Fields of Victory

CHAPTER I

And with that recollection goes also another, which I owe to the same General--one of the idols of the French Army!--of a little graveyard far up in the wilds of the Champagne battle-field--the "Cimetière de Mont Muret," whence the eye takes in for miles and miles nothing but the trench-seamed hillsides and the bristling fields of wire. Here on every grave, most of them of nameless dead, collected after many months from the vast battle-field, lie heaped the last possessions of the soldier who sleeps beneath--his helmet, his haversack, his water-bottle, his _spade_. These rusty spades were to me a tragic symbol, not only of the endless, heart-wearing labour which had produced those trenched hillsides, but also of that irony of things, by which that very labour which protected the mysterious and spiritual thing which the Frenchman calls _patrie_, was at the same time ruining and sterilising the material base from which it springs--the _soil_, which the Frenchman loves with an understanding tenacity, such as perhaps inspires no other countryman in the world. In Artois and Picardy our own British graves lie thickly scattered over the murdered earth; and those of America's young and heroic dead, in the battle-fields of Soissons, the Marne, and the Argonne, have given it, this last year, a new consecration. But here in England our land is fruitful and productive, owing to the pressure of the submarine campaign, as it never was before; British farming and the American fields have cause to bless rather than to curse the war. Only in France has the tormented and poisoned earth itself been blasted by the war, and only in France, even where there are no trenches, have whole countrysides gone out of cultivation, so that in the course of a long motor drive, the sight of a solitary plough at work, or merely a strip of newly ploughed land amid the rank and endless waste, makes one's heart leap.

CHAPTER II

Among the impressions and experiences of my month in France there are naturally some that stand out in particularly high relief. I have just described one of them. But I look back to others not less vivid--an evening, for instance, with General Horne and his staff; a walk along the Hindenburg line and the Canal du Nord, north and south of the Arras-Bapaume road; dinner with General Gouraud in the great building at Strasbourg, which was formerly the headquarters of the German Army Corps holding Alsace, and is now the French Préfecture; the eastern battle-field at Verdun, and that small famous room under the citadel, through which all the leaders of the war have passed; Rheims Cathedral emerging ghostly from the fog, with, in front of it, a group of motor-cars and two men shaking hands, the British Premier and the Cardinal-Archbishop; that desolate heart of the Champagne battle-field, where General Gouraud, with the American Army on his right, made his September push towards Vouziers and Mézières; General Pershing in his office, and General Pershing _en petit comité_ in a friend's drawing-room, in both settings the same attractive figure, with the same sudden half-mischievous smile and the same observant eyes; and, finally, that rabbit-warren of small, barely furnished rooms in the old Ecole Militaire at Montreuil, where the British General Staff worked during the war, when it was not moving in its staff train up and down behind the front.

CHAPTER II

At the same time, this generation has got somehow--as an ingredient in its daily life--to form as clear a mental picture as it can of the war as a whole, and especially just now of its closing months in France. For the history of those last months is at the present moment an _active agent in the European situation_. What one may call the war-consciousness of France, with the first battle of the Marne, glorious Verdun, the Champagne battle-field, the victorious leadership of Marshal Foch, on the one hand--her hideous losses in men, her incalculable loss in material and stored-up wealth, and her stern claim for adequate protection in future, on the other, as its main elements; the war-consciousness of Great Britain and the Empire, turning essentially on the immortal defence of the Ypres salient and the Channel ports, the huge sacrifices of the Somme, the successes and disappointments of 1917, the great defensive battle of last March, and the immediate and brilliant reaction, leading in less than five months to the beginning of that series of great actions on the British front which finished the war--all interpenetrated with the sense of perpetual growth in efficiency and power; and finally, the American war-consciousness, as it emerged from the war, with its crusading impulse intact, its sense of boundless resources, and its ever-fresh astonishment at the irrevocable part America was now called on to play in European affairs:--amid these three great and sometimes clashing currents, the visitor to France lived and moved in the early weeks of the year. And then, of course, there was the Belgian war-consciousness--a new thing for Belgium and for Europe. But with that I was not concerned.

CHAPTER V

The Champagne-battle-field is indeed deeply interwoven with the whole history of the war. The flower of the French Army and almost all the leading French Generals--Castelnau, Pétain, Nivelle, Gouraud, have passed through its furnace. But famous as it is, and for ever associated with the remarkable and fascinating personality of General Gouraud, which gives to it a _panache_ of its own, it has not the sacredness of Verdun.

