WITH THE AMERICANS
SEPTEMBER 27: Our meetings with the Americans had so far been pretty casual. We had seen parties of them in June and July, training in the Contay area, north of the Albert-Amiens road; and one day during that period I accompanied our colonel and the colonel of our companion brigade on a motor trip to the coast, and we passed some thousands of them hard at work getting fit, and training with almost fervid enthusiasm. It used to be a joke of mine that on one occasion my horse shied because an Australian private saluted me. No one could make a friendly jest of like kind against the American soldiers. When first they arrived in France no troops were more punctilious in practising the outward and visible evidences of discipline. Fit, with the perfect fitness of the man from 23 to 28, not a weed amongst them, intelligent-looking, splendidly eager to learn, they were much akin in physique and general qualities to our own immortal “First Hundred Thousand.” I came across colonels and majors of the New York and Illinois Divisions getting experience in the line with our brigadiers and colonels. I have seen U.S. Army N.C.O.’s out in the field receiving instruction from picked N.C.O.’s of our army in the art of shouting orders. Their officers and men undertook this training with a certain shy solemnity that I myself thought very attractive. I am doing no lip-service to a “wish is father to the thought” sentiment when I say that a manly modesty in respect to military achievements characterised all the fighting American soldiers that I met.
They were not long in tumbling into the humours of life at the front. I remember an episode told with much enjoyment by a major of the regular U.S. Army, who spent a liaison fortnight with our Division.
There is a word that appears at least once a day on orders sent out from the “Q” or administrative branch of the British Army. It is the word “Return”: “Return of Personnel,” “Casualty Returns,” “Ammunition Returns,” &c., all to do with the compilation of reports. The American Division to which the major belonged had been included among the units of a British Corps. When, in course of time, the Division was transferred elsewhere Corps Q branch wired, “Return wanted of all tents and trench shelters in your possession.” Next day the American Division received a second message: “Re my 0546/8023, hasten return of tents and trench shelters.”
The day following the Corps people were startled by the steady arrival of scores of tents and trench shelters. The wires hummed furiously, and the Corps staff captain shouted his hardest, explaining over a longdistance telephone that “Hasten return” did not mean “Send back as quickly as possible.”
“And we thought we had got a proper move on sending back those tents,” concluded the American major who told me the story.
And now we were in action with these virile ardent fellows. Two of their Divisions took part in the great battle which at 5.30 A.M. opened on a 35-mile front - ten days of bloody victorious fighting, by which three armies shattered the last and strongest of the enemy’s fully-prepared positions, and struck a vital blow at his main communications.
The first news on Sept. 27th was of the best. On our part of the front the Americans had swept forward, seized the two ruined farms that were their earliest objectives, and surged to the top of a knoll that had formed a superb point of vantage for the Boche observers. By 7.30 A.M. the Brigade was told to warn F.O.O.’s that our bombers would throw red flares outside the trenches along which they were advancing to indicate their position.
But again there was to be no walk-over. The Boche counter-attack was delivered on the Americans’ left flank. We were ordered to fire a two-hours’ bombardment upon certain points towards which the enemy was pouring his troops; and the colonel told me to instruct our two F.O.O.’s to keep a particular look-out for hostile movement.
By 11 A.M. Division issued instructions for all gun dumps to be made up that night to 500 rounds per gun. “Stiff fighting ahead,” commented the colonel.
At three o’clock Dumble, who was commanding A Battery, Major Bullivant having gone on leave, reported that the Americans were withdrawing from the knoll to trenches four hundred yards in rear, where they were reorganising their position.
