The German losses were piling up. The agony of the German troops under our shellfire was reaching unnatural limits of torture. The early prisoners I saw—Prussians and Bavarians of the 14th Reserve Corps—were nerve-broken, and told frightful stories of the way in which their regiments had been cut to pieces. The German generals had to fill up the gaps, to put new barriers of men against the waves of British infantry. They flung new troops into the line, called up hurriedly from reserve depots.
Now, for the first time, their staff-work showed signs of disorder and demoralization. When the Prussian Guards Reserves were brought up from Valenciennes to counterattack at Contalmaison they were sent on to the battlefield without maps or local guides, and walked straight into our barrage. A whole battalion was cut to pieces and many others suffered frightful things. Some of the prisoners told me that they had lost three-quarters of their number in casualties, and our troops advanced over heaps of killed and wounded.
The 122nd Bavarian Regiment in Contalmaison was among those which suffered horribly. Owing to our ceaseless gunfire, they could get no food-supplies and no water. The dugouts were crowded, so that they had to take turns to get into these shelters, and outside our shells were bursting over every yard of ground.
“Those who went outside,” a prisoner told me, “were killed or wounded. Some of them had their heads blown off, and some of them their arms. But we went on taking turns in the hole, although those who went outside knew that it was their turn to die, most likely. At last most of those who came into the hole were wounded, some of them badly, so that we lay in blood.” That is one little picture in a great panorama of bloodshed.
The German command was not thinking much about the human suffering of its troops. It was thinking of the next defensive line upon which they would have to fall back if the pressure of the British offensive could be maintained—the Longueval–Bazentin–Pozières line. It was getting nervous. Owing to the enormous efforts made in the Verdun offensive, the supplies of ammunition were not adequate to the enormous demand.
The German gunners were trying to compete with the British in continuity of bombardments and the shells were running short. Guns were wearing out under this incessant strain, and it was difficult to replace them. General von Gallwitz received reports of “an alarmingly large number of bursts in the bore, particularly in field-guns.”
General von Arnim complained that “reserve supplies of ammunition were only available in very small quantities.” The German telephone system proved “totally inadequate in consequence of the development which the fighting took.” The German air service was surprisingly weak, and the British airmen had established temporary mastery.
“The numerical superiority of the enemy’s airmen,” noted General von Arnim, “and the fact that their machines were better made, became disagreeably apparent to us, particularly in their direction of the enemy’s artillery fire and in bomb-dropping.”
On July 15th the British troops broke the German second line at Longueval and the Bazentins, and inflicted great losses upon the enemy, who fought with their usual courage until the British bayonets were among them.
A day or two later the fortress of Ovillers fell, and the remnants of the garrison—one hundred and fifty strong—after a desperate and gallant resistance in ditches and tunnels, where they had fought to the last, surrendered with honor.
Then began the long battle of the woods—Devil’s Wood, High Wood, Trones Wood—continued through August with most fierce and bloody fighting, which ended in our favor and forced the enemy back, gradually but steadily, in spite of the terrific bombardments which filled those woods with shellfire and the constant counterattacks delivered by the Germans.
“Counterattack!” came the order from the German staff, and battalions of men marched out obediently to certain death, sometimes with incredible folly on the part of their commanding officers, who ordered these attacks to be made without the slightest chance of success.
I saw an example of that at close range during a battle at Falfemont Farm, near Guillemont. Our men had advanced from Wedge Wood, and I watched them from a trench just south of this, to which I had gone at a great pace over shell-craters and broken wire, with a young observing officer who had been detailed to report back to the guns. (Old “Falstaff,” whose songs and stories had filled the tent under the Red Cross with laughter, toiled after us gallantly, but grunting and sweating under the sun like his prototype, until we lost him in our hurry.) Presently a body of Germans came out of a copse called Leuze Wood, on rising ground, faced round among the thin, slashed trees of Falfemont, and advanced toward our men, shoulder to shoulder, like a solid bar. It was sheer suicide. I saw our men get their machine-guns into action, and the right side of the living bar frittered away, and then the whole line fell into the scorched grass. Another line followed. They were tall men, and did not falter as they came forward, but it seemed to me they walked like men conscious of going to death. They died. The simile is outworn, but it was exactly as though some invisible scythe had mown them down.
In all the letters written during those weeks of fighting and captured by us from dead or living men there was one cry of agony and horror.
“I stood on the brink of the most terrible days of my life,” wrote one of them. “They were those of the battle of the Somme. It began with a night attack on August 13th and 14th. The attack lasted till the evening of the 18th, when the English wrote on our bodies in letters of blood, ‘It is all over with you.’ A handful of half-mad, wretched creatures, worn out
