ENEMY PREPARING FOR FRESH ATTACK.
ACTIVITY BEHIND LINES.
From PHILIP GIBBS. WAR CORRESPONDENTS’ HEADQUARTERS, FRANCE, Saturday.
The enemy still stays in his lines, and even his gunning has during the past twenty-four hours slackened down, except for bursts of heavy fire here and there. Does it mean that the German High Command acknowledge secretly the failure of the stupendous effort which began on March 21, brought to a check on the Somme and in Flanders, and have now decided to cut their losses by remaining on the defensive? If anyone thinks so he is living without knowledge of the realities. Nothing but revolt in Germany or in their armies here – revolts against this colossal shambles of their manhood – will cause the German Command to abandon the desperate hope that they may still smash the Allied armies on the Western front, and in that hope they are going on. I believe what is happening now behind the German lines is the preparation of another violent blow by masses of men and guns. It may be that where the front is most quiet the menace is greatest. It is the quietude which preceded the storm of the first phase of their offensive.
Along many parts of the front yesterday it was our guns that were doing most of the business. The German gunners answered hack hardly at all. They were not turning the other cheek out of a spirit of martyrdom and Christian charity. No doubt they were just economising their ammunition, filling up their dumps, unloading stores of shells from light! railways for a day’s work, which may come very soon. I saw their black shrapnel bursting very high in a sunny sky, just as at St. Quentin before the big assault. Just odd bursts, too high to kill or hurt. What did they mean? Perhaps a study of wind variation. Here and there along the front stray shells were falling in an apparently aimless way, by the side of a road, through the roof of a ruined house. A silly sort of game, one might think, without any plan or idea behind it. Not necessarily. It may be the work of gunners registering on points which, when the time comes, they hope to smother under their fire. Those are things we can see.
What we cannot see, but what we may be sure is taking place behind the enemy lines, is the concentration of those divisions which are still undamaged by battle, the reorganisation of divisions whose gaps, torn by our gunfire and machine-gun fire and rifle fire, are being filled up by drafts from German depôts, the gathering of ammunition stores, the regrouping of guns, the establishment of field hospitals for the wreckage that will follow the next storm, the arrangement of every detail that must be ordered for a battle of the scale that is now being measured.
Our airmen out on reconnaissance see sometimes unusual activity on the German railways, a continual tide of rolling stock along some of their lines, and occasionally a long column of marching men. But it is at night that most of the movement takes place, and in the darkness we may assume that these fresh divisions, with their field batteries and their heavies, are taking up positions nearer our lines in readiness for the hour of assault, whenever that may be.