From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917 Part 22

THE WAY THROUGH GLENCORSE WOOD

AUGUST 22

There was severe fighting again to-day eastwards of St.-Julien (3-1/2 miles north-east of Ypres), extending south across the Zonnebeke, beyond the Frezenberg Redoubt, while on the right our troops again penetrated Glencorse Copse (due east of Ypres), and fought on that ugly rising ground which the enemy is defending in great strength. The Divisions engaged, from north to south, are the 29th, 38th, 11th, 48th, 18th, 61st, 15th, 19th, 47th, 14th, and 24th.

On the left progress has been made from the high road of St.-Julien to the Zonnebeke-Langemarck road, which cuts across it, guarded on the enemy's side by two strong points with the usual concrete shelters which the Germans have adopted as their new means of forward defence. Below them there is another strong position called Winnipeg, about which our men were heavily engaged in the early hours of this morning, and below that again the same series of pill-boxes and concrete blockhouses against which the Irish battalions went forward with such desperate valour on the 16th of this month, as I described in my message yesterday.

Scottish troops of the 15th Division attacked to-day where the Southern Irish were engaged six days ago. Before them they had those sinister forts, Beck House and Borry Farm, and Vampire Point guarding the way to the Bremen Redoubt, which will be remembered always in the history of the Irish brigades as places of heroic endeavour, just as now this morning they will take their place in the annals of our Scottish fighting. To the left of them are other forts, round which the Ulster men were fighting last week--Pond Farm, Schuler Farm, and others on the way to the Gallipoli Redoubt. About these places Warwicks.h.i.+res and other Midland troops of the 61st Division have been fighting, and have met with the same difficulties, apart from the state of the ground, which has dried a little. It has not dried much, for our sh.e.l.l-fire has broken up the gullies and streams with which it was drained, and the country is water-logged, so that the pools remain until the sun dries them up. The sh.e.l.l-holes and these ponds are not so full of water as when the Irish went across, and the surface of the sh.e.l.l-broken earth is hardening. But it is only a thin crust over a bog, so that the Tanks which went forward to-day here and there could not get very far without sinking in. One Tank was taken by a gallant crew almost as far as a German strong point nearly half a mile beyond our old front line very early in the morning, and did good work up there. The enemy put down a furious barrage-fire soon after the attack had started to-day, and kept the Frezenberg Redoubt under intense bombardment. But as soon as the attack developed he could not use his artillery against our men at many points, not knowing what forts and ground were still held by his own troops. He relied again upon the cross-fire of machine-guns, arranged very skilfully in depth, for enfilade barrages, and upon the garrisons who held his concrete redoubts in the advanced positions. In one of the blockhouses this morning our Warwicks.h.i.+re men captured forty-seven prisoners, who, when they were surrounded, took refuge in tunnelled galleries running to the right of the main fort, called Schuler Farm.

Some of our men fought through the enfilade fire of machine-guns as far as the slopes of Hill 35, and to the right of this the Scots made a gallant and fierce a.s.sault towards Bremen Redoubt.

AUGUST 30

The sky of Flanders is still full of wind and water, and heavy rain-storms driven by the gale sweep over the battlefield, flinging down trees already broken by sh.e.l.l-fire. Behind the lines some of the hop-fields round Poperinghe and other villages are sadly wrecked. Many of the hop-poles have fallen, and the long trailing hops lie all tangled in the mire. Many telephone wires were down also just after the gale, and the signallers had a rough windy time in getting them up again. But it is on the field of battle that this weather matters most, and there in such places as Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse and Sanctuary Wood on our side of the lines, the linked sh.e.l.l-craters are ponds. In and between them is a quagmire.

I write of Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse rather than of the ground farther north, in the valley of the Steenbeek, though that is just as bad, or a little worse, because yesterday I went to see the troops of the 14th Division who made the last attack in those sinister woodlands in the track of the London men who fought there so desperately on July 31.