That settled the fighting for the day, although there was speedy indication of the Boche’s continued liveliness: a plane came over, and by a daring manoeuvre set fire to three of our “sausage” balloons, the observers having to tumble out with their parachutes. All this time I had remained glued to the telephone for the receipt of news and the passing of orders. There was opportunity now to give thought to the fortifying of our headquarters. Hubbard, who prided himself on his biceps, had engaged in a brisk discussion with the officers of a near-by Artillery brigade headquarters regarding the dug-out that he and myself and “Ernest” had occupied the night before. Originally it had been arranged that we should share quarters with them, dug-outs in a neighbouring bank having been allotted for their overflow of signallers. But at the last moment an Infantry brigade headquarters had “commandeered” part of their accommodation, and they gave up the dug-out that Hubbard and I had slept in, with the intimation that they would want it on the morrow. As Hubbard had discovered that they were in possession of four good dug-outs on the opposite side of the road, he said we ought to be allowed to retain our solitary one. But no! they stuck to their rights, and during the morning’s battle a stream of protesting officers came to interview Hubbard. Their orderly officer was suave but anxious; their signalling officer admitted the previous arrangement to share quarters; Hubbard remained firm, and said that if the Infantry brigade had upset their arrangements, they themselves had upset ours. I was too busy to enter at length into the argument, but I agreed to send a waggon and horses to fetch material if they chose to build a new place. When their adjutant came over and began to use sarcasm, I referred the matter to our colonel, who decided, “Their Division has sent us here. The dug-out is in our area. There is no other accommodation. We shall keep it.”
“Will you come over and see our colonel, sir?” asked the adjutant persuasively.
“Certainly not,” replied the colonel with some asperity.
The next arrivals were a gas officer and a tall ebullient Irish doctor, who said that the dug-out had been prepared for them. Hubbard conveyed our colonel’s decision, and ten minutes later his servant brought news that the doctor’s servant had been into the dug-out and replaced our kit by the doctor’s.
Hubbard, smiling happily, slipped out of our gun-pit mess, and the next item of news from this bit of front informed me that our valises had been replaced and the doctor’s kit put outside. Hubbard told me he had informed the doctor and the gas officer that, our colonel having made his decision, he was prepared to repeat the performance every time they invaded the dug-out. “And I was ready to throw them after their kit if necessary,” he added, expanding his chest.
The upshot of it all was that our horses fetched fresh material, and we helped to find the doctor and the gas officer a home.
The battle continued next day, our infantry nibbling their way into the Boche defences and allowing him no rest. The artillery work was not so strenuous as on the previous day, and Hubbard and I decided to dig a dug-out for the colonel. It was bonny exercise for me. “I think every adjutant ought to have a pit to dig in - adjutants get too little exercise,” I told the colonel. After which Hubbard, crouching with his pick, offered practical tuition in the science of underpinning. We sweated hard and enjoyed our lunch. Judd and young Beale reported back from leave, and Beale caused a sensation by confessing that he had got married. A Corps wire informed every unit that Lance-Corporal Kleinberg-Hermann, “5 ft. 8, fair hair, eyes blue, scar above nose, one false tooth in front, dressed German uniform,” and Meyer Hans, “6 ft., fair hair, brown eyes, thin face, wears glasses, speaks English and French fluently, dressed German uniform,” had escaped from a prisoners of war camp. The mail brought a letter from which the colonel learnt that a long-time friend, a lieut.-colonel in the Garrison Artillery, had been killed. He had lunched with us one day in June, a bright-eyed, grizzled veteran, with a whimsical humour. India had made him look older than his years. “They found his body in No Man’s Land,” said the colonel softly. “They couldn’t get to it for two days.”
At half-past nine that night we learned that our own Divisional infantry were coming up in front of us again. There was to be another big attack, to complete the work begun by the Americans, and at zero hour we should pass under the command of our Divisional artillery. At four in the morning the telephone near my pillow woke me up, and Major Bartlett reported that the Boche had started a barrage. “I don’t think he suspects anything,” said the major. “It’s only ordinary counter-preparation.” In any case it didn’t affect our attack, which started with splendid zest. The Boche plunked a few gas shells near us; but by 9.15 the brigade-major told me that the Americans and our own infantry had advanced a thousand yards and were on their first objective. “I smell victory to-day,” said the colonel, looking at his map. By half-past ten Major Bartlett’s battery had moved forward two thousand yards, and the major had joined a battalion commander so as to keep pace with the onward rush of the infantry.
