Among those who took their turn in the hell of the Hohenzollern were the men of the 12th Division, New Army men, and all of the old stock and spirit of England, bred in the shires of Norfolk and Suffolk, Gloucester and Bedford, and in Surrey, Kent, Sussex, and Middlesex (which meant London), as the names of their battalions told. In September they relieved the Guards and cavalry at Loos; in December they moved on to Givenchy, and in February they began a long spell at the Hohenzollern. It was there the English battalions learned the worst things of war and showed the quality of English courage.
A man of Kent, named Corporal Cotter, of the Buffs, was marvelous in spirit, stronger than the flesh.
On the night of March 6th an attack was made by his company along an enemy trench, but his own bombing-party was cut off, owing to heavy casualties in the center of the attack. Things looked serious and Cotter went back under heavy fire to report and bring up more bombs.
On the return journey his right leg was blown off close below the knee and he was wounded in both arms. By a kind of miracle—the miracle of human courage—he did not drop down and die in the mud of the trench, mud so deep that unwounded men found it hard to walk—but made his way along fifty yards of trench toward the crater where his comrades were hard pressed. He came up to Lance-corporal Newman, who was bombing with his sector to the right of the position. Cotter called to him and directed him to bomb six feet toward where help was most needed, and worked his way forward to the crater where the Germans had developed a violent counterattack.
Men fell rapidly under the enemy’s bomb-fire, but Cotter, with only one leg, and bleeding from both arms, steadied his comrades, who were beginning to have the windup, as they say, issued orders, controlled the fire, and then altered dispositions to meet the attack. It was repulsed after two hours’ fighting, and only then did Cotter allow his wounds to be bandaged. From the dugout where he lay while the bombardment still continued he called out cheery words to the men, until he was carried down, fourteen hours later. He received the V.C., but died of his wounds.
Officers and men vied with one another, yet not for honor or reward, round these craters of the Hohenzollern, and in the mud, and the fumes of shells, and rain-swept darkness, and all the black horror of such a time and place, sometimes in groups and sometimes quite alone, did acts of supreme valor. When all the men in one of these infernal craters were dead or wounded Lieut. Lea Smith, of the Buffs, ran forward with a Lewis gun, helped by Private Bradley, and served it during a fierce attack by German bombers until it jammed.
Then he left the gun and took to bombing, and that single figure of his, flinging grenades like an overarm bowler, kept the enemy at bay until reinforcements reached him.
Another officer of the Buff’s—by name Smeltzer—withdrew his platoon under heavy fire, and, although he was wounded, fought his way back slowly to prevent the enemy from following up. The men were proud of his gallantry, but when he was asked what he had done he could think of nothing except that “when the Boches began shelling I got into a dugout, and when they stopped I came out again.”
There were many men like that who did amazing things and, in the English way, said nothing of them. Of that modesty was Capt. Augrere Dawson, of the West Kents, who did not bother much about a bullet he met on his way to a crater, though it traveled through his chest to his shoulder-blade. He had it dressed, and then went back to lead his men, and remained with them until the German night attack was repulsed. He was again wounded, this time in the thigh, but did not trouble the stretcher-men (they had a lot to do on the night of March 18th and 19th), and trudged back alone.
It was valor that was paid for by flesh and blood. The honors gained by the 12th Division in a few months of trench warfare—one V.C., sixteen D.S.C.’s, forty-five Military Crosses, thirty-four Military Medals—were won by the loss in casualties of more than fourteen thousand men. That is to say, the losses of their division in that time, made up by new drafts, was 100 percent; and the Hohenzollern took the highest toll of life and limbs.
V
I heard no carols in the trenches on Christmas Eve in 1915, but afterward, when I sat with a pint of water in each of my top-boots, among a company of men who were wet to the knees and slathered with moist mud, a friend of mine raised his hand and said, “Listen!”
Through the open door came the music of a mouth-organ, and it was playing an old tune:
God rest ye, merry gentlemen.
Let nothing you dismay,
For Jesus Christ, our Saviour,
Was born on Christmas Day.
Outside the wind was howling across Flanders with a doleful whine, rising now and then into a savage violence which rattled the windowpanes, and beyond the booming of its lower notes was the faint, dull rumble of distant guns.
“Christmas Eve!” said an officer. “Nineteen hundred and fifteen years ago … and now—this!”
He sighed heavily, and a few moments later told a funny story, which was followed by loud laughter. And so it was, I think, in every billet in Flanders and in every dugout that Christmas Eve, where men thought of the meaning of the day, with its message of peace and goodwill, and contrasted it with the great, grim horror of the war, and spoke a few words of perplexity; and then, after that
