What the Fighting Men Suffered With Heroic Silence.
It has not been hidden from the world that modern warfare
has surpassed in horror anything that has been recorded in the black history of
human strife. The vast casualty lists
published month after moth and year after year darkened human imagination by
their statistics of sacrifice; and every
name in those closely printed columns meant a cry of agony in some little home
where a father, mother, or wife had tried to stifle the fear of the heart by
faith in the luck of their man at the front.
The tide of maimed and broken men, of blind and cripple and sick, which
flowed back into England and France after the first battles of 1914 and for
four and a half years afterwards, was overwhelming in its flood of tragedy, in
great cities and tiny hamlets, and it
was only the courage of race and blood which refused to yield to despair
because of this continual slaughter and torture of youth. So the soul of the world cries out
"Never Again," and in this period of reshaping the structure of
civilization say's: "For God's sake let us devise some new philosophy
which will cut out this horror. Let us
get at the root-causes of war so that we may kill them, and let us establish
safe-guards against any nation likely to let loose the old devils of
international hatred in bloody conflict."
That is the present mood of civilized mankind and I think it is out of
that general emotion of revolt against the sacrifice and agonies of this
manhood that a new philosophy of life based upon new international relations
may be evolved. The danger is that in a
generation or less, the memory of what this war meant in human suffering may
fade out, leaving only the remembrance of heroism touched by romance. The danger is , even now that when people
talk about "the horrors of war," it is but an abstract idea to them
and that they do not really understand the depths of abomination through which
our men passed so bravely, so patiently, so silently.
For the fighting men did not tell what was happening to
them. In their letters home they wrote
of the brighter side of things for the sake of those who were anxious and
afraid; and, when they came home on
leave, in answer to questions about their sufferings they said: "I want to
forget all that … Let's go and see a show which will make us laugh. Thank God for laughter" as a war correspondent in the field I too had
to tone down the black side of war.
Apart altogether from censorship it was my duty to keep up the heart of
the people and not to add to their torture of anxiety for those they loved by
harrowing descriptions of carnage and misery.
And there were things the enemy wanted to know which I was not going to
tell him - the exact effect of his poison gas.
The sum total of his slaughter in particular places. The success of his flame machines and other
devilish devices. So in spite of the
tragic spirit which often brooded in my dispatches form the front, and my
descriptions of battlefield scenes which were grim enough, God Knows, in their
realism, I did not give the full picture of our men's agony.
The need of secrecy has now passed. It is due to our men that the world should
now know how much they suffered with such stoical courage. The misery and the
beastliness and the terror of it all should be stripped of all their romantic
"camouflage" s that the truth should be etched deeply in the pages of
history.
* * *
After the Retreat From
Mons
The worst suffering of the British army began after the
retreat from Mons
of the "old contemptibles" - the gallant little regular - in 1914, and when there began that long
period of stationary warfare in entrenched positions which neither side could
break through. The Germans by good generalship
and superior numbers had established themselves on high ground almost
everywhere on the whole line of their front.
Through Belgium and France the British troops were in a hideous
position in the Ypres salient lying in a
saucer-like hollow rimmed round by the Germans on the ridges of Pilkem,
Westhoek, Wytschaete
and Messines. When later in the spring of 1915 they took
over a long line to liberate the 10th French army for the defence of Verdun
they were again in low-lying ground round Lens and Arras, with the enemy above
them on the Vimy Ridge, Monchy Hill, and the banks of the Scarpe. This was the cause of much misery and
enormous slaughter. The Germans had
complete observation of the British trenches and of the roads and tracks which
led to them. They stared straight down
into the villages held by British garrisons and into other villages six miles
or more behind the lines - Sochez,
Ablain, St. Nazaire, Vlamertinghe, and many more - through which our troops had
to march on their way to the front or where they were billeted. With immense superiority in gun power, until
the end of 195, they turned their artillery on to these places with
ruthlessness and method, by day and night.
They pounded them into fragments and then into dust so that of Sochez
town and sugar factory there is not even a rubbish heap, and Ablain, St.
