EVEN VETERANS HORRIFIED AS AIRMAN BOMBS OWN SIDE
YeSTeRDAY in a dugout beyond the hindenburg line and the tunnels, officers were reading a telegram saying that the children of Buxton had saluted the flag in honour of the glorious deeds of the 46th Division.
Round that same dug-out had earlier been flying limbs and pieces of Germans horribly shattered by one of their own airmen.
he had dropped all his bombs in a mass on to a column of prisoners taken by this division and killed 40 of them. It was the grimmest scene that even inveterate fighters had ever witnessed. The survivors had rushed with screams of terror into the dug- out where officers were messing.
Near this same dug- out I saw in a trench an old man in the clothes of 1913 eating cheese and bully beef along with a crony. he was the Mayor of Ramicourt, rescued along with several score other civilians by the 46th Division.
FORCED LABOUR
The group was the most remarkable I have seen, because some of them were young men of military age.
Among the sights that had afflicted them in their period of captivity and forced labour was the demolition of their homes, not by mines in the usual manner but by heavy guns fired point-blank.
They had all been forced to work and no agriculture had been permitted for the last two years.
In the cellars where they hid were also a good many Germans, who lurked there in order to surrender. Close beside the trench in the smashed village where the old man mumbled his talk was the entrance to a milelong tunnel, specially dug by the enemy. It represented years of hard work, is panelled all through, and has dormitories at intervals over its whole length.
As never since the war began did I see in one day such an epitome of the human and material attributes of war. It is still to me a miracle beyond all explication how the Staffords forced the position of the canal. I saw where they crossed with their rafts, their collapsible boats, their scaling ladders, and their life-belts taken from the leave boat.
It is another miracle how they went on and three days later, with the Sherwood Foresters, broke the Beaurevoir line in an assault made on the spur of the moment.
They took 6,000 prisoners, more than double the casualties of the division, though they were fighting all
the time with exposed flanks. Lincolns and Notts and Derbys shared, of course, in this triumph. the value of this break through the last of the German defensive lines this side of Le Catelet was made manifest today by the rapid withdrawal of the enemy in the bend of the canal to the south, which he was leaving, as he had left St Quentin, for fear of suffering a deep dent in his lines.
Yesterday’s attacks rounded off the exploit, and the capture of Beaurevoir by the Australians with 500 prisoners adds to a corps triumph.
the breaking of the German spirit is apparent all along the British line. the retreat deepens and widens before the 3rd Army and before the 5th in the area of La Bassée and Aubers Ridge.
Small rearguards are met and the enemy has resorted to many childish devices to delay the advance.
Among other tricks, he has set up dummy wooden figures as well as sham guns to give the idea that the place is held. the scroll of the degeneration of German spirit and mentality may be read in the cemeteries in the area.
the early graves in the front of the cemetery along the road have solid headstones and footstones, well-cut and ornamented. the later graves at the back, some way from the road, have rough and flimsy crosses, evidently set up in a hurry. the huns are retreating between Lens and the Scarpe, and are burning the city of Douai.
they have been compelled to give up their strong positions south of Cambrai, when our troops are well beyond the Scheldt Canal. Farther south, fierce attempts to push us back beyond the broken Beaurevoir defence line have failed, and we have taken 1,000 more prisoners.
A breakthrough in Champagne has been followed by an enemy retreat on a front of 30 miles, and our Allies are now ten miles north of Rheims and only 13½ miles from Rethel, through which runs a main line to Germany.