I saw many of the scenes which led up to Mons and Le Cateau and afterward to the Rhine. Something of the horror of war passed when the enemy drew back slowly in retreat from the lands he had invaded, and we liberated great cities like Lille and Roubaix and Tourcoing, and scores of towns and villages where the people had been waiting for us so long, and now wept with joy to see us. The entry into Lille was unforgetable, when old men and women and girls and boys and little children crowded round us and kissed our hands. So it was in other places. Yet not all the horror had passed. In Courtrai, in St.-Amand by Valenciennes, in Bohain, and other villages, the enemy’s shellfire and poison-gas killed and injured many of the people who had been under the German yoke so long and now thought they were safe. Hospitals were filled with women gasping for breath, with gas-fumes in their lungs, and with dying children. In Valenciennes the cellars were flooded when I walked there on its day of capture, so that when shells began to fall the people could not go down to shelter. Some of them did not try to go down. At an open window sat an old veteran of 1870 with his medal on his breast, and with his daughter and granddaughter on each side of his chair. He called out, “Merci! Merci!” when English soldiers passed, and when I stopped a moment clasped my hands through the window and could not speak for the tears which fell down his white and withered cheeks. A few dead Germans lay about the streets, and in Maubeuge on the day before the armistice I saw the last dead German of the war in that part of the line. He lay stretched outside the railway station into which many shells had crashed. It was as though he had walked from his own comrades toward our line before a bullet caught him.
Ludendorff writes of the broken morale of the German troops, and of how his men surrendered to single troopers of ours, while whole detachments gave themselves up to tanks. “Retiring troops,” he wrote, “greeted one particular division (the cavalry) that was going up fresh and gallantly to the attack, with shouts of ‘Blacklegs!’ and ‘War-prolongers!’ ” That is true. When the Germans left Bohain they shouted out to the French girls: “The English are coming. Bravo! The war will soon be over!” On a day in September, when British troops broke the Drocourt–Quéant line, I saw the Second German Guards coming along in batches, like companies, and after they had been put in barbed-wire enclosures they laughed and clapped at the sight of other crowds of comrades coming down as prisoners. I thought then, “Something has broken in the German spirit.” For the first time the end seemed very near.
Yet the German rearguards fought stubbornly in many places, especially in the last battles round Cambrai, where, on the north, the Canadian corps had to fight desperately, and suffered heavy and bitter losses under machine-gun fire, while on the south our naval division and others were badly cut up.
General Currie, whom I saw during those days, was anxious and disheartened. He was losing more men in machine-gun actions round Cambrai than in bigger battles. I watched those actions from Bourlon Wood, saw the last German railway train steam out of the town, and went into the city early on the morning of its capture, when there was a roaring fire in the heart of it and the Canadians were routing out the last Germans from their hiding-places.
The British army could not have gone on much farther after November 11th, when the armistice brought us to a halt. For three months our troops had fought incessantly, storming many villages strongly garrisoned with machine-gunners, crossing many canals under heavy fire, and losing many comrades all along the way. The pace could not have been kept up. There is a limit even to the valor of British troops, and for a time we had reached that limit. There were not many divisions who could have staggered on to new attacks without rest and relief. But they had broken the German armies against them by a succession of hammer-strokes astounding in their rapidity and in their continuity, which I need not here describe in detail, because in my despatches, now in book form, I have narrated that history as I was a witness of it day by day.
Elsewhere the French and Americans had done their part with steady, driving pressure. The illimitable reserves of Americans, and their fighting quality, which triumphed over a faulty organization of transport and supplies, left the German High Command without hope even for a final gamble.
Before them the German troops were in revolt, at last, against the bloody, futile sacrifice of their manhood and people. A blinding light had come to them, revealing the criminality of their war lords in this “Great Swindle” against their race. It was defeat and agony which enlightened them, as most people—even ourselves—are enlightened only by suffering and disillusionment, and never by successes.