The last attack, beginning on August 22, was made by light-infantry regiments, among whom were the Duke of Cornwall's and the Somerset Light Infantry. They were fine well-trained men--trained hard and trained long in the tactics of a.s.sault--and though they took ground which they could not hold, because the enemy was in great strength against them and they were weakened after hard fighting in frightful ground, they held off repeated counter-attacks and indicted great loss upon the enemy, and held their original line intact against most fierce a.s.saults. The enemy's storm troops advanced against them through Inverness Copse, and in encircling movements which tried to get round and through their flanks again and again during two days of violent fighting, they counter-attacked behind the barrage-fire of many batteries, so that all the ground held by our men was swept by high explosives and shrapnel hour after hour, and when these waves of Saxons and Prussians were broken or repulsed, others came with a sheet of flame before them--from "flammenwerfer" machines, which project fire like water from a fireman's hose. Our riflemen and light infantry did not break before this advancing furnace, but fired into the heart of it, and saw some of the "flammenwerfer" men go up in their own flame like moths bursting in the light of a candle with loud reports, "a loud pop" as the men describe it, so that nothing of them was left but a little smoke and a few cinders.

But that was at the end of the battle, and the light-infantry battalions had fought through terrible hours before they faced that last ordeal.

Before the attack they held a line opposite Glencorse Wood on the left and running down on the right past Stirling Castle, the old German fort above a nest of dug-outs, which has become famous in all this fighting.

In front of them lay Inverness Copse, a thousand yards long by 500 deep, with many concrete blockhouses hidden, or half hidden, among the fallen trees and tattered stumps and upheaved earth of this blasted wood; and north-east of that, ruins of an old chteau called Herenthage Castle.

Facing our left were three lines of battered trenches north of Inverness Copse, and two blockhouses called L-shaped Farm--on an aeroplane photograph it looks exactly like the capital letter--and Fitzclarence Farm. These places were strongly garrisoned, and the German machine-gunners were safe within their concrete walls from any sh.e.l.l-splinters. Our barrage swept on to the enemy's lines, flung up the earth, crashed among the trees, and tore all this belt of land to chaos, where already it was deeply cratered by the earlier bombardment. Behind that barrage went over the light-infantry battalions, and immediately they came under gusts of machine-gun fire from the blockhouses which still stood intact. It was then 7 o'clock in the morning. They forced their way into Inverness Copse, followed by some Tanks, and roved round one of the blockhouses, where thirty Germans sat inside with their steel doors shut and their machine-guns firing through the loopholes. Some sappers were sent for, and blew in the doors, and the garrison were killed fighting.

The Duke of Cornwall's men were checked for a time by machine-gun fire from Glencorse Wood, and advance waves were held up round a blockhouse with a garrison of sixty men north of Inverness Copse, but after fierce fighting this place fell, and not a man escaped. The Somerset Light Infantry pa.s.sed on, and fought their way to the rubbish-heap called Herenthage Chteau, where a hundred and twenty Germans of the 145th Infantry Regiment held out in concrete chambers. Only their officer remained alive after the fighting here, and he was brought in a prisoner.

The Somersets established themselves in their goal with posts in front of Inverness Copse and Herenthage Castle, but on the left the Cornish lads were held up by machine-gun fire east of "Clapham Junction," where there was another fortified farm with sixty men and six machine-guns inside. A Tank came up and sat outside the place, firing point-blank at its walls, and the Cornwalls followed it and burst the doors in and fought until again not a single German remained alive, after a terrible bayonet contest. So the attack had succeeded, but with forces now heavily reduced. It was now ten o'clock in the morning. The story that follows is one long series of counter-attacks. It began with a barrage which came down with a tempest of sh.e.l.ls half-way through Inverness Copse. For miles around the German batteries concentrated their fire on this ground and raked it. From the east of Inverness Copse, and at the same time from the south, storming parties of Germans advanced behind this great gun-fire and, though the first attack was broken and then the second by rifles and machine-guns, a third developed in greater strength. A runner came down from the Somersets--one of those brave runners who all day long and next day worked to and fro through dreadful barrage-fire until many were killed and other men went out to search for those dead boys and look for their dispatches, unless they had been blown to bits. The message from the Somersets reported that they could not hold on. They were being enclosed on both flanks, and proposed to fall back half-way through Inverness Copse, and this was done. Some reserves from light-infantry battalions were thrown in to strengthen the line, and the Cornwalls threw out a defensive flank with strong points.

