COMING OFFENSIVE THE TIME FACTOR SHELLS AND SUNSHINE

From Philip Gibbs. War Correspondents’ Headquarters, France, Thursday.

The long postponement of the enemy’s coming assaults seems a definite proof that his losses in the first six weeks of his offensive were so heavy that he had to abandon the costly tactical blows which followed his general advance, in order to reorganise his fighting machine. The task of filling up his gaps by large drafts from his dépôts, where he has begun to draw upon his boys of the 1919 class, is taking up time, and it seems to me evident now that he will not attempt to strike again until his fresh and refitted divisions are ready for a new offensive on something like the scale of March 21. The time he has already taken has been entirely in our favour, and we need be in no hurry for him to begin. We have forced from him the very thing which he wanted most to deny us – time, and by yielding that under force majeure he has had to abandon his greatest chance of victory, and, as many of us believe, his only chance.

Our gaps are now filled up, the exhaustion of our troops after long fighting has now passed, the French armies are mingled with ours, and our men no longer have to bear the brunt of the enemy’s full strength in numbers that were hideously unequal. That the German High Command gave time for this is good evidence enough that they could take no further risks in the first gambler’s throw, and had to cut their losses for a time, or at least be satisfied with smaller gains than they had hoped.

So much for the general situation. The particular situation is just a matter of shellfire and sunshine. The sunshine, which has put a splendour over the fields of France so warmly that the light spirit of May is deepening to the colours of flaming June, is spoilt near the lines by the shellfire. For its beastliness is not redeemed by a blue sky, and shell splinters bite as sharply into human flesh though they come into fields enamelled with the blue-eyed speedwell. The German guns have been busy about Lens and in the old places up in Flanders, and in the country north of Albert. Yesterday they did some violent counter-battery work with gas-shells and others, and tried to silence our guns which are still harassing the German side of things in a very deadly way.

COMRADES-IN-ARMS

All this is the routine of war between battles. What is better to see is the country behind the line. It is enchanting now, and puts such a spell upon one’s senses at these glinting woods of France where every leaf is a jewel, these gardens of old châteaux where the grass is sprinkled with living gold, these French villages where the whitewashed

walls and thatched or tiled roofs are warm in the sun, and, painted in picture-book colours, remind one of old songs which had not war but love for their theme. It is a moving and marvellous pageant of blue and brown where French and English pass along the roads. The men in French lorries sit with their faces above the side boards or with their heads out of the side flaps, winking at the Tommies, casting amorous eyes upon buxom lasses in cottage doors, smoking endless cigarettes with a look of complete indifference to anything that may happen at the journey’s end. They are tough types, some of them men of middle age, hard bitten, with spade beards like Elizabethan Englishmen or Henri Quatre of France. In their steel casques they have a medieval look like their ancestors of the sixteenth century.

French soldiers and English soldiers are bivouacked in the woods and fields side by side, and yesterday I saw them bathing in one of the rivers which our Henry crossed on his way to Agincourt when their forefathers and ours were not comrades in arms. While some men washed their feet, others lay fullstretched in the grass sleeping in every attitude of languorous ease, with their steel hats among the flowers, and an officer’s sword stuck into the turf beside him.

GREAT AIR ACTIVITY

So I lay down in a ditch full of flowers and drowsed and forgot war until the usual noises overhead made one open one’s eyes. There was a German aeroplane, high enough to be invisible, but not too high to silence the drone of its engine or to avoid observation from our Archie men. Bang went an Archie gun, and presently there was a fusillade in the sky and a tattoo from a machine gun in the grass, and then the throb of engines as our planes came over to chase the intruder. The enemy’s air scouts were out and about yesterday because of the wonderful visibility, and they came peering over our lines and villages as though searching for some special secret. There must have been many fights in that cloudless sky, for our men were up there too and away over the enemy’s lines, and all day long there were puffs of shrapnel overhead, so that peasant girls harrowing the fields gazed up with their hands to their eyes, and French soldiers gave a glance upwards and said for the millionth time, “Quelle vache de guerre,” and, every now and then a crash of noise came through the humming drowsiness of this May day where a bomb had been dropped. In one field was a German aeroplane newly brought down, a silver-looking thing with iron crosses painted on its framework, and some of our airmen gathered around it to study its details.