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Chapter XX Of the Storm That Burst Upon Messines

—M.R. in New Zealand at the Front.

The battalions marched back on the first day through Arques and the Wallon-Capel area. Another hard day brought them past Hazebrouck and the Forêt de Nieppe to the villages about La Motte; and thence it was but a short distance to the Bailleul road and so to Canteen Corner.

The final preparations had all been made. Red Lodge and Kandahar Farm had been heavily reinforced with thick walls of concrete and converted into forward dressing stations. A strong concrete dugout had been made at Charing Cross for the same purpose. Routes were clearly marked out for the walking wounded. At the rear were large wire cages for the prisoners, for whom special tracks were also provided. To prevent any confusion among the infantry moving up W., X., Y., and Z. overland routes were cleared and pegged from the concentra-page 201tion area to the assembly trenches. Nothing had been forgotten—no smallest detail overlooked.

Day by day the firing increased in intensity. The trench mortar, the flying pig, the 18-pounder, the 6-ineh howitzer, the 9.2, the 12-inch, the 15-inch, the long-range naval gun, all pounded, hammered, and searched the enemy lines. Every day the creeping barrage moved up Messines Hill. The green slope was gone, the clean outline of the trenches blotted out. The great church was blown apart, the buildings disintegrated into shapeless heaps of broken bricks. From the middle of No Man's Land to far on the reverse slope was a brown waste.

The Germans were determined to keep their hold upon the town. Beneath the crumbling buildings they constructed concrete works strong enough, they hoped, to withstand the fire and give shelter to the machine-gun crews. They brought in fresh troops and more guns. They steadily blew in the front line and practised their counter-barrage across the valley of the Douve. Their shelling grew very heavy.

Men crouch up against the sandbags or squeeze into the safe corners, or lie at full length beneath the firestep to obtain a little overhead cover from the flying splinters that come zutting down upon the duckboards. "Bang! Crash! Bang! Crash! Whizz-bang! Zirr-zut!" for half an hour at a time the air is full of splinters, flying debris, dust, smoke and infernal noise. The parapet comes crashing down on top of a couple of men and the platoon sergeant who has been glimpsing across No Man's page 202Land for the first sign of a German attack springs down, shovels the earth away and drags the two men out. They are shaken but not hurt. A moment later a 5.9 smashes a dugout. The sergeant and the stretcher-bearers come through a hail of splinters. One man is dead. Another has a smashed thigh. They stop the bleeding and bandage him, but leave him in the broken dugout for the time being. Two others have good "Blighties" and as soon as they are fixed up make off to the dressing station. A big shell lands in the bottom of the trench and blows the duckboards to matchwood. "Crash! Crash! Cr-r-rash!" the earth shakes.

The sergeant, disdaining what cover is to be had, moves along the line of his men with a word, a gesture, a smile, bringing good cheer to the overwrought, the trembling and the much afraid. In some indefinable fashion virtue goes out of him, and the weak, seeing him, become strong. Afterwards he may do great deeds but the men in the crumbling trench know that the supreme hour of his valour was in that time when nothing could have been written of deeds done but when shaken men could say, "He gave us the courage." Men sit or lie quietly, nerves and muscles tensed up, ready to roll away if the bank above them comes tumbling in or to spring to the firestep if there is an alarm. They think of many things. The minds of some are clouded with fear. As each shell shrieks towards them they feel the agony of wounds and suffer many times all the bitterness of death. Fear can be terribly present in such times. It has page 203time to grow and shape itself into sick fancies. It may grow and grow until honour and duty and friendship are all forgotten in a blind urge for selfpreservation. One man does go mad with terror, deserts his post, flings away his rifle and his gas helmet, and runs screaming through the explosions. He is met by the sergeant, who checks him for a moment and fastens his own gas helmet on him. The quiet voice has its effect and the poor wretch is put into a dugout with a brave corporal. He covers his head with an oil-sheet and shudders at each burst but does not run again.