At midday another attack was made on the Somersets, and driven off by rifles and machine-guns, and at two o'clock they reported that the enemy was ma.s.sing in an attempt to turn their left flank, which was then weak. The artillery answered an urgent call, and the German a.s.sembly was destroyed. So the evening came and the night, and the Light Infantry held on east of Stirling Castle and partly in Inverness Copse with many dead and wounded about them, and lines of German dead in front of them, awaiting riflemen coming to their support.

In a brigade headquarters a group of officers waited more anxiously for this help, having more responsibility. They sat with wet towels about their heads and eyes, in poisonous fumes and dreadful stenches which crept down from above, where heavy sh.e.l.ls burst incessantly, shaking all the earth and blowing out the candles. The concrete ceiling bulged in.

Runners came in white-faced and shaking, after frightful journeys, and officers bent to the candlelight to read scribbled messages sent down by hard-pressed men. Outside were the groans of wounded men.

At dawn, Tanks went out to attack the strong points north of Inverness Copse, where the enemy had rallied again, and one of them approached Fitzclarence Farm and broke up a counter-attacking preparation there.

Some Germans ran into the blockhouse there and shot down the steel doors and lay doggo. Others came out of a trench to attack the Tank, but fled before the fire. Later in the morning German aeroplanes came out and flew very low and played their machine-guns on to our men, but without doing much harm.

From 1 A.M. to 3.30 A.M. the enemy kept a terrific barrage over all our ground, and then flamed out all along the line the signal of a new counter-attack. It was the "flammenwerfer" attack against the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, and the whole sky was red with the light of these advancing fire-jets. For a time, in spite of the enemy's heavy losses, the Cornwalls had to retire before these far-reaching flames, but they rallied and went forward again, driving the enemy part of the way back, where he was swept by our artillery-fire. The enemy kept up a steady barrage-fire over three wide belts, and an officer who went up to report the position had the worst hours of his life on that journey through bursting sh.e.l.ls and over the fields of dead. But in spite of a message that had come down reporting a new withdrawal, it was found that the line was intact, and that the thin ranks of Light Infantry and King's Royal Rifles had beaten back all the enemy's a.s.saults, and had destroyed their spirit for further attacks by most deadly losses. We could not hold Inverness Copse, but the fighting here was worthy of men who, during two years of war, have fought with steadfast courage and have many acts of heroism in their long record.

XIII

THE SLAUGHTER-HOUSE OF LENS

AUGUST 23

One day, when it is possible to get in and around Lens, the veil will be torn from a human charnel-house, or, rather, from charnel-houses which none of us may yet enter or see through the drifting smoke. Yesterday I looked down on Lens and saw its roofless buildings and its gaping walls, but I could only guess at the scenes which are hidden below ground there in the tunnels where the Germans a.s.semble for their counter-attacks against the Canadians, and to which they drag back their dead and wounded. Those places must reek with the smell of death and corruption, for the losses of the Prussian Guards during the last few and of other divisions who have come up against the Canadians, have been, I am told and believe, enormous. The Canadians tell me that their troops have never had harder or more prolonged fighting, not even in their old days of the Ypres salient nor on the Somme. Every hundred yards of the ground they have taken, and during the last week or so they have taken thousands of yards of open country and of ruined streets in and about the mining cits, until they have forced their way into Lens itself, have been contested by desperate fighting and held against unceasing counter-attacks delivered by great bodies of picked German troops supported by monstrous bombardments. Imagination can, if it likes, picture the slaughter involved in all this to those German a.s.sault troops, because they have not succeeded in gaining their purpose, and counter-attacks like that, in those numbers and in that strength, are shattered when they do not succeed. It is a wonderful tribute to the Canadians and to their grim tenacity that, after all the repeated counter-attacks against them, and after storms of fire from batteries which have increased in number every day, they hold their lines round Lens intact as they stood on August 15 and 16, and have gained an entry into the streets of Lens and swung up southwards with increasing pressure.

