XX
I have described what happened on our side of the lines, our fearful losses, the stream of wounded that came back day by day, the “Butchers’ Shops,” the agony in men’s souls, the shell-shock cases, the welter and bewilderment of battle, the shelling of our own troops, the lack of communication between fighting units and the command, the filth and stench of the hideous shambles which were our battlefields. But to complete the picture of that human conflict in the Somme I must now tell what happened on the German side of the lines, as I was able to piece the tale together from German prisoners with whom I talked, German letters which I found in their abandoned dugouts, and documents which fell into the hands of our staff-officers.
Our men were at least inspirited by the knowledge that they were beating their enemy back, in spite of their own bloody losses. The Germans had not even that source of comfort, for whatever it might be worth under barrage fire. The mistakes of our generalship, the inefficiency of our staff-work, were not greater than the blunderings of the German High Command, and their problem was more difficult than ours because of the weakness of their reserves, owing to enormous preoccupation on the Russian front. The agony of their men was greater than ours.
To understand the German situation it must be remembered that from January to May, 1916, the German command on the western front was concentrating all its energy and available strength in manpower and gun-power upon the attack of Verdun. The Crown Prince had staked his reputation upon that adventure, which he believed would end in the capture of the strongest French fortress and the destruction of the French armies. He demanded men and more men, until every unit that could be spared from other fronts of the line had been thrown into that furnace. Divisions were called in from other theaters of war, and increased the strength on the western front to a total of about one hundred and thirty divisions.
But the months passed and Verdun still held out above piles of German corpses on its slopes, and in June Germany looked east and saw a great menace. The Russian offensive was becoming violent. German generals on the Russian fronts sent desperate messages for help. “Send us more men,” they said, and from the western front four divisions containing thirty-nine battalions were sent to them.
They must have been sent grudgingly, for now another menace threatened the enemy, and it was ours. The British armies were getting ready to strike. In spite of Verdun, France still had men enough—withdrawn from that part of the line in which they had been relieved by the British—to cooperate in a new attack.
It was our offensive that the German command feared most, for they had no exact knowledge of our strength or of the quality of our new troops. They knew that our army had grown prodigiously since the assault on Loos, nearly a year before.
They had heard of the Canadian reinforcements, and the coming of the Australians, and the steady increase of recruiting in England, and month by month they had heard the louder roar of our guns along the line, and had seen their destructive effect spreading and becoming more terrible. They knew of the steady, quiet concentration of batteries and divisions on the west and south of the Ancre.
The German command expected a heavy blow and, prepared for it, but as yet had no knowledge of the driving force behind it. What confidence they had of being able to resist the British attack was based upon the wonderful strength of the lines which they had been digging and fortifying since the autumn of the first year of war—“impregnable positions,” they had called them—the inexperience of our troops, their own immense quantity of machine-guns, the courage and skill of their gunners, and their profound belief in the superiority of German generalship.
In order to prevent espionage during the coming struggle, and to conceal the movement of troops and guns, they ordered the civil populations to be removed from villages close behind their positions, drew cordons of military police across the country, picketed crossroads, and established a network of counter espionage to prevent any leakage of information.
To inspire the German troops with a spirit of martial fervor (not easily aroused to fever pitch after the bloody losses before Verdun) Orders of the Day were issued to the battalions counseling them to hold fast against the hated English, who stood foremost in the way of peace (that was the gist of a manifesto by Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, which I found in a dugout at Montauban), and promising them a speedy ending to the war.
Great stores of material and munitions were concentrated at railheads and dumps ready to be sent up to the firing-lines, and the perfection of German organization may well have seemed flawless—before the attack began.
When they began they found that in “heavies” and in expenditure of high explosives they were outclassed.
They were startled, too, by the skill and accuracy of the British gunners, whom they had scorned as “amateurs,” and by the daring of our airmen, who flew over their lines with the utmost audacity, “spotting” for the guns, and registering on batteries, communication trenches, crossroads, railheads, and every vital point of organization in the German war-machine working opposite the British lines north and south of the Ancre.
Even before the British infantry had left their trenches at dawn on July 1st, German officers behind the firing-lines saw with anxiety that all the organization which had worked so smoothly in times of ordinary trench-warfare was now working only in a hazardous way under a deadly storm of shells.
Food and supplies of all kinds could not be sent up to front-line trenches