Good news tumbled in. At 10.50 the intelligence officer of our companion Artillery brigade rang up to tell me that their liaison officer had seen our troops entering the southern end of a well-known village that lay along the canal.
“Ring up A and B at once,” interjected the colonel, “and tell them to stop their bursts of fire, otherwise they will be firing on our own people. Tell our liaison officer with the ——th Infantry Brigade that we are no longer firing on the village…. And increase the how. battery’s range by 1000 yards.”
Five minutes later the brigade-major let us know that the Corps on our left had cleared a vastly important ridge, but their most northerly Division was held up by machine-gun fire. When the situation was eased they would advance upon the canal. Our D Battery was now firing at maximum range, and at 11.20 the colonel ordered them to move up alongside C.
The exhilarating swiftness of the success infected every one. Drysdale rang up to know whether we hadn’t any fresh targets for D Battery. “I’m sure we’ve cleared out every Boche in the quarry you gave us,” he said. The staff captain told us he was bringing forward his ammunition dumps. The old wheeler was observed to smile. Even the telephone seemed to be working better than for months past. In restraint of overeagerness, complaints of short shooting filtered in from the infantry, but I established the fact that our batteries were not the sinners.
By tea-time all the batteries had advanced, and the colonel, “Ernest,” and myself were walking at the head of the headquarters waggon and mess carts through a village that a fortnight before had been a hotbed of Germany’s hardest fighting infantry.
The longer the time spent in the fighting area, the stronger that secret spasm of apprehension when a shift forward to new positions had to be made. The ordinary honest-souled member of His Majesty’s forces will admit that to be a true saying. The average healthy-minded recruit coming to the Western Front since July 1916 marvelled for his first six months on the thousands of hostile shells that he saw hitting nothing in particular, and maiming and killing nobody. If he survived a couple of years he lost all curiosity about shells that did no harm; he had learned that in the forward areas there was never real safety, the fatal shell might come at the most unexpected moment, in the most unlooked-for spot: it might be one solitary missile of death, it might accompany a hideous drove that beat down the earth all around, and drenched a whole area with sickening scorching fumes; he might not show it, but he had learned to fear.
But on this move-up we were agog with the day’s fine news. We were in the mood to calculate on the extent of the enemy’s retirement: for the moment his long-range guns had ceased to fire. We talked seriously of the war ending by Christmas. We laughed when I opened the first Divisional message delivered at our new Headquarters: “Divisional Cinema will open at Lieramont to-morrow. Performances twice daily, 3 P.M. and 6 P.M.” “That looks as if our infantry are moving out,” I said.
We had taken over a bank and some shallow, aged dug-outs, occupied the night before by our C Battery; and as there was a chill in the air that foretold rain, and banks of sombre clouds were lining up in the western sky, we unloaded our carts and set to work getting our belongings under cover while it was still light. “There’s no pit for you to dig in,” the colonel told me quizzingly, “but you can occupy yourself filling these ammunition boxes with earth; they’ll make walls for the mess.” Hubbard had been looking for something heavy to carry; he brought an enormous beam from the broad-gauge railway that lay a hundred yards west of us. The colonel immediately claimed it for the mess roof. “We’ll fix it centre-wise on the ammunition boxes to support the tarpaulin,” he decided. “Old Fritz has done his dirtiest along the railway,” said Hubbard cheerfully. “He’s taken a bit out of every rail; and he’s blown a mine a quarter of a mile down there that’s giving the sappers something to think about. They told me they want to have trains running in two days.”
Meanwhile the signallers had been cleaning out the deep shaft they were to work in; the cooks and the clerks had selected their own rabbit-hutches; and I had picked a semi-detached dug-out in which were wire beds for the colonel, Hubbard, and myself. True, a shell had made a hole in one corner of the iron roof, and the place was of such antiquity that rats could be heard squeaking in the vicinity of my bed-head, but I hoped that a map-board fixed behind my pillow would protect me from unpleasantness.
