GREAT SCENES ON THE BATTLEFIELD BAPAUME OURS AGAIN

FROM PHILIP GIBBS. WAR CORRESPONDENTS’ HEADQUARTERS, FRANCE, FRIDAY.

The official communiqué tells the places we have captured to-day and last night – so many that a mere list of them is long – from north of the Scarpe, where Scotsmen are on the outskirts of Plouvain, after their long and gallant fighting, to Bullecourt, which Londoners and West Lancashires took yesterday, going farther east to-day than we have ever been before, and away down south beyond Bapaume and towards Péronne. In the First Army, Canadians, following up yesterday’s splendid attack by Londoners, have made a new assault to-day, and are within a few hundred yards of the Drocourt-quéant line, and in the Third Army the New Zealanders and other troops are getting out into open country and on high ground to the north and east of Bapaume. I picked some roses to-day in Bapaume, red rambler roses, which would make a garland for the steel helmet of one of the New Zealand boys, to whom honour is most due for the capture of the town. Bapaume is not a fragrant place for rose-lovers, and when I went into it early this morning, when the new battle was in progress outside, German shells were smashing among the houses, and there was a smell of corruption and high explosives in its ruined streets; but I noticed how against a broken wall these roses were in bloom, and marigolds and sweet williams among the red brickdust of the ruins, and I picked a bunch out of sheer maudlin sentiment. For there is a sentiment about the recapture of Bapaume for all our soldiers and for me. It is the second time that we have entered it with triumph after stern fighting up a long, long trail. I shall never forget the thrill of that first entry on March 17 last year, when I had the luck to go in with the Australians up the long road from Albert, past Pozières and Le Sars and Butte de Warlencourt, and those frightful places where thousands of our men had fallen on the way. It seemed then that Bapaume was the goal of victory, and in spite of the dreadful sights about one’s spirit rose as one passed each shell-crater and drew nearer to the town. The repetition of an experience is never quite so fresh in sensation as the first adventure; yet to get again into Bapaume after its loss last March, when the German army came in a rolling tide back over the Somme battlefields, was a thing worth doing. It was another landmark of history, made this time by New Zealanders and English regiments fighting beside them. I set out early to get there, and saw the dawn rise for this new day of war. The fields were pale in the first light of day, and there was a white mist over all the war-zone until it was soaked up by the rising sun.

A VALLEY OF ABOMINATION

The battlefields were ghastly in this whitish glamour, with dew clinging to the strands of the barbed wire and to tall thistles growing rankly in the unreaped cornfields all cut up with trenches and shell-craters. Supply trains puffed through the desolation of those old battlefields, with long trails of white smoke, and truck-loads of shells for new battles. Kite balloons rose above the grey earth and wagged their white ears aloft. Presently along the roads transport came crawling. Labour battalions came out of their camps in which smoky fires burned, and marched up to mend the roads tramped over by German boots a day or two ago. From the aerodromes on the way our flying men were coming out for the first flight of the morning, and winged away into dappled sky. So the world out here awoke to another day of war, though farther up there was no waking, for no man had slept. I went up through Miraumont and the Valley of the Ancre, across which the Welsh went wading to capture the heights of Thiépval on Aug 8. It was a valley of abomination, and the dawn lighted up its leprous trees, stinking out of deep swamps from which there rose wafts of stench where dead things lie rotting. Sand-bag emplacements, where men had a little shelter from storms of fire, were white against the charred earth and blank stumps. Everywhere for miles up this valley to Irles and Achiet-le-petit and Grevillers and other places, near Bapaume, where our men have been fighting hard these last few days, the ground – all this tumult of tortured earth, all these pits dug by shells, all this wild destruction of places ruined in the first years of the war, and mangled ever since – was strewn with relics of German life and German death newly littered here. Their great steel helmets, punctured by bullets, or torn like paper by shell-splinters, lay in thousands, with gas-masks and rifles and cartridge belts and grey coats. Every mile of the way lay rows of stick-bombs never used against our men, and dumps of unexploded shells hideous in their potentiality. A few dead horses lay on each side of the tracks as they had gone trudging up with our transport before being hit. Beside one horse lay a dead white dog, the pet of a transport column. For a picture of war an artist like Orpen should have been here. But the men hereabouts had other work to do. They were getting on with the business, bringing up their guns across wild wastes of cratered ground, filling up pits in the roads for transport to pass, tearing up broken rails that new ones might be laid, riding and marching forward to support their comrades in another day of fighting. They were mostly New Zealanders on this way, and although bad stuff was flying about – the enemy was crumping Grevillers and Achiet-le-petit, and scattering high velocities about in a vicious random way – many of these lads did not trouble to wear their steel helmets, but kept to their slouch hats with the dandy red bind. I poked my head into a tent to get some direction, and found a New Zealand officer just waking up from a too-brief sleep. “How are things going?” I asked, and he said: “Oh! fine. Our boys have done grandly, and are still going ahead.” He sat up to tell me some of their adventures: how they had fought machinegun nests, how the Germans had counterattacked a day or two ago, and got very near to their field batteries, which were far forward. “What do you think?” he said. “Those gunners of ours fought at point-blank range until the Germans were nearly up to their muzzles, and took seven prisoners on their own, which is not in the artillery contract. They are devilish amused with themselves, and have reason to be.”