Nazaire, could not be found except for the skeleton ribs of its church. Beneath those ruins and in that dust lie the
bones of British soldiers. Many of them
were buried alive. That happened scores
of times in Ypres where platoons of men
billeted in vaults below the cloth hall, the Cathedral and house were entombed
by tons of masonry hurled down by high explosives. I remember in the spring of 1915 that forty
men were buried like this below a house in Ypres
which was piled above them by German shell fire. Their groans were heard by their comrades who
made frantic efforts to rescue them but during this work of rescue the enemy's
fire was intensified and around the living tomb of the forty men lay many dead
and dying. That happened not one but
hundreds of times not only in Ypres, but in Albert and Arras and many other towns under German
gunfire into which we went with the nagging little devil of thought that at any
moment death or horrible agonies preceding death might happen to us.
* * *
Our Men Whistled at Death.
Yet our men went into these places and live in them,
laughing and whistling, taking the risk, day after day, and hiding that cold
touch of fear which was somewhere in the heart of the bravest of them. Our troops and our transport went up the tracks which the Germans had
registered with their guns. It was just
luck, always, whether they passed between the bursts of shell-fire at
"Suicide Corner" and "Shrapnel Corner," Hellfire Cross Roads and "Hellfire Cross Roads,"
and our of Ypres
along the Menin Road . Often luck was against them and I saw the
unlucky ones blown to bits, headless, or with smashed faces, or mere fragments
of human flesh lying among dead and mangle horses, where a gun team had tried
to dash past Arras
station, or a transport column had come thorough Albert with its Falling Virgin. Yet no man ever shirked going up those
roads of ill-fame and if one transport column were destroyed another followed
past the dead bodies of their comrades, past the dead horses and the broken
wagons so that the men in the line should not lack for food or ammunition, and
this happened not for one week or one month or one year, but for four years
until the cemeteries behind our lines grew like forests of white crosses.
Behind the front lines where the communication trenches began no body of men moved in daylight
without being "strafes" by the enemy's guns directed by watchful
observers on the ridges with telephones connected with the batteries so that
all movement was at night. Further
forward in the trenches battalions lived horribly in foul and perilous
conditions. The Germans ion the high
ground made their drainage flow into the British trenches and the heavy rains
of Flanders flowed down naturally into the
flats so that many of our trenches were waterlogged. Even in August I have waded waist deep in
water through trenches where English soldiers were holding the front line. "That Grand Fleet of ours don't seem
to be very active," said one of them, getting a joke out of his misery.
"It's a pity it don't steam down these blinking ranches and do abit
of fighting." That was in
summer. In winter when the water was ice
cold it may be imagined what our men endured.
They were always wet. They slept
in wet clothes, sat in wet dugouts, stood in wet boots and the cold slime of
mud in Flanders encased them and put its
clammy touch about their very souls. In
the first tow inters of the war they were stricken with a disease called
"Trench Foot." Its symptoms
were exactly like those of frost bite, a sense of burning until all sense was
deadened and the feet blackened and rotted.
Battalions lost forty per cent of their men for a time from this cause
and in the old Ypres salient I have seen men of the 49th (Yorkshire) division
crawling back from the trenches or carried pick-a-back by their comrades,
unable to walk a yard, and with both feet tied up in cotton wool at the field
ambulance. There was no comfort for them
in their dugouts which were miserable holes in the wet earth without any of the
comfort or safety of those deep tunnelling dugouts which the Germans had built
for themselves below the ridges. They
were not only wet but alive with vermin and our officers and men from decent
clean homes, some of them used all their lives to the delicacies and
refinements of civilized life, found themselves swarming with lice and they
hated this worse than the danger of five-point-nines and trench mortars with the risk of being
buried alive in their dugouts or killed by a flying scythe of steel across
their parapets. For the lice did not leave them alone by day or
night and made life itself a foul and disgusting thing. Larger vermin - rats and mice - invaded
trenches and romped and squealed in the dugouts, attacking food supplies and
careless of living men though they liked dead men best, and outside in No Man's
Land, or in the bogs of Hooge - the worst hell of all where our men sat and
lived amidst the corruption of human flesh-gnawed dead bodies until their bones
were bare and white.