Lens is packed tight with German troops. They belong to the 4th Guards Division, and latterly to the 1st Guards Reserve, the crack division of the German army, which had a month's rest at Cambrai before being sent into this slaughter-house. For although that city is tunnelled throughout, all the cellars being linked up and strengthened with ma.s.sive concrete, so that even heavy sh.e.l.ls cannot pierce down to them, men cannot fight in tunnels if they are on the offensive, and must get out of them to make their counter-attacks. It is at those times that they suffer more hideously than in any other battle.

Our aeroplanes are always watching for these a.s.semblies. To take only one case out of many, they reported a ma.s.s of men in a certain square of Lens the day before yesterday. Our guns turned on to them, not only our field-guns but our heavies, up to those howitzers which could batter down a ma.s.sive fortress after a few rounds. Men under the fire of such sh.e.l.ls as those things send do not escape in great numbers. Most of them die. The Prussians in the square of Lens were caught by this hurricane fire, and before they could get into the tunnels many were blown to bits.

Yesterday as I looked down on Lens the fire had quietened on both sides, as though the guns were tired. For several minutes at a time there was a great quietude over the city of doom, and as the afternoon sun lay warm upon its red walls, and cast black shadows across its deserted streets, where no single figure walked, it was hard to believe that a few hours before swarms of men had been fighting on the edge of those houses, and that the place was full of new dead and old. The water of the Souchez river was as blue as the sky, which was deep bright blue above wispy clouds. A little light glinted from the white church tower which a sh.e.l.l has smashed off at the top. Perhaps some German officer was there staring through his gla.s.ses, or perhaps it was only a bit of metal caught by the sun. A smoke-barrage drifted densely across the northern side of the city, and every now and then there came a sharp vicious hammering of machine-guns to show that somewhere in those ruins men wore alive and watchful. Then the guns got busy again, but in a slow, unhurried way. The enemy had a hate against the outer edge of Livin, and every two minutes smote it with a great sh.e.l.l, which burst with big billowing smoke-clouds, and a flash which was followed by a low, sullen roar. He flung sh.e.l.ls as big as this into Angres and Avion, but seemed to rely on machine-gun fire to barrage our lines nearest to his own.

Behind me to the right were some of our big howitzers, old friends of mine, whose voices I prefer at a mile or two's distance. They tuned up their ba.s.s viols and played their dead march. Perhaps it was their sh.e.l.ls I saw smas.h.i.+ng on to the German defences. Rosy clouds went up, and in those clouds the dust of red-brick houses went up, too, leaving gaps of nothingness where the buildings had once been. There was a kite-balloon in the sky behind me with the wispy clouds like white horse-tails all curled about it, and presently there came riding above it several coveys of aeroplanes, so that the sky was filled with their loud drone-song. They flew round about Lens, and only a few German "Archies" tried to strafe them with bursts of shrapnel. They flew not very high above the mining city, circling round and round like hawks before swooping to their prey. The guns were loud but shrill; and sweet and clear above them a bugle sounded from some camp of ours behind the lines among the cornfields all gold and glowing in the evening light, with a little shadow sleeping beside each stook; and it blew the evening retreat. It is the first time I have heard a bugle play that call so near to the guns, and it stirred one's heart with a queer sense of emotion, as though its music belonged to the spirit world. The night closed down on the battlefields but did not bring peace. Below the stars there were many strange lights and fires and sounds. A tall bank of clouds was pierced with lightning so like sh.e.l.l-fire, except for a longer tremor of light, that men looked and wondered what devilry was on over there in the back areas. The devilry was round about. It was time for the German raiders to come out under the cover of darkness, and they came and dropped their bombs over quiet villages and among the cornfields and the hop-gardens. The explosions came up with sharp flashes and gruff roars from dark fields between black belts of trees.

