"THE BLOOD BATH"

Evening Post, Volume XCIII, Issue 27, 31 January 1917, Page 10

"THE BLOOD BATH"

THE SOMME OFFENSIVE

FROM THE GERMAN SIDE,

(From Philip Gibbs.) BRITISH HEADQUARTERS (France), 25th November.

Before the ending of the first phase of the Battles of the Somme—the second phase begins, 1 imagine, with our great advance on 15th September from the Pozieres-Longueval-Guillemont line —the German troops had invented a terrible name to describe this great ordeal; it was "The Blood-Bath of the Somme." The name and the news could not be hidden from the people of Germany, who had already been chilled with horror by the losses at Verdun, nov from the. soldiers of reserve regiments quartered in French and Belgian towns like Valenciennes, St. Quentin, Cambrai, Lille. Bruges, and as far back as Brussels, waiting to go to._thc front, nor from the civil populations of those towns held for two years by their enemy—these blonde young men who lived in their houses, marched down their streets, aud made love to their women. The, news was brought down from the Somme front bj Red Cross trains., arriving in endless succession, and packed with maimed and mangled men. 1 German military policemen formed cordons round the railway stations, pushed back civilians.who came to stare with sombre eyes at these blanketed bundles of living flesh, but when the ambulances rumbled through the streets towards the hospitals—long pro cessions of them, with the soles of men's boots turned up over the stretchers on which they lay quiet" and stiff—the talewas told though no word was spoken. The tale of defeat, of great losses, of grave and Increasing anxiety, was told clearly enough—as I have read in captured letters—by the faces of German officers who went about in these towns behind the lines with gloomy looks, end whose tempers, never of the sweetest, became irritable and unbearable, so that the soldiers hated them for all this cursing and bullying.. A certain battalion commander has a nervous breakdown because he has-to meet his colonel in the morning. "He is dying with fear and anxiety," writes one of his comrades. Other men, riot battalion commanders, are. even more afraid of their superior officers, upon whom this bad .news from the Somme has an evil effect. The bad news was spread by divisions taken out of the line and sent back to rest. The men ■ reported that their battalions. had been cut to pieces. Some.of their regiments had lost three-quarters of their strength. They described the frightful effect of the British artillery—the smashed trenches, the shell-craters, the great horror. ...

BAVARIANS AND PRUSSIANS. ' It is not good for the moral of men who are first going up there to, take their turn. The man who was afraid of his colonel "sits all day long writing home' with the picture of his wife and children before his eyes." He is afraid of other things.' Bavarian soldiers quarrelled with Prussians, accused them (unjustly) ■of shirking the Somme battlefields and leaving the Bavarians ■to go. to the blood-bath. , • ' : : ■

• All the Bavarian troops ; are being sent to the Somme ■ (this much. is certain,, you can see no Prussians-there) and this in spito of the. losses the Ist Bavarian Corps suffered recently at Ver-dun.--And. how we did-suffer. , It appears that, we are in for another turn, at least the sth Bavarian ; Division. Everybody has been talking about it .for a long time. To.the devil if! .Every .Bavarian regiment is being sent into "it, and it's a, swindle. ... - It was in. no cheerful mood that men went, a-way to the Somme battlefields, those battalions of grey-clad men entrained without any „of the, - old* enthusiasm with, which, they had gone' to earlier battles. Their gloom , was noticed by the officers. "Sing, you sheep's head,. sing !" they : shouted They were compelled to sing, by order. A man of the 18th .Reserve Division'wrote :' ,' „ '

We.had to.go out again; we were,to learn to sing. The greater.part, did not join.in, and the song went feebly.- Then we had to march round in a circle and ping. ,and. that went no . better. After that we had an hour off, and on the.way back to billets we were to sing "Dcutschland liber Alles," but this broke down completely. One never hears songs of the Fatherland any more. FOREBODINGS OF FEAR, They, were silent, grave-eyed men who marched through the streets •' of French and Belgian towns to be. entrained, for the Somme front, for they had forebodings of the fate before them. Yet none of their forebodings were equal in intensity of fear to the frightful reality into- which they Were Hung. The journey to the Somme front on the German side was a way of terror, ugliness, and death. Not. all the imagination of morbid minds searching: obscenely for foulness and blood in the great ' deep pits of human agony could surpass these scenes along , the way- to the German liTjes round Courcelette and $ Flers, Gueudcourt, Morval, and Les • Boeufs. Many times, long before a German '.bati talion had arrived near the trenches, itl i .was' but a collection of nerve-broken men bemoaning-losses already sufferal far behind the lines and filled with hideous apprehension. . For British long-range guns were hurling high explosives into distant villages, barraging cross-roads, reaching out to rail-heads and ammunition dumps, while British airmen were on bombing flights over railways stations and; rest\billets, and . high roads down which the German troops, en me marching at Cambrai, Bapaume, in the.valley ;bctween Irles .and Warlencouit, at LigriyThilloy, Busigny, and.many other places on the lines of route."' ' ....