The colonel was suspicious of the S.O.S. line issued to us by Division that night. The ordinary rules of gunnery provide that the angle of sight to be put on the guns can be calculated from the difference between the height of the ground on which the battery stands and the height at the target. More often than not ridges intervene between the gun and the target, and the height and position of these ridges sometimes cause complications in the reckoning of the angle of sight, particularly if a high ridge is situated close to the object to be shot at. Without going into full explanation, I hope I may be understood when I say that the correct angle of sight, calculated from the map difference in height between battery and target, occasionally fails to ensure that the curve described by the shell in its flight will finish sufficiently high in the air for the shell to clear the final crest. When that happens shells fall on the wrong side of the ridge, and our own infantry are endangered. It is a point to which brigade-majors and brigade commanders naturally give close attention.
The colonel looked at his map, shook his head, said, “I don’t like that ridge,” and got out his ruler and made calculations. Then he talked over the telephone to the brigade-major. “Yes, I know that theoretically, by every ordinary test, we should be safe in shooting there, and I know what you want to shoot at…. But there’s a risk, and I should prefer to be on the safe side…. Will you speak to the General about it?”
The colonel gained his point, and at 10.20 P.M. issued a further order to the batteries:-
“Previous S.O.S. line is cancelled, as it is found that the hillside is so steep that our troops in Tino Support Trench may be hit.
“Complaints of short shooting have been frequent all day. Henceforth S.O.S. will be as follows….”
“I’ll write out those recommendations for honours and awards before turning in,” he said, a quarter of an hour later, searching through the box in which confidential papers were kept. “Now, what was it I wanted to know? - oh, I remember. Ring up Drysdale, and ask him whether the corporal he put in is named Marchman or Marshman. His writing is not very clear…. If he’s gone to bed, say I’m sorry to disturb him, but these things want to be got in as soon as possible.”
It was a quiet night as far as shell-fire was concerned, but a furious rain-storm permitted us very little sleep, and played havoc with the mess. Our documents remained safe, though most of them were saturated with water. In the morning it was cold enough to make one rub one’s hands and stamp the feet. There was plenty of exercise awaiting us in the enlarging and rebuilding of the mess. We made it a very secure affair this time. “What about a fire, sir?” inquired Hubbard.
“Good idea,” said the colonel. He and Hubbard used pick and shovel to fashion a vertical, triangular niche in the side of the bank. The staff-sergeant fitter returned with a ten-foot stove-pipe that he had found in the neighbouring village; and before ten o’clock our first mess fire since the end of April was crackling merrily and burning up spare ammunition boxes.
The colonel went off to tour the batteries, saying, “I’ll leave you to fight the battle.” The brigade-major’s first telephone talk at 10.35 A.M. left no doubt that we were pushing home all the advantages gained the day before. “I want one good burst on —— Trench,” he said. “After that cease firing this side of the canal until I tell you to go on.” The news an hour later was that our Divisional Infantry patrols were working methodically through Vendhuile, the village on the canal bank, which the Americans had entered the day before. Next “Buller,” who was with the Infantry brigade, called up, and said that the mopping-up in the village had been most successful: our fellows were thrusting for the canal bridge, and had yet to encounter any large enemy forces. At twenty to one the brigade-major told me that our people were moving steadily to the other side of the canal. “We’re properly over the Hindenburg Line this time,” he wound up.
The Brigadier-General C.R.A. came to see us during the afternoon, and we learned for the first time that on the previous day the Americans had fought their way right through Vendhuile, but, on account of their impetuosity, had lost touch with their supports. “They fought magnificently, but didn’t mop-up as they went along,” explained the General. “The Boche tried the trick he used to play on us. He hid until the first wave had gone by, and then came up with his machine-guns and fired into their backs…. It’s a great pity…. I’m afraid that six hundred of them who crossed the canal have been wiped out.”