From the earth hands of light stretched up, reaching up to the clouds and touching them with their finger-tips. They felt their way for those flying raiders, groped about like hands searching in a dark room, and then clasped each other. In the archway below their long straight arms shrapnel glinted like confetti. Our anti-aircraft guns had got their target. Along the lines rockets were rising, giving a second or two of white steady light to No Man's Land, with fringes of trees etched blackly against it. Somewhere a dump--ours or the enemy's--had been hit, and the clouds above it were tipped with scarlet flame. So then the night scene began as usual, and as it is played out below the stars every night. And somewhere in Lens the Prussians were preparing for a new counter-attack, while German doctors in deep tunnels stared down upon a ma.s.s of wounded which was their day's harvest. Into one of the houses there the night before, where fifteen German soldiers lay in the cellar after a day of prodigious fighting, a party of Canadian raiders appeared and dragged them all out to a ditch over the way in the Canadian lines. Well may the German prisoners say to these men of ours, "You give us no rest." There is never a night's rest in Lens nor round about it unless men are put to sleep for ever. Many of them were put to sleep by thousands of gas-sh.e.l.ls fired into the town by our artillery a night ago as an answer to German gas. Perhaps they were glad of it, for the wakeful hours in Lens must be h.e.l.l on earth.

AUGUST 24

To the south of Lens there is a slag-heap overgrown with weeds called the Green Cra.s.sier. It is clearly visible across the Souchez river beyond a broken bridge, and I have often seen it from the lower slopes of Vimy. It was the scene of fierce fighting yesterday, for in the morning the Canadians, who are showing an indomitable spirit after ten days of most furious attacks and counter-attacks, launched an a.s.sault upon it and seized the position. Later in the day the enemy came back in strength and, after violent efforts, succeeded in thrusting the Canadians off the crest of this old mound of cinders, though they still cling to the western side. It is another incident in the long series of fierce and b.l.o.o.d.y encounters which since the battle of Vimy, on April 9, have surrounded the city of Lens and given to its streets and suburbs a sinister but historic fame. The Canadians have fought here with astounding resolution. They have hurled themselves against fortress positions, and by sheer courage have smashed their way through streets entangled with quick-set hedges of steel, through houses alive with machine-gun fire, through trenches dug between concrete forts, through tunnels under red-brick ruins, sometimes too strong to be touched by sh.e.l.l-fire, and through walls loopholed for rifle-fire and hiding machine-gun emplacements designed to enfilade the Canadian line of advance. Through the cits of St.-Laurent, St.-Thodore, and St.-Emilie, to the north and west of Lens, they have fought past high slag-heaps and pit-heads, along railway embankments, and down sunken roads, until they have broken a route through frightful defences to the western streets of the inner city.

Every day, and sometimes many times a day, they have been counter-attacked by swarms of Germans coming up out of their tunnels, and between these attacks they have been under terrific gun-fire from a wide semicircle of heavy batteries. In the early days of the war the French fought like this through the streets of Vermelles, smas.h.i.+ng their way from one wall to another, from one house to another, and over trenches dug across the streets. That fighting in Vermelles stands as one of the most frightful episodes of the war, and when I first went there I stood aghast at the relics of this b.l.o.o.d.y struggle. But Vermelles is hardly more than a village, and the mining district of Lens, with all its suburbs, covers several square miles of ground, so that the Canadians have had a longer and a harder task. Six German divisions have attacked them in turn, and have been shattered against them. These are the 7th and 8th, the 4th Guards Division, the 11th Reserve, the 220th, and the 1st Guards Reserve Division. In addition to these six divisions, some portions, at any rate, of the 185th Division and of the 36th Reserve Division have been engaged. The total German strength used at Lens must well exceed fifty battalions, and the German losses may perhaps be estimated at between 12,000 to 15,000 men.