CHAPTER II

Passchendaele!--name of sorrow and of glory. What were the British losses, in that three months' fighting from June to November, 1917, which has been called the "Third Battle of Ypres," which began with the victory of the Messines ridge and culminated in the Canadian capture of Passchendaele?[4] Outside the inner circle of those who know, there are many figures given. They are alike only in this that they seem to grow perpetually. Heroic, heart-breaking wrestle with the old hostile forces of earth and water--black earth and creeping water and strangling mud! We won the ridge and we held it till the German advance in April last forced our temporary withdrawal; we had pushed the Germans off the high ground into the marsh lands beyond; but we failed, as everyone knows, in the real strategic objects of the attack, and the losses in the autumn advance on Passchendaele were an important and untoward factor in the spring fighting of 1918.

CHAPTER II

[4] Mr. Bonar Law has stated in the House of Commons since these lines were written that the losses in the third battle of Ypres, from Messines to Passchendaele, July--October, 1917, were 228,000.

CHAPTER II

Messines, and the victory of June, 1917--Passchendaele, and the losses of that grim winter--all the points indeed of this dim horizon from north-west to south-east have their imperishable meaning for Great Britain and the Dominions. For quite apart from the main actions which stand out, fighting and death never ceased in the Ypres salient.

CHAPTER III

"Militarily, the more critical period was that which immediately followed the battle when, having reached the line of the old Somme defences of 1916, it was decided to switch the point of attack to the area north of the Somme. On the success of this manoeuvre depended whether the attack of the 8th August was to be a single isolated victory comparable to the battle of Messines in June, 1917, or whether it was to develop into something very much greater. The decision was a grave one, and was in some sense a departure from previous practice. The enemy was now on the alert, the troops to be employed had already been severely tried in the earlier fighting of the year, and failure would have called down severe criticism upon the wisdom of abandoning so quickly the scene of our first great success.

CHAPTER III

And every step beyond Cambrai, desolate as it is, is thronged with these invisible legions. There to our right rises the long line of Bourlon Wood--here are the sand-pits at its foot--and there are the ruined fragments of Fontaine-notre-Dame. There rushes over one again the exultation and the bitter recoil of those London days in November, 1917, when the news of the Cambrai battle came in; the glorious surprise of the tanks; the triumphant progress of Sir Julian Byng; the evening papers with their telegrams, and those tragic joy-bells that began to ring; and then the flowing back of the German wave; the British withdrawal from that high wood yonder which had cost so much to win, and from much else; the bewilderment and disappointment at home. A tired Army, and an attack pushed too far?--is that the summing up of the first battle of Cambrai? A sudden gleam had shone on that dark autumn which had seen the bitter victory and the appalling losses of Passchendaele, and then the gleam vanished, and the winter closed in, and there was nothing for the British Army but to turn its steady mind to the Russian break-down and to the ever-growing certainty of a German attack, fiercer and more formidable than had ever yet broken on the Allies.

CHAPTER VI

Then came the days of disappointment. Troops arrived at a more leisurely pace in France than had been hoped. Ships and aeroplanes, which American enthusiasm in the early weeks of the war had promised in profusion, delayed their coming; there was congestion on the American railways, interfering with supplies of all kinds; and the Weather God, besides, let loose all his storm and snow battalions upon the Northern States to hamper the work of transport. We in England watched these things, not realising that our own confidence in the military prospects and the resisting power of the Allies, was partly to blame for American leisureliness. It was so natural that American opinion, watching the war, should split into two phases--one that held the war was going to be won quickly by negotiation, before America could seriously come in; the other that the war would go on for another three years, and therefore there would be ample time for America to make all her own independent plans and form her own separate army with purely American equipment. English opinion wavered in the same way. I well remember a gathering in a London house in November, 1917, just after the first successful attack in the Battle of Cambrai. It was a gathering in honour of General Bliss, and other American officers and high officials then in London. General Bliss was the centre of it, and the rugged, most human, most lovable figure of Mr. Page was not far away. The Battle of Cambrai was in progress, and English expectations, terribly depressed, at any rate among those who knew, by the reports which had been coming through of the severe fighting in the Salient, during the preceding weeks, were again rising rapidly. Everybody was full of the success of the initial attack, of the tanks above all, and what they might mean for the future. At last Sir Julian Byng had achieved surprise; at last there had been open fighting; if by happy chance we took Cambrai what might not happen? A flash of optimism ran through us all. Victory and peace drew nearer. Yet in the background there were always those dim rumours of the appalling losses at Passchendaele, together with the smarting memory of Caporetto, and of the British divisions sent to Italy.

CHAPTER VII

The third and last phase of the fighting began on the 23rd of October. The enemy was now weakening rapidly along the whole of his line. For while the American Army had been stubbornly fighting its way north from Varennes to Grandpré, where it stood on November 1st, the British Armies, in the great Battles of Cambrai-St. Quentin, Ypres, and Courtrai, had not only captured the Hindenburg line and some fifty thousand prisoners, but had brought about--without fighting--the evacuation of Laon and the retreat of the Germans to the line of the Aisne; the German withdrawal, also, to the Scheldt, involving the freeing of Lille and the great industrial district of France; and finally, in concert with Belgian, French, and some American units, the clearing of the Belgian coast, and the recovery of Ostend, Zeebrugge and Bruges. The end, indeed, was rushing on. Co-operation was everywhere maintained, and blow followed blow. "During this period" (6th to 31st October), says the British Commander-in-Chief, "our Allies had been pushing forward steadily on both sides of the Argonne. The enemy was held by their attacks on his southern flank, while to the north the British offensive was driving forward rapidly behind his right."

