND Pa.s.sCHENDAELE

London: W^m. Heinemann _Stanford's Geog^l. Estab^t., London_]

"As soon as the barrage began," said an Irish sergeant of the Munsters, "a mine only a few hundred yards away from us at Maedelstede Farm went up, and we went down. The ground rocked under us, and fire rushed up to the sky. The fumes came back on to us and made us dizzy, but we--the Royal Irish and the Munsters--went on to Pet.i.t-Bois Wood, and then to Wytschaete Wood, and other Irish lads pa.s.sed through us to the attack on the village."

The only trouble was in and about the wood. In the centre of it was a small body of Germans, with a machine-gun, who held out stubbornly and swept the Irish with fire. But they were destroyed, and the attack swept on. There was another post hereabout, in which a party of Germans held out with rifle-fire. An Irish officer of a famous old family led an attack on this, and fell dead with a bullet in his brain at five yards range, but a sergeant with him, whom I met to-day, helped to surround the enemy, and this hornets' nest was routed out. A German officer had climbed a tree, and in the coolest possible way signalled with his hand to his men beyond. An Irishman brought him down, and made him a prisoner.

Wytschaete village was a fortress position, with machine-gun emplacements made for defence on all sides, but the Irish closed round it and captured it easily. The garrison was demoralized by prolonged sh.e.l.l-fire, which had made a clean sweep of the hospice ruins and the church and chteau, and every blade of gra.s.s above their tunnels. "I am an old soldier," said one of their officers, "and I hate to be a prisoner, but human nature cannot stand the strain of such bombardments."

On the right of Irish Nationalists fought the Ulstermen, keeping in absolute line with their comrades-in-arms, in friendly rivalry with them to give glory to Ireland. They advanced through Spanbroekmolen, a fortress position, through h.e.l.l Wood, to the top of Wytschaete Ridge, and it is curious that these two bodies of Irish troops had an almost identical experience. The South and West Country Irishmen of Dublin and Munster took 1000 prisoners. So did the Ulstermen. When the Catholic Irishmen were shaken by the mine explosion a whole company of Germans was hurled high in its eruption, and this awful fate happened to another company of Germans in front of the Ulstermen. Without thought of old strife at home, these men fought side by side and are proud of each other. Their Irish blood has mingled, and out of it some spirit of healing and brotherhood should come because of this remembrance. An Irish soldier poet has made a new version of "The Wearing of the Green,"

inspired by the guns that wear green jackets of foliage and cover the advance of the Irish brigade. I heard some of the verses this morning:

_They love the old division in the land the boys come from, And they're proud of what they did at Loos and on the Somme.

If by chance we all advance to Whitesheet and Messines, They'll know the guns that strafe the Huns were wearing of the green._

Wytschaete and Messines are safe in our hands, and our troops are far on the other side. A party of the enemy is holding out in Battle Wood, but that will not be for long, and is only a small episode. To-day and yesterday German troops ma.s.sed at Warneton, as though for a counter-attack, but each time were scattered by our guns. From our new ridge, so long an evil barrier against us, we have observation on them, and the tables are turned.

III

AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE

JUNE 9

The ground gained by our troops in the great battle of Messines remains firmly in our hands, and enemy attempts to counter-attack have been broken by our artillery, in most cases before the German troops have been able to advance. Last evening shortly before dusk of another day of brilliant suns.h.i.+ne, almost too hot for our men in shadeless country of the battlefields, SOS signals all along the line gave warning of German endeavours to thrust back our new front line far beyond the Messines Ridge, and away north of St.-Eloi on the old line of the Ypres salient, now by our victory no longer a salient.