The Canadians themselves have been hard pressed at times, but have endured the exhaustion of a savage struggle with amazing strength of spirit, grimly and fiercely resolved to hold their gains, unless overwhelmed by numbers in their advanced positions, as it has sometimes happened to them. But it is no wonder that some of the men whom I met yesterday coming out of that city of blood and death looked like men who had suffered to the last limit of mental and bodily resistance. Their faces were haggard and drawn. Their eyes were heavy. Their skin was grey as burnt ash. Some of them walked like drunken men, drunk with sheer fatigue, and as soon as they had reached their journey's end some of them sat under the walls of a mining village with their chalky helmets tilted back, drugged by the need of sleep, but too tired even for that.

They were men of the battalions who three days ago came face to face with the enemy in No Man's Land, a stretch of barren cratered earth between St.-Emilie and the northern streets of Lens, and fought him there until many dead lay strewn on both sides, and their ammunition was exhausted. An officer of one of these battalions came out of a miner's cottage to talk to me. He was a very young man with a thin, clean-shaven face, which gave him a boyish look. He was too weary to stand straight and too weary to talk more than a few jerky words. He leaned up against the wall of the miner's cottage, and pa.s.sed a hand over his face and eyes, and said:

"I'm darned tired. It was the h.e.l.l of a fight. We fought to a finish, and when we had no more bombs of our own we picked up Heine's bombs and used those." [The Canadians call their enemy Heine and not Fritz.]

"Heine was at least three times as strong as us, and we gave him h.e.l.l.

It was hand-to-hand fighting--rifles, bombs, bayonets, b.u.t.t-ends, any old way of killing a man, and we killed a lot. But he broke our left flank, and things were b.l.o.o.d.y in the centre. He had one of his strong points there, and swept us with machine-gun fire. My fellows went straight for it, and a lot of them got wiped out. But we got on top of it and through the wire, and held the trench beyond until Heine came down with swarms of bombers."

This young Canadian officer was stricken by the loss of many of his men.

"The best crowd that any fellow could command," and he had been through indescribable things under enormous sh.e.l.l-fire, and he had had no sleep for days and nights, and could not sleep now for thinking of things. But he smiled grimly once or twice when he reckoned up the enemy's losses.

The remembrance of the German dead he had seen seemed like strong wine to his soul. "We made them pay," was his summing up of the battle. The nightmare of it all was still heavy on him, and he spoke with a quiet fierceness about the enemy's losses and the things he had endured in a way which would scare poor, simple souls who think that war is a fine picturesque business.

A senior officer of a battalion on the flank of his was a different type of man--a very tall, strong-featured man of middle age, like an English squire of the old style, with a fine smiling light in his eyes, in spite of all he had been through, and with a vivid way of speech that would not come fast enough to say splendid things about his men, to describe the marvellous way in which they had fought in frightful conditions, to praise first one and then another for the things they had done when things were at their worst. He had been addressing some of the survivors of this battle when I came upon him, and I saw them march away, straightening themselves up before this officer of theirs, and proud because he was pleased with them. He thanked them for one thing above all, and that was for the gallant way in which, after all their fighting, they had gone out to fetch in their dead and wounded, so that not one wounded man lay out there to die or to be taken prisoner, and the dead were brought back for burial. He said a word, too, for Heine, as they call him. The Germans had not sniped or machine-gunned the stretcher-bearers, but had sent their own men out on the same mission too. That was after the battle, and there was no surrendering while the fighting was on.