Others with some sort of scientific detachment speculate on the probable point of impact of an approaching shell and then from the explosion deduce the calibre of the enemy gun. Some force the sensations of the present back into the fringe of consciousness and focus upon past pleasures and future hopes. Some cheerful ones jest in the midst of terror. To the noble souls comes a certain exaltation because in the quietness of their own souls they have overcome the fear of imminent death. Not that they have come to consider themselves invulnerable—far from it—they are acutely conscious that the next rending crash may leave them headless or limbless or bereft of sight. But they have faced fear with open eyes, and the monster has grown powerless and all his feverish urgings are of no avail before the greater urgency of duty and the necessity of self-sacrifice. "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil," They are lifted beyond the common-page 204place and in the broken trench they find the Presence.

The German guns ceased and those of the British opened up on the hill in front. Messines vanished in smoke and drifting columns of dust. The fiery hail rained down on trench and dugout. Nothing on the surface was safe, and twenty feet below ground the flying pig rooted and tore. German ! diaries give some glimpse of what a hell it must have been for them. "This everlasting murder." "The casualties increase terribly." "All the trenches are clodded up." "No shelter left." "They blow up the earth all around us." "To look on such things is utter misery." As in Dante's Inferno:

O'er all, the sand fell slowly wafting down Dilated flakes of fire.

As dugout and trench collapse in heaps of smoking debris, little groups of fear-stricken men endeavour to run back across country seeking some secure shelter, but the Lewis-gunners are on the look-out for just such an opportunity. "Br-r-r-r-rt-t-tt! Br-r-r-r-rt-t-tt!" The runners fall: some killed, some wounded.

"Throughout the afternoon and evening before the battle there was a great coming and going of men moving into their battle stations. Perhaps in no other battle of the war did the private soldier carry quite so much: steel helmet, rifle, bayonet, Webb equipment, full pouches of S.A.A., and an extra hundred rounds in bandoliers, entrenching page 205tool, haversack and water-bottle, with small box respirator slung on the chest was battle order. In addition, however, every man carried two Mills bombs in his breast pockets and extra rations besides a pick or a shovel. Then distributed about among the members of a platoon were wire-cutters of all sizes and shapes, buckets of bombs, carriers full of rifle grenades, spare Lewis-gun panniers, ground flares, signal apparatus."—2/A.R.

So careful and thorough indeed was the preparation that every officer and even every section commander was issued with a map showing in detail the German trench system to be assaulted.

The main saps were crowded and stoppages were frequented. German gas shells were bursting continually on the long slope. "Plop! Plop! Plop!" Gas-masks were donned hurriedly and the long line stood for half an hour until the reek drifted away. Men shuffled on again. There were casualties. "Plop!" A shell slid gently into the earth as two men passed by. There was a slight odour of phosgene gas. They paid no heed, but twenty minutes later one of them was choking and vomiting on the floor of the trench. A very brave man, he refused to be carried out until his mates forced him on to a stretcher. For a couple of months he lay between life and death. One lung went completely and he was recommended for discharge. Then for months he bluffed, cajoled, wangled points until he fought his way, doctor by doctor, orderlyroom by orderly-room, back to his own company.

The British guns were silent, but a few machine-page 206guns chattered and an aeroplane flew low over the enemy line to drown the noise of the tanks moving up. Some half an hour before zero all were in place, waiting while the minute-hand crept slowly toward 3.10 a.m. There is a touch of unreality in this waiting for the appointed hour. All is so quiet. Everything seems to be so safe. The trench walls are strong and high. Men are intensely alive. Yet a dozen men standing in a bay know that in an hour two of them will probably be dead, and three or four more lying wounded.

On the very second there came a shaking of the earth. Tongues of leaping flame stabbed through the greying darkness. Columns of smoke and debris rose dimly in the first light of dawn. A muffled roar like thunder in the far distance. The mines had gone up blowing great gaps in the German lines. A brief pause, a sudden rattle of thousands of machine-guns, a red flash round the horizon, and then with a thunder blast of sound the great barrage fell on Messines. The long roll of the heavy guns, and the quick, stabbing, bang-snap-bang of the 18-pounders merged into one tremendous volume of sound. From the stricken lines and far to the right and the left the SOS rockets went flaring whitely into the sky, bursting into green stars. But the reply was thin and broken, for the German guns had been drenched with gas and smothered with high explosive.