.-■German soldiers arriving at Cambrai by train found themselves under the .fire of a single aeroplane, which, flew very low and dropped bombe. They,exploded with heavy crashes, and .one bomb .hit the first 'carriage behind the engine, killing, and wounding several men. A second .bomb hit the station buildings, and there was a great clatter of broken glass, the rending of. wood and the fall of bricks. All lights went out, and the German 'soldiers groped, about in the darkness amidst .the splinters of glass and the fallen bricks, searching for the wounded by the sound of their groans. It was biit one scene along the way to that blood-bath, through which they had ■to wade'td ith'e trenches of the Somme.

DEATH FROM THE. SKIES. .•. Flights, of British aeroplanes circled over the villages on the way. At' Grevilhers,,in, August; eleven 112-16.bombs ■fell in the market square so that the centre'of the'village collapsed in a SUite of. ruin, burying soldiers billeted there. Every day ithe British airmen paid these visits, meeting the Germans "far up the roads on their way tb the Somme, avid swooping over them like a flying Death. Kven on the march in open country the 'German soldiers trumping silently along -—not singing in spite of orders—were bombed and shot at by these British aviators, who flew- down 'very low, pouring out streams of machine-gun bullets. The Germans .lost their nerve at such times, and scattered into the ditches, falling over each oitlier, struck and cursed by their " unteroflizieren," and leaving their dead and wounded in ■ the roadway. As the roads went nearer to the battlefields they were choked with the traffic of -war, with artillery. >.juid transport wajjona and horse ambu-

lances, and always thousands of grey men marching 'vp-to their lines, v. back from them, exhausted and broken after many_ days in the fires of hell up there. Officers sac on their horses by the roadside directing all the traffic with -the usual swearing and cursing, and rode alongside the itransport wagons and the troops, urging- them forward at a. quicker pace, because of stern orders received from headquarters demanding quicker movement. The reserves, it seemed, were desperately wanted up in the lines. The English were attacking again. God nlone knew what was happening. Regiments ha.d lost their-way Wounded were pouring back Officers had gone.mad. . . Into the midst of all this turmoil shells fell—shells from longrange guns. Transport ■ wagons were blown to bus. The bodies and fragments of artillery horse s lay nil over the roads. .Men lay dead or bleeding under the debris or gun-wheels and broken bricks Above all the noise of this concision and death in the night the liard stern .voices of German officers rang out, and German discipline prevailed and' men marched on to greater perils. IN THE SHELL ZONE. They were in the shell zone now, and sometimes a regiment on the march was tracked all along the way by British gunfire directed from aeroplanes and captive balloons. It was the fate of a captured, officer I met who had detrained at Bapaume for the trenches at Contalmaison.. At Bapaume bis battalion was hit by fragments of 12-inch shells. Nearer to the line they came under the fire of 8-inch and 6-inch shells. Four-point-sevens found them somewhere by Bazentin. At Contalmaison they marched into a barrage' and here the officer was taken prisoner. Of his battalion there were few men left. It was so with tho 3rd Jaeger Battalion,- ordered up hurnedly to make \a counter-attack near Flers. They suffered so heavily on the way to the trendies that no attack could be made. The stretcher-bearers had all the work to do.

The way up to the trenches became more tragic as every kilometre was passed^ until the stench of corruption was wafted on the wind, so that men were sickened and tried not to breathe, and marched hurriedly to get on the lee side of its foulness. They walked, now through places which had once been villages, but were sinister ruins where, death lay in wait for German soldiers. One of them wrote:— . ' "It seems queer to me that whole villages close to the front look as flat!tened as a child's toy run over by a steam roller. Not one stone remains on I another. The streets aro one line of shell-holes. Add to that the thunder of the guns, and you.will see with what feelings, we come into the " line—into trenches - where for months shells of all calibre have rained. . . Flers is a scrapheap." - . „•■ • ■'• ■■

■ They had reached the Battle of Blood. at last, above that river of the Sommo which aa long as the history of this war lasts will be coloured in the imagination of men by the crimson flow of life spilt on these battlefields, though it runs silver bright between the ■ high rushes on its j banks. 1 In, the fire-trenches and support trenches and communication trenches up by Thiepval, Martinpuich,. and Courcelette; by Flers and. Gueudecourt, and ] Morval, even farther back by Grandcourt and. Le Sars, British shell-fire came in great storms, ploughing up the. earth, burying living nien,unburying dead men, searching for. German' flesh and blood, many .days before the British infantry leapt from their own trenches ahd-began the second phase, or, if you like to reckon differently, the third phase, of their advance, on 15th September. -'-. . RELIEFS ONLY-AT NIGHT. : ; Again and again men lost 1 their way up to the lines. The reliefs could only be.made at night,, lest they should be discovered by British airmen and British gunners, and . even if these. German soldiers had trench-maps' the guidance „was but little good when many trenches had been; smashed in, and only shell-craters could be found. They stumbled through the darkness and into these pits, sometimes waist-high in water. .The British flares shot up with a vivid white light, and the men crouched low and still between the rockets, and then crawled on again. Shells burst over them, and there was the chatter of English machine-guns'. A letter written by one of these Germans says:—' . ■ -