This officer's story was as wonderful as anything I have heard in this war. And the man himself was wonderful, for he had had no sleep for six days and nights, and had suffered the fearful strain of his responsibility for many men's lives; yet now, when I met him straight from all that, he was bright-eyed and his mind was as clear as a bell, and the emotion that surged through him was well controlled. He described the things I have attempted to describe before--the fortified streets and houses of Lens, which make it one great fortress, tunnelled from end to end with exits into concrete forts two yards thick in cement, in the ruined cottages. On the morning of our attack the enemy was expecting it, and within a minute and a half of our barrage put down his own barrage with terrific intensity. So there were the Canadians between two walls of high explosives, and it was between that inferno that they fought in the great death struggle. For the Canadians had already advanced towards the enemy's line, and in greater numbers--three times as great--he had advanced to ours, and the two forces met on the barren stretch of earth crossed by twisted trenches, which for a time had been No Man's Land.

While the battalion on the left was heavily engaged fighting with rifles and bombs until their ammunition gave out, and then with bayonets and b.u.t.t-ends, the battalion on the right was working southward and eastward to the northern outskirts of Lens. They came up at once against the fortress houses from which machine-gun and rifle fire poured out. The Canadians in small parties tried to surround these places, but many were swept down. Some of them rushed close to the walls of one house, which was a bastion of the northern defences of Lens, and were so close that the machine-guns, through slits in the walls, could not fire at them.

They even established a post behind it and beyond it, quite isolated from the rest of their men, but clinging to their post all day. The enemy dropped bombs upon them through the loopholes and sand-bagged windows, fired rifle-grenades at them, and tried to get machine-guns at them, but there were always a few men left to hold the post, until at last, when the line withdrew elsewhere, they were recalled. One house near here, into which a party of Canadians forced their way, was a big a.r.s.enal. Its cellars were crammed with sh.e.l.ls and piled boxes of bombs.

In other cellars were dead bodies, and the stench of corruption mingled with the stale vapour of gas. Down in one of these vaults a young Canadian soldier stayed with his officer, who was badly wounded, and could not leave him, but waited until night, when he carried the officer back to safety.

Before that night came there were great German counter-attacks. Ma.s.ses of men carrying nothing but stick-bombs, which they had slung around them, advanced down the communication-trenches and flung these things at the Canadians of the left battalion, who were fighting out in the open, and in another communication-trench with the right battalion. The enemy walked over the piled corpses of his own dead before he could drive back the Canadians, but by repeated storming parties he did at last force them to give way and retreat down the trench to gain the support of their comrades of the other battalion, which had not been so hard pressed. These came to the rescue, and for a long time held the German grenadiers at bay. The fighting was fierce and savage on both sides.

At last, weakened by their losses and with failing stores of ammunition, these two battalions were given the order to retire to a trench farther back, and the survivors of the most desperate action in Canadian history withdrew, still fighting, and established blocks in the communication-trenches down which the enemy was bombing, so that they could not pa.s.s those points to the line upon which here on the north of Lens the Canadians had fallen back. Southward there had been no withdrawal, and other battalions had forced their way forward a good distance, shutting up that entrance to the city and getting down into the deep tunnels, over which there howled the unceasing fire of the German heavies. Our own guns were hard at work, and I have already told how the Prussians were destroyed in the square of Lens by 12-inch sh.e.l.ls and shrapnel.

I could write more, but I have written enough. The Canadians never had fighting so hard as this, but the losses they have inflicted upon the enemy have made Lens a Prussian tomb, so that its tunnels are death vaults. The heart of the city is still a fortress, and the new garrison is still strong there, so that, like Thiepval, which held out for many weeks after it was enclosed on three sides, Lens will not fall in a night. But as a dwelling-place for German troops it is a city of abomination and dreadfulness.

XIV