* * *
Awful Effects of Shell Shock
British soldiers were great fighters, but bad trenchers,
dugouts and diggers and the German earthworks were always better than ours, so
that in the old/stationary warfare their daily casualties were less than
ours. Later, when we captured many of
their trench systems our men made use of their deep dugouts and shell-proof
tunnels so that their physical conditions of life improved, but meanwhile there
was greater intensity of gunfire on both sides and all the battlefields were
ravaged with harassing fire which reached by long long-distance guns twelve,
fifteen and even twenty miles behind the lines, so that men billeted in little
villages a long way from what they thought was the danger zone were blown to
pieces in farm houses and cottages.
There was one house below Mont St. Eloi, blown clean out by
one shell, so that nothing but the outer walls remained and not a trace was
found of thirty-six Canadian soldiers who had been quartered there. It was the constant shelling behind the lines
and in the lines which wore down the nerves of men and caused that new disease,
unknown to mankind before, called shell-shock - the most horrible malady in the
war. Strangely enough it affected the
stolid, phlegmatic type of man more than the nervous and highly strung, and it
had nothing to do with lack of courage, but was a physical disorder of the
nervous system caused by concussion.
During the attack on Thiepval in the battle of the Somme ,
I saw a tall and strapping sergeant-major go raving mad by the shock. He kept clawing at his mouth and his body was
shaken with convulsions, so that he had to be strapped to a stretcher. Another soldier near him a young and handsome
boy, was shaking in a kind of ague, staring wildly with a dreadful terror in
his eyes, quite insane. After almost
every battle we fought through four and a half years of fighting there was
always a crowd of shell-shock cases, and I used to turn my head away from the
sight of these poor boys, with their dazed and lolling eyes and that clawing
gesture at the mouth. Our asylums are still
full of them.
Every year, every month almost, intensified the powers of
destruction on each side, or change on form of slaughter for another. In the early days of trench warfare the
Germans mined under our lines and our officers and men in places like
Hohenzollern redoubt and Fricourt and St. Eloi went about their duties with the
awful consciousness that at any moment the ground might open beneath their feet
and bits of their bodies be hurled sky high.
So it happened many times until by counter-mining we completely defeated
the enemy's underground work. Then the
"Flammenwerter," of flame-thrower, made its appearance and our King's
Royal Rifles in the Ypres salient were the
first to see this new form of terror. As
they stood-to in the trenches they were aware of some liquid falling lightly
upon them, and it smelt of petroleum. As
few minutes later they saw German soldiers advancing upon them with canisters
strapped to their shoulders, and hose-pipes from which jets of flame gushed out
twenty yards ahead. Some of the King's
Royal Rifles caught fire and were charred to cinders. Others beat the flames out of their clothes,
crying and cursing, and others in spite of their burns, fired through those
tongues of flame, and Germans carrying canisters were burned to death in their
own fire.
* * *
What Poison Gas Really Meant
Then came the devilish use of poison gas, first used by the Germans
in the second battle of Ypres, in April of 1915, when our men did not understand its meaning
and retreated before that vapor of death through a wild stampede of civilians
in Ypres until many fell, choking and gasping their lives out in the fields
around. One despatch rider, carrying urgent orders,
rode forward through the tide of retreat until he fell from his motor cycle,
which dashed sixty yards ahead until it crashed into a ruined wall.
That was in the spring of 1915, and until the end of the war the Germans and ourselves developed and intensified this most dreaded means of destruction. The enemy was devilishly ingenious in his methods and varieties of gas poisoning. He made it heavy so that it filtered down into our cellars in
* * *
Slaughter on Battlefields
Worst of All
Yet after all, these devices
were but the trimmings and decorations of that death which is war. The slaughter in the battlefields by artillery,
heavy and light; by machine guns and trench mortars, was the main business of
the enemy and ourselves, and both sides did their job thoroughly, with
superiority on our side towards the end.