Our gunners got to work again, in spite of a night-and-day strain for more than a week, and for several hours there was another tremendous bombardment from all our heavies and field-guns, watched for miles around by Flemish peasants sitting outside their windmills and outside cottage doors, looking at this lightning in the sky, which is a revelation to them of the mighty growth of that British Army since those early days when a few divisions and a few guns came to these fields of Flanders and fought to a thin, ragged line round Ypres. In many cases the rockets which rose from our lines last night calling for the help of the gunners were hardly needed, for though the enemy was seen to be a.s.sembling, he did not try to break through our barrage. In many places ma.s.sed bodies of his men were caught round Warneton by this new storm of fire which burst upon them, and the night scenes behind the German lines must have been full of terror and tragedy for those poor wretches urged forward along the roads ploughed up by our sh.e.l.ls. Only at Klein Zillebeke, on the northern flank of our battle-line, did they gain a temporary footing, and many of them lie dead there after the fierce fighting which is still in progress.

It is no wonder that, after such experiences of our gun-fire, the German prisoners show no regret at being in British hands. I saw new batches of them to-day, mopped up last night as an aftermath of the battle, young boys and middle-aged men, all very st.u.r.dy and strong, and astonis.h.i.+ngly clean after their escape from the tumult of that frightful ground by Wytschaete and Messines. They stretched themselves in the suns.h.i.+ne, and took their ease in green fields, drinking quarts of water provided by their guards. It is not with resignation but with joy that they find themselves on our side of the lines, away from all that horror of the fire zone.

"Now we shall go on leave," they said to one of our officers; "we are sick of this war." He spoke to two German boys who have been fighting for a year, and are now only seventeen and look much younger. "You ought to be spanked and sent home to your mothers," he said. They laughed, and said: "That is what we should like, sir, if you please."

All the prisoners are extraordinarily ignorant of the feeling of hatred they have aroused against them in the world, and expect that they should be admired for the way they have fought. But they want the war to end quickly, and the rank and file do not seem to mind very much whether it ends by a German victory or German defeat, so that it ends somehow. One human being, shattered in nerves, half senseless, was dragged back after Hill 60 was mined, and he said that he had seen only two men of his company after the great explosion. All the others had been hurled sky-high by the flames and gases, or buried in the fall of earth.

The work of this mining under the German lines has been carried on for a year or more by a number of tunnelling companies from Australia, New Zealand, and our mining districts. It was hard, dangerous toil, for the enemy was down counter-mining, and there were frightful moments when the men who heard the working of picks very close to them had to be rushed out lest they should be blown into the next world. Their own work was done quickly lest the enemy should discover the secret of these borings beneath their lines before the ammonal with which they were packed was detonated on the morning of the battle. It was in darkness that the miners relieved each other lest enemy aircraft or eyes that always stared down from the ridges should see and suspect. Some of our English troops took Hill 60 after this explosion, which flung some of them to the ground as they rose at the signal of attack. From the craters they dragged that dazed and terror-stricken officer, who had lost all his company after that vibration of an electric wire in contact with h.e.l.lish forces.

Just south of these men, astride the Ypres-Comines Ca.n.a.l, a number of London battalions of the 47th Division were fighting forward to the ruins of the famous White Chteau, south of the ca.n.a.l, on the west of Hollebeke. It is the Chteau Matthieu, once a n.o.ble mansion, with a park in which a stream flowed from a lake to the ca.n.a.l, and fine stables south of the lake, surrounded by woods. For more than a year only ruins of the chteau stood, and the wood was like all these woods of war, lopped and torn by sh.e.l.l-fire, with black, dead limbs. Some of the London men were having a hard fight north of the ca.n.a.l in face of machine-gun fire sweeping them from two triangular spoil-banks, as they are called, where earth from the ca.n.a.l sides has been stacked, forming strong points for the enemy above their tunnelled defences. They took one of these heaps of earth with eighty prisoners, but fell back from the other holding the ca.n.a.l bank opposite White Chteau, where their comrades, London men all, were fighting heavily. The Germans here did not yield without a desperate resistance. A company and a half of men held the ruins of the chteau, and flung out bombs to keep our a.s.saulting troops at bay. A gallant platoon crept round the chteau walls, and hurled bombs over these bits of brickwork, and after some time of this fighting the enemy hoisted a white flag of surrender, and sixty prisoners, survivors of this garrison, were taken. The Londoners still had a hard way to go across the stream from the lake, twenty feet broad at points, and past the stables and through the old stumps of the wood, but they kept to the time-table of the battle and added 450 prisoners to the great captures of the day. It was an historic day in the record of the London men of the 47th Division, who have fought with such glorious valour since they first came out to France.