Behind the moving wall of steel and flame the infantry flung themselves on the demoralized enemy. A few scattered groups made some show of page 207resistance but by far the greater number were so dazed and shaken that they could think of nothing but immediate surrender.

Think of their case. For days they had been shelled with intensity, losing heavily, seeing their fortifications steadily crumble, unable probably to get any hot food, knowing that the British would come but not knowing when. Each morning they stood to, waiting for the awful crash of fire that would herald the assault, and then all day long enduring the agony of another long wait for the fateful hour. Then at last it had come. To the right and left of them their comrades of the same regiment had been blown up in eruptions of flame, and after this the storm of destruction had fallen upon them. All about the earth was no longer firm and solid but moving like the waves of the sea, opening and closing again, throwing up masses of brown and fiery spume against the sky. There was a continued vibration as though the hill itself was shaking in some dreadful palsy. A ceaseless roar of sound smote upon their ear-drums, and within the general tumult each separate explosion carried its own individual menace. Minutes that seemed like hours lengthened out into more minutes, and they into an eternity, until personality oozed out into the dreadful ocean of sound and men were so shaken and dazed that they were no longer capable of initiative or resistance. The sharpness of terror changed to a numbness in which fear vanished, but in which there was neither hope nor desire. And then, just when the blast and roar of destruction page 208seemed to have become a timeless eternity, there fell a stillness, and life, with terror, was reborn. Men who had lain with their faces to the earth lifted their heads above the shell craters and saw long lines of khaki-clad men closing in upon them, and behind these in the growing light, other lines. There was a faint glimmer on the cruel dull grey bayonets. The Germans looked into terrible faces and gleaming eyes:

"Kamerad! Kamerad!"

They dropped their rifles and bombs and threw their arms into the air. Sometimes the surrender is accepted and they stumble off to life that of a sudden enlarges and becomes intoxicatingly sweet, But there is hysteria among the attackers also and deadly hate. A man whose comrade had been killed in No Man's Land goes mad with sorrow and bloodlust and leaps upon a little group that stands pleading for mercy and life.

The New Zealand waves swept on with scarcely a pause across the Steenbeek Creek, over the broken debris of Oyster Trench, and Uhlan, and Ulcer; up the hill to Moulin de I'Hospice, and the Bon Fermier Cabaret and Ulcer and Uhlan support; through the heaps of broken bricks that had been Messines and so through and round to Unbearable Trench and Ulcer Reserve and Ungodly Trench and across the La Basse Ville Road and Hun's Walk until the crest was well behind and the front posts could look down the long slope towards the Lys, towards the green unbroken country that lay beyond. Occasionally, a German machine-gun, page 209manned by very brave and fortunate men, swung into action, but it was always quickly out-flanked and bombed into submission. And so with small loss the New Zealanders carried all their objectives and then commenced to dig in over all the hill.

The Germans were still paralysed. Their whole system had been swept away. The advance had penetrated as far as their foremost artillery positions and their immediate preoccupation was the saving of their guns. This they could not have effected if the New Zealand battalions, which had suffered few casualties and were still fresh, had been thrust forward yet again with speed and determination. Corps and army orders forbade the venture and when the cavalry came up, and later still the Australians, the opportunity had passed and there was nothing to be done except consolidate.

As the day wore on the Germans got more of their guns back into new positions. They rushed up reserve batteries. Their balloons and a few daring airmen picked up the new British positions, and they commenced to search the hillside with shell-fire. Their infantry took heart of grace and filled the wide gaps sniping and machine-gunning. The Australian attack broke down and their men streamed back through the New Zealand line. Movement was seen behind the enemy lines and our men made ready for a counter attack. The New Zealand batteries were being rushed across on to Messines. Thirty-six heavy machine-guns were placed in position in front of the village, but the counter attack was not pressed home on the division's front. The page 210night passed full of rumours but when dawn broke on A day it was generally felt that the position was secure.