In those four and a half years our losses were nearly 700,000 killed and
over 2,000,000 wounded. High figures. Crying out to the pity of God and man for all
this sacrifice of splendid youth, and with much suffering of spirit and body to
each individual before he lay quiet below a wooden cross or went home with a
blighty wound, who can describe the terrors of the battlefield? I cannot, though I have gone through those
fields on days of great battle and seen our guns blown up into the air by high
explosives, with their teams killed beside them, and have walked through tracks
strewn with our dead and German dead, headless, with arms and legs flung far
from their bodies, with dreadful mangled faces or with no faces. I have seen not once but scores of times the
long trail of the walking wounded, staggering back under shell fire with their
arms about each others necks, or hobbling alone until they dropped to wait for
the stretcher bearers or to die, so patiently that they hardly groaned - men
with ghastly wounds revealed nakedly, blind men groping forward miserably with
one hand tightly clutching a wounded comrade, men so hideous in masks of clotted blood that I
dared not look at them after the first glance.
The Flanders battlefields were worst of
all because of the intensity of fire there and because of the state of the soil
in five months of heavy rains so that each shell hole merged into another pit
ten or twelve feet deep was filled to the brim and made great bogs in which dead
bodies floated. Our men could only get through
that ground ten miles deep to Passchendaele by duck board tracks, a foot and a
half wide and greasy with slime, and "taped out" by German shellfire. They went into action at night up those
narrow ways of earth, and if they slipped off the duck boards they fell up to
the armpits or deeper into the slime-filled pits, and their cries came wailing down
the gusty wind. Woe betide a wounded man
who fell like that. If there were no
comrades handy to haul him out he sank deep into those bogs by Glencorse Wood
and Inverness Copse and drowned.
* * *
The Slimy Bogs of Flanders
After a battle in those swamps
there were many wounded men lying there, and one of them told me how he
recovered consciousness at dawn and thought himself quite alone and was very much afraid because
of that loneliness, until he heard the voices of wounded wailing about him, and
as the light of dawn paled over those grey fields of slime he saw blood-stained
figures raising themselves out of the pits like dead men rising from their graves.
Afterwards some of them clung to each other or held hands like children,
and so I met them and saw how they were shaken by the cold in their bones, and
how the grey slime of the Flanders mud was clotted on them, engrained in the
skin of their faces and hands, and plastering the clothes to their bodies, so
that they seemed to have been buried and dug up again. For five months in 1917 our British soldiers
endured those things, and our losses reached fantastic heights. It amounted in the case of some divisions to
all but annihilation. The two Irish
divisions lost tow thousand men each before attacking a line of German "Pill
Boxes" (or concrete block houses) in August of 1917. They were shelled for
hours as they stood-to in their trenches before the battle - and then when they went into action each
division lost over two thousand more, in one case their loss was 62 per cent of
their total strength. In the other it
was 64 per cent. During all the years of
war, until the last phase, there were dreadful episodes like that when whole bodies of men, around
Ypres, in Delville Wood and High Wood, on the Somme ,
at Gommecourt and Thiepval, were slashed to death by German gunfire. They were fine men, boys for the most part,
from English counties and Scottish farmsteads and cities, and Irish villages,
and I had many friends among them and loved them all so that it was hard to go
to a battalion mess after one of these battles and to find few familiar faces,
but new faces of other s who had come out to fill up the gaps, knowing that in
a little while their turn would come. But
they came and did not try to shun their fate,
they walked among the dead and knew the horrors of war, but then put on
a mask of cheerfulness and hid any fear they might have in their hearts - God
knows we were all afraid - and thy sere gallant to the end, hating this war as
the hell it was, but going through with it, and drinking to the very dregs its
cup of agony, for the name and honor of the British race and for their own
pride of manhood which would allow no surrender.
__________
Published in the St. Thomas Times Journal
Saturday, April 5, 1919
Benner Collection
__________
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