“I hear that our infantry go out for a proper rest as soon as this is over,” he added. “They brought them up again to complete the smashing of the Hindenburg Line, because they didn’t want to draw upon the three absolutely fresh Divisions they were keeping to chase the Hun immediately he yielded the Hindenburg Line. Our infantry must have fought themselves to a standstill these last three weeks.”
“Any news about us?” inquired the colonel.
“No; I’m afraid the gunners will have to carry on as usual…. The horses seem to be surviving the ordeal very well….”
At 4.25 P.M. - I particularly remember noting the time - we were told by Division that Bulgaria’s surrender was unconditional. “That will be cheering news for the batteries,” observed the colonel. “I’d send that out.” The brigade-major also informed us that British cavalry were reported to be at Roulers, north-east of Ypres - but that wasn’t official. “Anyhow,” said the colonel, his face glowing, “it shows the right spirit. Yes, I think the war will be over by Christmas after all.”
“It would be great to be home by Christmas, sir,” put in Hubbard.
“Yes,” responded the colonel in the same vein, “but it wouldn’t be so bad even out here…. I don’t think any of us would really mind staying another six months if we had no 5·9’s to worry us.” And he settled down to writing his daily letter home.
October came in with every one joyously expectant. The enemy still struggled to hold the most valuable high ground on the far side of the canal, but there was little doubt that he purposed a monster withdrawal - and our batteries did their best to quicken his decision. The brigade-major departed for a Senior Staff Course in England, and Major “Pat” of our sister brigade, a highly efficient and extremely popular officer, who, with no previous knowledge of soldiering, had won deserved distinction, filled his place. Major “Pat” was a disciple of cheering news for the batteries. “This has just come in by the wireless,” he telephoned to me on October 2nd. “Turkey surrendered - British ships sailing through the Dardanelles - Lille being evacuated - British bluejackets landed at Ostend.”
“Is that official?” I asked wonderingly.
He laughed. “No, I didn’t say that…. It’s a wireless report.”
“Not waggon line?” I went on.
He laughed again. “No, I’ll let you know when it becomes official.”
Formal intimation was to hand that Dumble, Judd, Bob Pottinger, young Beale, Stenson, and Tincler had been awarded the Military Cross, and Major Veasey the D.S.O. Drysdale was happy because, after many times of asking, he had got back from headquarters, Patrick, the black charger that he had ridden early in 1916.
The tide of success rolled on. A swift little attack on the morning of October 3rd took the infantry we were supporting, now that our own battalions had withdrawn for a fortnight’s rest, on to valuable high ground east of the canal. “They met with such little opposition that our barrage became merely an escort,” was the way in which Beadle, who was doing F.O.O., described the advance. Surrendering Germans poured back in such numbers that dozens of them walked unattended to the prisoners of war cages. “I saw one lot come down,” a D.A.C. officer told me. “All that the sentry had to do was to point to the cage with a ‘This-way-in’ gesture, and in they marched.”
One wee cloud blurred the high-spirited light-heartedness of those days. We lost “Ernest,” who had marched forward with us and been our pet since Sept. 6th. The colonel and Hubbard took him up the line; the little fellow didn’t seem anxious to leave me that morning, but I thought that a run would do him good, and he had followed the colonel a couple of days before. “I’m sorry, but we’ve lost ‘Ernest,’” was the colonel’s bluntly told news when he returned. “He disappeared when I was calling on B Battery…. They said he went over the hill with an infantry officer, who had made much of him…. It’s curious, because he stuck to us when I went to see the infantry at Brigade Headquarters, although every one in their very long dug-out fussed over him.”
There was poor chance of the dog finding his way back to us in that country of many tracks, amid the coming to and fro of thousands of all kinds of troops. We never saw or heard of him again. The loss of him dispirited all of us a bit; and I suppose I felt it more than most: he had been a splendid little companion for nearly a month.
