INCIDENTS OF THE GREAT BATTLE

RECAPTURE OF AYETTE OUR AIRMEN’S WORK

FROM PHILIP GIBBS. WAR CORRESPONDENTS’ HEADQUARTERS, FRANCE, THURSDAY MORNING Our capture of the village of Ayette yesterday, with six officers and nearly 200 men, was heartening to our troops as a sign that the tide is turning against the enemy. These German storm troops, who passed division through division in vast numbers, surged after our rearguards on to the Somme battlefields and across the country of their old retreat beyond Bapaume and Péronne, leaving a wake of dead and wounded behind them, have not come into a land flowing with milk and honey, nor into cities good to sack. They have behind them now, as we had behind us, many miles deep of awful desolation. There is no cover from wind, rain or high explosives, no billets in which weary soldiers may find dry beds and warmth, no roofs to houses, no houses to shell-broken walls.

Far beyond the Somme, and the furthest range of our guns in 1916, the enemy himself laid waste everything that could be blown up or burnt. He made a bonfire of Bapaume and its surrounding hamlets. He wrecked all the beauty of Péronne, with its Renaissance houses and public buildings. With torches and axes and explosive charges he destroyed all the habitations over a long belt of country, so that when our men followed they should have no kind of comfort, and be aghast at this desolation. Now they have come back to that waste of their own making, and back across the battlefields of the Somme, where for many miles it is more frightful, because every kilometre is a ghastly reminder to these Germans of things they suffered on there, of their blood that flowed there in that bloodbath of the Somme and of the agonies and tortures in ditches which still wind through this mangled earth, though filled now with rank grass, hiding the bones of men. Not a pleasant place for the German divisions behind their present battle line, no more pleasant than the cold wet hell where the spectres of slaughtered men crowd at night round German sentries, and men under rain-soaked blankets.

MUDDY BATTLEFIELDS

It has been raining hard these two nights past and this morning, and I know what those fields of the Somme, up by Contalmaison and Courcelette and along the valley of the Ancre, look like after rain. I know how sticky is the earth there at Pozières, so that one’s feet sink into its slime. I know how deep are those rain-filled shell-holes and how those undrained trenches become rivers. For the German gunners trying to drag up field artillery or long-range guns there is now a bog. It is hard work for German field companies, pressed furiously to lay narrow-gauge lines over these deserts according to the orders of the High Command, who insist on lines being run out almost as quickly as their men advance so that material of war may be brought up. Their railheads and dumps are in mud through which our men struggled in the winter of 1916, and their transport is wallowing in ruts and old wrecked trenches. All that spells delay in their plans and loss of life. For they are not resting quietly in this waste. Our guns are harassing all this open country with heavy shells. By day and night our aeroplanes are out with tons of bombs, keeping important cross-roads under deadly fire, so that their transport has had to abandon main roads and take to wild tracks across crater-land; bombing bodies of men lying in the open or in column of march; pouring high explosives down on their ammunition dumps, railheads, aerodromes, and assembly places.

There is terror for the enemy over these fields in daylight and darkness from our flying men, who have gone out in squadrons to scatter death and destruction among them. This work has reached fantastic heights of horror for the German troops under the menace of it. There have been times when I believe we have had as many as 300 aeroplanes up at one time. One squadron alone dropped six tons of bombs over the enemy, and, each man went out six times. Another squadron went out four times one night, and was bombing for 11 hours. When the enemy was advancing in masses, our men flew as low as 100ft, dropping bombs among them and firing into them with machine-guns. They attacked German cavalry and machine-gunned trenches full of men, and batteries in action, and transport crowding down narrow roads. There are several cases in which they fought German aeroplanes at night, so that it was like a fight between vampire bats up there. The enemy retaliates as best he can, and suddenly into quiet villages behind our lines comes the noise of bursting shells like a salvo of heavy guns. Peasants driving their carts or children playing are killed or wounded from thunderbolts out of the grey sky. It is not a pleasant kind of war. The cruelty of it all sickens one and the nightmare of it darkens one’s spirit. The enemy is as ruthless of civilian life as of any other, and in addition to his bombing of innocent places, ranges his long guns on to remote towns where old market women are selling poultry and girls are cleaning windows, and war until then seemed far away.

“THE MEN WHO CAME BACK”

Yesterday I went again among some of the men who have come back, and all the time as I moved among them and saw them marching the last lap and settling into billets in an old French village, and greeting comrades whom they had given up for lost, and prefacing the story of their own adventures with queer gusts of laughter as men who have seen strange things and had amazing luck, those words kept ringing through my head and heart, “The men who have come back! The men who have come back,” like some old song. Yes, there were some more of them, and one among them whom I desired to see most come back from the great peril in 10 days of battle. They were men of Sussex and Hampshire and many other counties, and they marched with their transport on that last lap from the battle lines through a country like their own southern shires of England. Sweat poured down their faces after coming down the long trail with the enemy about them all the way, and they walked stiffly, with drag of feet. But most of them looked wonderfully hard and fit, and they came whistling down the winding lanes which led to the village with Norman gateways and high gabled houses and a little old church and a market place of quaint architecture. They dumped their packs in the market place, tethered their horses next to the church, and searched round for their billets.