Henry Ruffin

“ And what an amazing efflorescence of old iron, grenades and bits of shell!
In this Land of Mines we find a symbol of the savage splendour of this war. All these carefully prepared horrors, all these apocalyptic monstrosities, for the conquest of an acre or two! One can understand why King George came here, as a wooden tablet records, to the edge of this fabulous, petrified tide race, to salute the victorious courage of the Empire's soldiers.
Beast-like around us roar the guns. Lightnings flicker through the haze. ”

“ The barrage fires of the Germans followed one another every quarter of an hour, each one lasting seven minutes, and each minute an eternity, when, every second, there fell not less than 100 shells. To protect those who were at work the English artillery set up curtain fires, which smashed every preparation for a counter-attack. Marmites, shells, shrapnel, hurtled from either side of the single line which had been snatched from this Inferno.
An odd scent of roasted apples catches us by the throat; our eyes begin to stream in a detestable fashion. ”

“ An invisible world is moving about us. Listen!
Yes, there is the sound of many feet on the road—not the brisk tramp of the parade ground, but the steps of the poor souls who are fighting their way through the mud. It is as if ten thousand little wings were flapping.
All lights are out. The long stream of motor-cars moves upon the road in perfect order. Midnight. Now the preparations for the advance are at their height. Now is the time when the reliefs come up, the blessed hour, so long expected by those who quit the trenches, by those who go into them so bravely met. ”

“ On the right, the Ancre, swollen by the rain, flows, indifferent and peaceful, beside its slaughtered poplars; and on the left bank the houses of bombarded Gueudecourt, the ruins of Thiepval, and all the mourning landscape that surrounds us, seem to advise us not to let our eyes linger upon the ravine, and to tell us that all Nature is worthy of our pity and that the earth has become indeed the great valley of tears of which the psalmist sings. ”

“ How is one to describe this ghastly picture of roots, clayey soil freshly ploughed up, shattered trunks of every size, and dismal stumps, among which, none the less, the birds persist in their vain search for food and cover?
These trees will bud again; Nature will clothe herself once more in green; even the earth that lies about us will yield new fruits. But the villages? What magical power shall call them back to life, unless it be the marvellous vitality of France—France, who refuses to die? ”

“ In their English helmets, which look like basins upside-down, caked with mud—already—to the eyes, with their rifles shouldered, slung, or carried in the hand, but each one carefully protected by its canvas cover, smoking their pipes, their chests thrown forward against the weight of their bursting haversacks, steady of step and bright of eye, the Tommies go forward to relieve their friends.
When they feel the need of a rest the men in khaki, quite regardless of the mud, throw themselves down on the sopping earth, and man, clothing, and soil become one. ”

“ As soon as twilight is come, aeroplanes cross the neighbouring lines and attack this tree with their machine-guns. It is treated like a combatant. Herein, perhaps, lies the secret of its clumsy strength and beauty. It stands upon its hill, solid and straight. It holds its ground as few men could do. It is a French ash that stands upon the field of battle in the very middle of the British Army. ”

“ Some time ago, on the North bank of the Ancre, in the Beaumont-Hamel Sector, everyone was affected with a curious boredom. Nothing happened: very little artillery fire; not so much as a pretence at an attack. It was a dead calm. The bombs were all asleep. Muscles grew slack. Enthusiasm staled. Boredom, that worst misery of trench life, reigned supreme.
One evening this slackness among the troops—and it was as bad on one side as on the other—produced a curious result. Among the Germans, a homesick Silesian began to sing some of the carols of his own country. ”

“ Beaumont-Hamel, 15th November.
That two-hour tramp through a few kilometres of trenches was a heart-breaking business. We floundered through holes, we were swallowed up in bogs, while the mud that fell from the parapets gradually spread itself over our oilskins. A steel helmet becomes wonderfully heavy after an hour or so, and a dizzy headache soon tormented us, from the constant right-angled turns which we were obliged to make, like so many slaves at a cornmill. ”