The adjutant and Wilde returned from leave on Oct. 3rd, full of the bright times to be spent in London. “People in England think the war’s all over. They don’t realise that pursuing the Boche means fighting him as well,” burst forth the adjutant. “By Gad,” he went on, “we had a narrow escape the day we went on leave. I never saw anything like it in my life. You remember the factory at Moislains, near the place where we were out for three or four days at the beginning of last month. Well, Wilde and I caught a leave bus that went that way on the road to Amiens. The bus had to pull up about five hundred yards short of the factory, because there was a lot of infantry in front of us…. And just at that moment a Boche mine blew up…. Made an awful mess…. About eleven men killed…. We had taken the place three weeks before, and the mine had remained undiscovered all that time…. We must all of us have passed over that spot many times. You remember they made a Red Cross Station of the factory…. A most extraordinary thing!”
The Boche fire had died away almost entirely; it was manifest that the Brigade would have to move forward. I could go on leave now that the adjutant was back - Beadle and myself were the only two officers in the Brigade who had gone through the March retreat and not yet been on leave to England; but I was keen on another trip forward with the colonel, and on the morning of the 4th Wilde and I joined him on a prospecting ride, looking for new positions for the batteries.
It was a journey that quickened all one’s powers of observation. We went forward a full five miles, over yellow churned wastes that four days before had been crowded battlefields; past shell-pocked stretches that had been made so by our own guns. At first we trotted along a straight road that a short time before had been seamed with Boche trenches and barbed wire. The colonel’s mare was fresh and ready to shy at heaps of stones and puddles. “She’s got plenty of spirit still,” said the colonel, “but she’s not the mare she was before the hit in the neck at Commenchon. However, I know her limitations, and she’s all right providing I spare her going uphill.”
Just outside the half-mile long village of Ronssoy he pointed to a clump of broken bricks and shattered beams. “That’s the farm that D Battery insisted was Gillemont Farm, when we were at Cliffe Post on September 19,” he explained. “The day I was with him at the ‘O.P.,’ Wood couldn’t understand why he was unable to see his shells fall. He telephoned to the battery to check the range they were firing at, and then decided that the map was wrong. When I told him to examine his map more closely he spotted the 140 contour between this place and Gillemont Farm. It made Gillemont Farm invisible from the ‘O.P.’ Of course Gillemont Farm is 2000 yards beyond this place.”
We reached a battered cross-roads 1200 yards due south of Duncan Post, that cockpit of the bitter hand-to-hand fighting of Sept. 19th and 20th. A couple of captured Boche 4·2’s - the dreaded high-velocity gun - stood tucked behind a low grassless bank, their curved, muddy, camouflaged shields blending with the brown desolation of the landscape. Two American soldiers saluted the colonel gravely - lean, tanned, straight-eyed young fellows. For the first time I noticed that the Americans were wearing puttees like our men, instead of the canvas gaiters which they sported when first in France. Their tin hats and box-respirators have always been the same make as ours.
The colonel stopped to look at his map. “We’ll turn north-east here and cross the canal at Bony,” he said. We rode round newly-dug shell-slits, and through gaps in the tangled, rusted barbed wire; at one spot we passed eighteen American dead, laid out in two neat rows, ready for removal to the cemetery that the U.S. Army had established in the neighbourhood; we went within twenty yards of a disabled tank that a land mine had rendered hors de combat; we came across another tank lumbered half-way across a road. “Tanks always seem to take it into their heads to collapse on a main road and interrupt traffic,” muttered the colonel sardonically.