: "In the front, lino of Flers the men were only occupying shell holes. Behind there was the intense smell , of. putrefaction, which filled, the, trench—almost unbearably. The corpses lie either quite insufficiently covered with earth on the edge of the trench or quite close under the bottom of the trench, so that the earth lets the stench through. In some places bodies lie quite uncovered- in , a trench recess,, and no one seems, to trouble about them. One sees horrilbe pictures—here an arm,-here a foot, here a. head, sticking out of the earth. And these .are all German soldiers—heroes! Not far from us, at the entrance to a dug-out, nine men were buried, of whom three were dead. All along the trench, men kept on getting buried. What had been a perfect trench a few hours before was in parts completely'blown in. . ... The,men are getting weaker. It is impossible to. hold out any longer. Losses can iiio longer ,be reckoned accurately. Without a 1 doubt many.of our-people are killed/" -'■".. . .'■'■. That is only one out of. thousands of such gruesome pictures,, \ true .as ' the death they, describe, which have gone to German, homes during, the battles .of the Somme. These German soldiers are grand letter-writers,, and men. sitting in wet, ditches—in "fox-holes," as they call their dug-outs—"up to. my waist in mud," as one: of them described, scribbled pitiful, things,,, which they, hoped might reach.their .people at'home, as a. voice from the dead. ■> For they had had.little hope of escape' from the "blood-bath." "When.you get this I shall be a corpse," wrote one of; them, and. one'finds the | same foreboding in many of these dpcu- j ments. Even the lucky ones, whocduld get some cover from the"incessant bom--bardmerit by English guns, began to lose their nerves after a day or two. They were always in fear of British infantry, sweeping upon them suddenly behind the' "Trommelfeuer,", rushing their dugouts with bombs and bayonets. - Sentries became "jumpy," and signalled attacks when there were no attacks. The gas alarm was sounded constantly by the clang of a bell in the trench, and men put on .their heavy gas-masks and sat in them until\they were nearly stifled. Here is a little picture of life in a German dug-out near : the .British lines, written-by a man now dead. ' ■ ,

The telephone bell rings. "Are_ you there? Yes; here's Nau's battalion." "Good. That is all." Then that ceases, and now the wire is in-again, perhaps foiv the-twenty-fith or thirtieth tithe. Tims the night" is interrupted, and now, they come, alarm .messages, 1 one after the other, each "more-terrifying than, the other, of enormous losses through the bombs and shells of the enemy,-of huge masses of troops advancing upon us, of all possible possibilities, such as a train broken down, and tortured.• by Hie terrors of the day can invent. Our nerves quiver. , We clench our teeth. None of us can forget the horrors of the night. Heavy mill fell, ;md the dug-outs, became wet and filthy. Our sleeping-places were full of water. We hud to try to bail out the trenches with cooking dishes. . T lay down in the water, with G . .We were to .have worked on dug-outs, but not a soul could do any more. Only- a few sections cot coffee. Mine, eofc liotkinc at aiL I

was frozen in every limb, poured , th» water out of my boots, and lay down ngain. GENERAL STAFF ALARMED The German generals and their staffs could not be quite indifferent to all this welter of 1 human suffering among their troops, jn spite of the cold scientific spirit with which they regard the problems of war. The agony of the individual soldier would not trouble them. There is no war without agony But the psychology of masses of men. had to be considered, because it affects ilie efficiency of the machine. As I shall show, the German Genera! Staff on the Westj em front were becoming seriously alarmed by-the declining moral ot their infantry under the increasing strain of the British attacks, and adopted stern measures to cure it. But they' could not hope to cure the heaps of German dead who were lying on the battlefields, nor the maimed men who were being carried back to the dressing stations, nor to bring back the prisoners taken in droves by the French and British troops. Before the attack on the Flers line, the capture-of Thiepval, and tho German debacle at Beaumont Hamel the enemy's command was already filled with a grave anxiety at the enormous losses of its fighting strength, was compelled to adopt new expedients for.increasing. the number of its divisions. It was forced to ■withdraw troops badly needed on other fronts, and, as I shall point out, the successive shocks of the British offensive reached as far as Germany itself, so that the whole of its recruiting system had to be revised to .fill up the gaps tarn out of the German ranks,.

[The first article by Mr. Philip Gibbs describing German views of the battles of the Somme appeared in our issue of Saturday last.]