All that day and the next consolidation went on. Batteries moved up into position. The roads were repaired so that the wheeled transport could come right forward into the village itself. The signallers connected up their wires and under their direction working parties of the infantry buried cable in all directions. The infantry dug and dug until the hill was girded with a ring of trenches. The German shelling increased in intensity and there were many casualties. There was nothing for it but to stand the storm. The battalions on the forward side of the hill commenced to waste slowly away under the persistent fire that fell upon them. A platoon of thirty men—six or seven had fallen in the attack —dug themselves in on a contour that gave a fair field of fire towards Warneton.

The new digging was picked up by the German observers. For ten minutes a battery concentrated upon it while the men stood with their backs to the wall. Flying fragments came zipping in, rattling on steel helmets and rifle-butts. Zirr-zip! and a man rolls over with a smashed shoulder. He is bandaged up roughly and put in the most secure place. The loose earth slides back into the trench in three places. Then the battery switches on to another target. The stretcher-bearers pick up the wounded man and carry him away. The remainder get to work with the spades and fling out the earth and settle down again, but at intervals all through the page 211morning they are fired on. The stretcher-bearers are hardly back before another man goes down with a broken leg and has to be carried out, and while they are away one man gets a splinter right through his steel helmet and another a bit of shrapnel through the arm. They go back together—walking wounded.

And so it goes on, until after lunch a great shell roars in on one extremity of the trench and kills two men. There is no excitement; just this nerveracking standing still and being shelled and wounded and killed. It's a dangerous moment. A single gun commences to shell the trench steadily, a shell a minute perhaps. One burst buries a man. He is dug out in time but is badly shaken. His condition commences to affect others about him, for burst after burst comes shrieking over. Then a section leader gets right out of the trench with a spade and sits on the top of the parapet. As each shell lands he signals towards the German gun. "Short! Over! A miss!" A shell lands a few yards away and covers him with flying earth. He jocularly signals a hit and then waves the next one an "over." It doesn't matter whether the Germans see him or not—they have the range anyway, but it is most important that his mates should:

"Come down, you silly b——!"

But he stays and does some more signalling with the spade. After a while the men in the trench commence to laugh at his foolhardy antics. The position is saved, for laughter is a good release for strained nerves. And the men are themselves again. He comes down—his purpose served and his ap-page 212parent folly justified of itself. The platoon holds steady though half a dozen more dribble out before relief. So A day passed, and in a similar fashion B day also. Then the New Zealanders handed over their section and went back to the camps in rear. 8

The continuous strain of the last three days had told heavily on all ranks and the order to go back was very welcome. The long files move across the Steenbeek back to the old front line and so up through the familiar gaps to the crest of Hill 63, where each man was checked off at his brigade headquarters. This, at any rate, was a rest, and tired men dozed off leaning up against the trench walls or lying flat upon the duckboards. "On the far side they moved through the mass of heavy guns. Brilliant green and yellow flashes suddenly stabbed through the darkness to be followed by a bellowing crash of sound. 'Cr-r-r-ash!' Twenty yards away another monstrous weapon explodes with a hideous clamour. There is a moment of intense blackness and then once more the flame of fire and the shock of the discharge. For half a mile on both sides of the track batteries are in action. It is a terrible ordeal for men who have been shelled for three days to pass through this hell of noise. A battery just ahead has the muzzles of its guns almost touching the road. It fires a salvo and the file of infantry sees what is ahead. Can they pass before the next discharge shatters through the night? No. 1 gun is being screwed up to its right elevation. No. 2 is ready but still silent. Perhaps they may just clear. But no! The battery commander is mega-page 213phoning his warning. "Hurry up there in front before the b——b——goes off.' It's too late! 'Fire!' comes the muffled voice through the megaphone. 'Crash!' from No. 1. 'Cr-r-r-ash!' from No. 2 and then the solid earth shakes and the air is rent with frightful sound as No. 3 and No. 4 bellow out, 'Oh, hell! Get on in front! Get on!"—2/A.R.

At last the guns are passed and the men stumble farther along the good road and at last reach camps, where they fling themselves down on the hard boards and sleep and sleep and sleep.