There were twelve hundred yards of a straight sunken road for us to ride through before we reached Bony. That road was a veritable gallery of German dead. They lay in twos and threes, in queer horrible postures, along its whole unkempt length, some of them with blackened decomposed faces and hands, most of them newly killed, for this was a road that connected the outer defences of the Hindenburg Line with the network of wire and trenches that formed the Hindenburg Line itself. “Best sight I’ve seen since the war,” said Wilde with satisfaction. And if the colonel and myself made no remark we showed no disagreement. Pity for dead Boche finds no place in the average decent-minded man’s composition. Half a dozen of our armoured cars, wheels off, half-burned, or their steering apparatus smashed, lay on the entrenched and wired outskirts of Bony, part of the Hindenburg Line proper. In the village itself we found Red Cross cars filling up with wounded; Boche prisoners were being used as stretcher-bearers; groups of waiting infantry stood in the main street; runners flitted to and fro.
“We’ll leave our horses here,” said the colonel; and the grooms guided them to the shelter of a high solid wall. The colonel, Wilde, and I ascended the main street, making eastward. A couple of 5·9’s dropped close to the northern edge of the village as we came out of it. We met a party of prisoners headed by two officers - one short, fat, nervous, dark, bespectacled; the other bearded, lanky, nonchalant, and of good carriage. He carried a gold-nobbed Malacca cane. Neither officer looked at us as we passed. The tall one reminded me of an officer among the first party of Boche prisoners I saw in France in August 1916. His arrogant, disdainful air had roused in me a gust of anger that made me glad I was in the war.
We went through a garden transformed into a dust-bin, and dipped down a hummocky slope that rose again to a chalky ridge. Shells were screaming overhead in quick succession now, and we walked fast, making for a white boulder that looked as if it would offer shielded observation and protection. We found ourselves near the top of one of the giant air-shafts that connected with the canal tunnel. Tufts of smoke spouted up at regular intervals on the steep slope behind the village below us. “We’re in time to see a barrage,” remarked the colonel, pulling out his binoculars. “Our people are trying to secure the heights. I didn’t know that Gouy was quite clear of Boche. There was fighting there yesterday.”
“There are some Boche in a trench near that farm on the left,” he added a minute later, after sweeping the hills opposite with his glasses. “Can you see them?”
I made out what did appear to be three grey tin-helmeted figures, but I could see nothing of our infantry. The shelling went on, but time pressed, and the colonel, packing up his glasses, led us eastwards again, down to a light-railway junction, and through a quaint little ravine lined with willow-trees. Many German dead lay here. One young soldier, who had died with his head thrown back resting against a green bank, his blue eyes open to the sky, wore a strangely perfect expression of peace and rest. Up another ascending sunken road. The Boche guns seemed to have switched, and half a dozen shells skimmed the top of the road, causing us to wait. We looked again at the fight being waged on the slopes behind the village. Our barrage had lifted, but we saw no sign of advancing infantry.
The colonel turned to me suddenly and said, “I’m going to select positions about a thousand yards south of where we are at this moment - along the valley. Wilde will come with me. You go back and pick up the horses, and meet us at Quennemont Farm. I expect we shall be there almost as soon as you.”
I followed the direct road to return to Bony. A few shells dropped on either side of the road, which was obviously a hunting-ground for the Boche gunners. At least a dozen British dead lay at intervals huddled against the sides of the road. One of them looked to be an artillery officer, judged by his field-boots and spurs. But the top part of him was covered by a rain-proof coat, and I saw no cap.
Quennemont Farm was a farm only in name. There was no wall more than three feet high left standing; the whole place was shapeless, stark, blasted into nothingness. In the very centre of the mournful chaos lay three disembowelled horses and an overturned Boche ammunition waggon. The shells were still on the shelves. They were Yellow Cross, the deadliest of the Boche mustard-gas shell.
I went on leave next morning, and got a motor-car lift from Peronne as far as Amiens. Before reaching Villers-Bretonneux, of glorious, fearful memories, we passed through Warfusee-Abancourt, a shell of its former self, a brick heap, a monument of devastation. An aged man and a slim white-faced girl were standing by the farm cart that had brought them there, the first civilians I had seen since August. The place was deserted save for them. In sad bereavement they looked at the cruel desolation around them.
“My God,” said my companion, interpreting my inmost thought, “what a home-coming!”