“Goodness knows what’s happening,” said an officer I met near Mametz. He had been waiting all night and half a day with a body of troops who had expected to go forward, and were still hanging about under harassing fire.
On July 9th Contalmaison was taken. I saw that attack very clearly, so clearly that I could almost count the bricks in the old château set in a little wood, and saw the left-hand tower knocked off by the direct hit of a fifteen-inch shell. At four o’clock in the afternoon our guns concentrated on the village, and under the cover of that fire our men advanced on three sides of it, hemmed it in, and captured it with the garrison of the 122nd Bavarian Regiment, who had suffered the agonies of hell inside its ruins. Now our men stayed in the ruins, and this time German shells smashed into the château and the cottages and left nothing but rubbish heaps of brick through which a few days later I went walking with the smell of death in my nostrils. Our men were now being shelled in that place.
Beyond La Boisselle, on the left of the Albert–Bapaume road, there had been a village called Ovillers. It was no longer there. Our guns has removed every trace of it, except as it lay in heaps of pounded brick. The Germans had a network of trenches about it, and in their ditches and their dugouts they fought like wolves. Our 12th Division was ordered to drive them out—a division of English county troops, including the Sussex, Essex, Bedfords, and Middlesex—and those country boys of ours fought their way among communication trenches, burrowed into tunnels, crouched below hummocks of earth and brick, and with bombs and bayonets and broken rifles, and boulders of stone, and German stick-bombs, and any weapon that would kill, gained yard by yard over the dead bodies of the enemy, or by the capture of small batches of cornered men, until after seventeen days of this one hundred and forty men of the 3rd Prussian Guard, the last of their garrison, without food or water, raised a signal of surrender, and came out with their hands up. Ovillers was a shambles, in a fight of primitive earthmen like human beasts. Yet our men were not beast-like. They came out from those places—if they had the luck to come out—apparently unchanged, without any mark of the beast on them, and when they cleansed themselves of mud and filth, boiled the lice out of their shirts, and assembled in a village street behind the lines, they whistled, laughed, gossiped, as though nothing had happened to their souls—though something had really happened, as now we know.
It was not until July 14th that our High Command ordered another general attack after the local fighting which had been in progress since the first day of battle. Our field-batteries, and some of our “heavies,” had moved forward to places like Montauban and Contalmaison—where German shells came searching for them all day long—and new divisions had been brought up to relieve some of the men who had been fighting so hard and so long. It was to be an attack on the second German line of defense on the ridges by the village of Bazentin le Grand and Bazentin le Petit to Longueval on the right and Delville Wood. I went up in the night to see the bombardment and the beginning of the battle and the swirl of its backwash, and I remember now the darkness of villages behind the lines through which our cars crawled, until we reached the edge of the battlefields and saw the sky rent by incessant flames of gunfire, while red tongues of flames leaped up from burning villages. Longueval was on fire, and the two Bazentins, and another belt of land in France, so beautiful to see, even as I had seen it first between the sandbags of our parapets, was being delivered to the charcoal-burners.
I have described that night scene elsewhere, in all its deviltry, but one picture which I passed on the way to the battlefield could not then be told. Yet it was significant of the mentality of our High Command, as was afterward pointed out derisively by Sixte von Arnim. It proved the strange unreasoning optimism which still lingered in the breasts of old-fashioned generals in spite of what had happened on the left on the first day of July, and their study of trench maps, and their knowledge of German machine-guns. By an old millhouse called the Moulin Vivier, outside the village of Méaulte, were masses of cavalry—Indian cavalry and Dragoons—drawn up densely to leave a narrow passageway for field-guns and horse-transport moving through the village, which was in utter darkness. The Indians sat like statues on their horses, motionless, dead silent. Now and again there was a jangle of bits. Here and there a British soldier lit a cigarette and for a second the little flame of his match revealed a bronzed face or glinted on steel helmets.
Cavalry! … So even now there was a serious purpose behind the joke of English soldiers who had gone forward on the first day, shouting, “This way to the gap!” and in the conversation of some of those who actually did ride through Bazentin that day.
A troop or two made their way over the cratered ground and skirted Delville Wood; the Dragoon Guards charged a machine-gun in a cornfield, and killed the gunners. Germans rounded up by them clung to their
