World War I - 9 Book Collection: Nelson's History of the War, The Battle of Jutland & The Battle of the Somme. Buchan John

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      CHAPTER II.

       THE OCTOBER FIGHTING

       Table of Contents

      To understand the difficulties which untoward weather imposed on the Allied advance, it is necessary to grasp the nature of the fifty square miles of tortured ground which three months’ fighting had given them, and over which lay the communications between their firing-line and the rear. From a position like the north end of High Wood almost the whole British battleground on a clear day was visible to the eye. To reach the place from the old Allied front line some four miles of bad roads had to be traversed. They would have been bad roads in a moorland parish, where they suffered only the transit of the infrequent carrier’s cart, for, at the best, they were mere country tracks, casually engineered, and with no solid foundation. But here they had to support such a traffic as the world had scarcely seen before. Not the biggest mining camp or the vastest engineering undertaking had ever produced one tithe of the activity which existed behind each section of the battle line. There were places like Crewe, places like the skirts of Birmingham, places like Aldershot or Salisbury Plain, It has often been pointed out that the immense and complex mechanism of modern armies resembles a series of pyramids which taper to a point as they near the front. Behind are the great general hospitals and convalescent homes; then come the clearing hospitals; then the main dressing stations; and, last of all, the advanced and regimental dressing stations—where mechanism fails. Behind are the huge transport depots and repairing shops, the daily trains to railhead, the supply columns; and, last, the hand carts to carry the ammunition to the firing line. Behind are the railways and mechanical transport; but at the end a man has only his two legs. Behind are the workshops of the Flying Corps, and the squadron and flight stations; but at the end of the chain is the solitary airplane coasting over the enemy lines and depending upon the skill and nerve of one man. Though all modern science has gone to the making of this war, at the end, in spite of every artificial aid, it becomes elementary, akin in many respects to the days of bows and arrows.

      It was true of the whole front, but the Somme battle-ground was peculiar in this, that the area of land where the devices of civilisation broke down was far larger than elsewhere. Elsewhere it was defined more or less by the limits of the enemy’s observation and fire. On the Somme it was defined by the previous three months’ battle. It was not the German guns which made the trouble on the ground between the Albert-Peronne road and the British firing line. Casual bombardments troubled us little. It was the hostile elements and the unkindly nature of Mother Earth.

      The country roads had been rutted out of recognition by endless transport, and, since they never had much of a bottom, the toil of the road-menders had nothing to build upon. New roads were hard to make, for the chalky soil was poor and had been so churned up by shelling and the movement of guns and troops that it had lost all cohesion. Countless shells had burst below the ground—causing everywhere subsidences and cavities. There was no stone in the countryside and little wood, so repairing materials had to be brought from a distance, which still further complicated the problem. To mend a road you must give it a rest, but there was little chance of a rest for any of those poor tortured passages. In all the district there were but two good highways, one running at right angles to our front from Albert to Bapaume, the other parallel to our old front line from Albert to Peronne. These, to begin with, were the best type of routes nationales—broad, well-engineered, lined with orderly poplars. By the third month of the battle even these were showing signs of wear, and to travel on either in a motor car was a switchback journey. If the famous highroads declined, what was likely to be the condition of the country lanes which rayed around Contalmaison, Longueval, and Guillemont?

      Let us take our stand at the northern angle of High Wood. It is only a spectre of a wood, a horrible place of matted tree trunks and crumbling trench lines, full of mementoes of the dead and all the dreadful debris of battle. To reach it we have walked across two miles of what once must have been breezy downland, patched with little fields of roots and grain. It is now like a waste brickfield in a decaying suburb, pock-marked with shell-holes, littered with cartridge clips, equipment, fragments of wire and every kind of tin can. Over all the area hangs the curious, acrid, unwholesome smell of burning, an odour which will always recall to every soldier the immediate front of battle.

      The air is clear, and we look from the height over a shallow trough towards the low slopes in front of the Transloy road—behind which lies the German fourth line. Our front is some thousands of yards off, close under that hillock which is the famous Butte de Warlencourt. Far on our left is the lift of the Thiepval ridge, and nearer us, hidden by the slope, are the ruins of Martinpuich. Le Sars and Eaucourt l’Abbaye are before us, Flers a little to the right, and beyond it Gueudecourt. On our extreme right rise the slopes of Sailly-Saillisel— one can see the shattered trees lining the Bapaume-Peronne road—and, hidden by the fall of the ground, are Lesboeufs and Morval. Behind us are things like scarred patches on the hillsides. They are the remains of the Bazentin woods and the ominous wood of Delville. The whole confines of the British battle-ground lie open to the eye from the Thiepval ridge in the north to the downs which ring the site of Combles.

      Look west, and beyond the dreary country we have crossed rise green downs set with woods untouched by shell—the normal, pleasant land of Picardy. Look east, beyond our front line and the smoke puffs, across the Warlencourt and Gueudecourt ridges, and on the skyline there also appear unbroken woods, and here and there a church spire and the smoke of villages. The German retirement in September had been rapid, and we have reached the fringes of a land as yet little scarred by combat. We are looking at the boundaries of the battlefield. We have pushed the enemy right up to the edge of habitable and undevastated country, but we pay for our success in having behind us a strip of sheer desolation. To-day there are two No Man’s lands. One is between the front lines; the other lies between the old enemy front and the front we have won. The second is the bigger problem, for across it must be brought the supplies of a great army. This is a war of motor-transport, and we are doing to-day what the Early Victorians pronounced impossible—running the equivalent of steam engines not on prepared tracks, but on highroads, running them day and night in endless relays. And these highroads are not the decent macadamised ways of England, but roads which would be despised in Sutherland or Connaught.

      The problem is hard enough in fine weather; but let the rain come and soak the churned-up soil and the whole land becomes a morass. There is no pavé, as in Flanders, to make a firm causeway. Every road becomes a watercourse, and in the hollows the mud is as deep as a man’s thighs. An army must be fed, troops must be relieved, guns must be supplied, and so there can be no slackening of the traffic. Off the roads the ground is a squelching bog, dug-outs crumble in, and communication trenches cease to be. In areas like Ypres and Festubert, where the soil is naturally waterlogged, the conditions are worse, but at Ypres and Festubert we have not six miles of sponge, varied by mud torrents, across which all transport must pass.

      Weather is a vital condition of success in operations where great armies are concerned, for men and guns cannot fight on air. In modern war it is more urgent than ever, since aerial reconnaissance plays so great a part, and Napoleon’s “fifth element,” mud, grows in importance with the complexity of the fighting machine. Again, in the semi-static trench warfare, where the same area remains for long the battlefield, the condition of the ground is the first fact to be reckoned with. Once we grasp this, the difficulty of the October campaign, waged in almost continuous rain, will be apparent. But no words can convey an adequate impression of the Somme area after a week’s downpour. Its discomforts had to be endured to be understood.

      The topography of the immediate battleground demands a note from the point of view of its tactical peculiarities. The British line at the end of September ran from the Schwaben Redoubt, a thousand yards north of Thiepval, along the ridge to a point north-east СКАЧАТЬ