JUNE 10

On the right of the London troops were some English county regiments of the 41st Division--the 60th Rifles (King's Royal Rifles), West Kents, and others--men who fought a great battle in the Somme fields that day when a Tank waddled up the high street of Flers with cheering men behind.

On the night of June 6 they lay by St.-Eloi, in the salient opposite the Mound, a famous heap of earth taken over by the glorious old 3rd Division, and lost when the Canadians were violently attacked a year ago. This mound had been cratered by deep mines in those bad old days of fighting, but the enemy did not know that new shafts had been tunnelled under them, and that explosive forces enormously greater than in the first mines were about to be touched off. When the metal discs were fired by tunnelling officers the sound of thousands of our men cheering with the wild madness of enthusiasm could be heard even above the deafening uproar of the explosions. Then waves of riflemen ran forward, round the vast craters that had been flung open and across the first line of German trenches, frightfully upheaved and shattered. There were not many living Germans here, and they were dazed by the shock and terror of the mines and made no kind of fight. Beyond them was a strong place known as the Damstra.s.se, a street of concrete houses built of great blocks six feet thick, and so enormously solid that not even heavy sh.e.l.l-bursts could do much damage to them. This position had given great anxiety to our officers, who knew its strength, but as it happened, the violence of our sh.e.l.l-fire was so amazing that many of these blockhouses were blown in, and the garrison of Damstra.s.se was utterly cowed, so that they were captured by hundreds.

The King's Royal Rifles pressed forward into the frightful chaos of country, with charred tree-trunks, upturned trenches, rubbish-heaps which had been German strong points, and a litter of machine-guns, twisted wire, bomb stores, and dead bodies. The first check came outside the ruin of an estaminet, in which a party of Germans, with machine-guns and rifles, determined to sell their lives dearly. They poured fire into our men, who suffered a good many casualties here, but would not be baulked, whatever the cost. They took what cover they could, and used their rifles to riddle the place with shot. One by one the Germans fell, and their fire slackened. Then the Rifles charged the ruins and captured all those who still remained alive. Fresh waves of men came up and went forward into Ravine Wood, with its tattered trunks and litter of broken branches. Here there was another fight, very fierce and b.l.o.o.d.y, between some of the West Kents and German soldiers of the 35th Division who attempted a strong counter-attack. The men of Kent had their bayonets fixed, and at a word from their officers they made a quick, grim dash at the Germans, advancing upon them through the dead wood with their bayonets ready also, so that the morning sun gleamed upon all this steel. The bayonets crossed. The men of Kent went through the enemy thrusting and stabbing, but though they saw red in that hour they gave quarter to men who dropped their rifles and cried "Kamerad!" Twenty-five prisoners were taken in that encounter, and over 800 prisoners were taken between the Mound and Ravine Wood before the day was done, with a great store of booty, including eight trench-mortars and nearly thirty machine-guns, though many more lie buried in this ground, and two searchlights and sacks of letters from German soldiers to their homes.

The enemy's losses hereabouts were very heavy. An officer taken prisoner said his own company had been reduced to thirty men before the battle began owing to our bombardment. Many of their batteries were knocked out, and the gunners lie dead before them. Several Tanks came up to share in the fight, and climbed over all this broken ground, but did not find much work to do as the strong parts had been knocked out.

The completeness of this victory, the march through of our troops, the utter despair of the German troops, was due in an overwhelming way to the guns, and the gunners who served them. It is only right and just that the highest tribute should be paid to these men, who have worked day and night for nearly a fortnight, under the intense strain, in an infernal noise, without sleep enough to relieve the nerve-rack, and always in danger of death. Gunner officers are hoa.r.s.e with shouting under fire. They are hollow-eyed with bodily and mental exhaustion. The ammunition-carriers worked themselves stiff in order to feed the guns.