IN CAPTURED BAPAUME

So I went on to Bapaume with quickened pulse, over trenches taken only yesterday, and still bristling with parts of German machine guns, which were densely emplaced along the lines. New Zealanders were organising their own defences in the old German trenches, oiling their rifles. They pointed out the best way into Bapaume, through belts of wire, and I went on across the railway, which I crossed first in March of 1917, on another day of victory. Bapaume had charged but little since I last saw it, before the German avalanche a few months ago. Since then our guns have pounded it, and our flying men have gone over it at night dropping down tons of explosives, and now this morning the enemy was shelling it again, but what difference can there be in a place already ruined, a scrap-heap of broken houses, except more holes in walls, broken roofs rebroken, brickwork smashed into smaller dust. I prowled about the streets of Bapaume, through gaping walks of houses, over piled wreckage, and found it the same old Bapaume as when I had left it, except that some of our huts and an officers’ clubhouse, and some YMCA tents and shelters have been blown to bits, like everything else. This was the chief difference, except again for many signboards showing the recent occupation of the enemy. One notice caught my eye, and I saw the same message of warning in Grevillers and Achiet, and other places near Bapaume, showing how effective had been the work of our airmen in terror to the German soldiers. It said: “Weg von der Strasse! Hier findet ench feindliche Flieger” (“Keep off the streets. Here you will find hostile airmen.’’) These notices were even in open country down the battlefield tracks, telling how our airmen had swooped over them all with their constant menace. Prowling about those sinister streets of Bapaume I met a fellow in a steel hat who had a valuable box of matches, which was good for a cigarette, and in friendly conversation he told me that before he became a rifleman of the New Zealanders he was the editor of a newspaper in his country, and a literary man. We exchanged views on the war and life and shellfire ruins, and he told me how some days ago, when he was outside Puisieux with his platoon, they were badly troubled by a German machine-gun in front of them. The editor was one of six who went out to get rid of this trouble, if they had the luck, and they not only brought in the machine-gun, but 26 prisoners as well, being the first batch from Puisieux. It was another little experience for a man who was more ready with a fountain pen than a rifle before the world went to war. In the streets of Bapaume I picked up a book dropped in a hurry by some poor devil who will never read it now. It is entitled “Der Quelle der Kraft, der Strom des Friedens, das Meer der Gnade” – “The source of power, the flood of peace, the sea of grace” – and I think when I have time I shall read it to find out another angle of German philosophy with regard to the war. It ought to make good reading, though not perhaps as the author intended.