CHAPTER IX

Nevertheless, towards the end of the Ypres battle the tank attack in the first Battle of Cambrai was being planned, and there, at last, the enthusiasts of the Tank Corps had the conditions for which they had been long hoping--a good ground and a surprise attack.

CHAPTER I

These were the sights of the first half of our journey. And as they recur to me, I understand so well the anxious and embittered mood of France, which was so evident a month ago;[2] though now, I hope, substantially changed by the conditions of the renewed Armistice. No one who has not seen with his or her own eyes the situation in Northern France can, it seems to me, realise its effects on the national feeling of the country. And in this third journey of mine, I have seen much more than Northern France. In a motor drive of some hundreds of miles, from Metz to Strasburg, through Nancy, Toul, St. Mihiel, Verdun, Châlons, over the ghastly battle-fields of Champagne, through Rheims, Chateau-Thierry, Vaux, to Paris, I have always had the same spectacle under my eyes, the same passion in my heart. If one tried to catch and summarise the sort of suppressed debate that was going on round one, a few weeks ago, between Allied opinion that was trying to reassure France, and the bitter feeling of France herself, it seemed to fall into something like the following dialogue:

CHAPTER I

The fact is--or so it seemed to me--that while the British Army salutes with all its heart, the glorious record of that veteran Army of France which bore the brunt of the first years of war, which held the gate at Verdun at whatever cost in heroic lives, and inscribed upon its shield last year the counter-attacks in the Marne salient, and the superb stand of General Gouraud in Champagne; and while, at the same time, it realises and acknowledges to the full the enormous moral and military effect of the warm American tide, as it came rushing over France through the early summer of last year, and the gallantry of those splendid American lads, who, making mock of death, held the crossing of the Marne, took Bouresches and Belleau Wood, fought their hardest under General Mangin in the Soissons counter-attack of July 18th, and gallantly pushed their way, in spite of heavy losses, through the Argonne to the Meuse at the end of the campaign--there is yet no doubt in any British military mind that it was the British Army which brought the war to its victorious end. The British Army had grown, after the great defensive battle of the spring, by a kind of national rebound, of which there have been many instances in our history, to a wonderful military strength and efficiency, and to it fell, not by any choice of its own, so to speak, but by the will of the gods, and the natural disposition of events, the final and decisive strokes of the war. The French had already "saved Europe by their example," through three bloody and heroic years, and they were bound, in 1918, to economise, where possible, their remaining men; while, if the war had lasted another six months, _or_ if America had come in a year earlier, the decisive battles might well have fallen to the American Army and General Pershing. But, as it happened, the British Army was at its zenith of power, numbers, and efficiency, when the last hammer-blows of the war had to be given--and our Army gave them. I do not believe there is a single instructed American or French officer who would deny this. But, if so, it is a fact which will and must make itself permanently felt in the consciousness of the Empire.

CHAPTER V

After the French rally, indeed, from the first terrific bombardment, which nearly gave the German Command its coveted prey, the thing became a duel, watched by all Europe, between Pétain and the Crown Prince; between the dynastic interests of the Hohenzollerns, served by a magnificent army, and the finest military and patriotic traditions of France. From day to day the public in this country watched the fluctuations of the struggle with an interest so absorbing that the names of Douaumont, Vaux, Mort Homme, Cumières, the Goose's Crest, came to ring in our ears almost as the names of Hougoumont, La Haye Sainte, La Belle Alliance, rang in those of an earlier time.

CHAPTER VII

Over this hard-fought ground, consecrated by the graves of men who had thus bravely--thus gaily--laid down their lives for a cause of which they had no doubt, we ran on to Chateau Thierry, and that western flank of the Marne salient, where in June, while the Germans were still pressing south, and in July when Foch turned upon his trapped foe, the Americans, most of whom were for the first time in real battle, bore themselves to the astonishment and admiration of all the watching Allies. In June especially, when matters were at their worst. The capture of Bouresches, and Belleau Wood, the capture of Vaux on July 1st, the gallant help which an American machine-gun battalion gave the French in covering the French retreat across the bridge at Château Thierry, before it was blown up, and foiling the German attempts to cross, and the German move towards Paris, were perhaps, writes a British military authority, "the most splendid service, from a military standpoint, the Americans rendered to the Allied Cause. It was certainly the first occasion on which they really made themselves felt, and brought home to the Germans the quality of the opposition they were likely to encounter from the American Armies."