“ The trenches were swarming with soldiers, the reliefs who were going back to billets, and the reserves who were taking their places; the sappers and pioneers, with their picks and shovels, who, protected by the machine-guns, repair the shelters wherever they have given way; the ambulance men and the stretcher-bearers; the grave diggers; the supplying sections, who bring up the cases of grenades, before ever they appear with food. This crowd of dim men, ten feet underground, moved like a silent river. ”

“ The continual addition of new units to the British forces was bound to cause frequent changes, here, in the geographical distribution of the adjoining troops. Can France ever forget the day when she learned that silently, without a hitch, and under the very noses of the Germans, the British front had suddenly been extended from Loos to the Somme? A mother who meets, after years, the son whom she has last seen as a child, must feel a surprise not unlike that with which France discovered that the Armies of her Allies had become so large. ”

“ After each flight of rockets the guns came savagely to life, and, below our watch-tower, even in greater numbers, even more furious, other batteries, and yet others, proclaimed their presence. "Barrage!" one of the short-lived fire-balls demanded over to the west. The firing increased, pounding the sector from end to end. This light from fairyland, then, was nothing but a cry for help! In a moment the Ancre and its swamps were blushing.
The moon began to veil herself with small round clouds. "Watch out for the aeroplanes," our staff-major told us again. ”

“ I can follow, with the naked eye, every movement of an active young officer, who is wearing a light yellow overcoat, and who is charging at the head of his company, with a cane under his left arm and a revolver in his right hand as calmly as if he were strolling along Regent Street or Piccadilly.
The human wave, breaking through the barrage, disappears suddenly in the earth. It is as if a chasm had opened to swallow all these men at a gulp. ”

“ We know this bit of soldiers' slang, which means the lachrymatory shells. We quickly put on our masks. In perfect safety, crouched against the wall of the trench, in the company of a hundred unknown comrades, we wait until the poisonous gust of yellow smoke has blown away. Through the eye-pieces of our masks everything seems to be enveloped in some fabulous steam; the pale lightning of the guns, the ghastly [Pg 17] discs of the English rockets, the red stars of the German. But one sound: the clatter of the machine-guns near us, a muffled thunder as of a rising sea. ”

“ Through the sticky, heavy mud troops and wagons crawled towards the firing line. The men, with naked chests that defied the bitter cold, sweated furiously under the load of their equipment. Horses with huge, hairy feet, mounted by Australians like so many cowboys, struggled, foaming, to drag the huge lorries through the deep ruts of the roadway.
Men from the pioneer battalions, directed by Engineers, worked with pick and shovel to drain away the water, to rebuild the fallen embankments, or to fill up boggy places. ”

“ Peace has not dwelt, this many a day, either in Englebelmer or in Mesnil, which offer to the eyes of the passer-by the spectacle of their desolated ruins, their silent belfries, their indescribable sadness. Nor does Peace dwell, assuredly, on this battlefield where you see these quagmires, these dead, bare [Pg 25] fields that, one would say, have been trampled by generations of men; these deserted trenches that have fallen in here and there; these networks of barbed wire, to-day, happily, no longer of any service ”

“ Creeping under the knife rests, and separating with care the ring of wire which the British call "trench concertina wire," he drags himself on his stomach through the wire system. These iron blackberries catch hold of him and prick him. He likens himself to one of those great trench rats on a poaching foray.
Suddenly his hand falls upon a human form. The body is cold—a corpse! He remembers, a week ago, an evening patrol was caught by our artillery fire, and this is one of them. "No Man's Land" in this sector is not particularly healthy, and grave-diggers are dispensed with. ”

“ IN BEAUMONT-HAMEL.
By nine o'clock the objective was gained with complete success. The fog grew thicker. The fire of the heavy guns and the barrage fires followed one another without pause.
Through twilight gloom and the mists of low-lying clouds monstrous lightnings flicker across this spectral landscape. The smallest hill is a Sinai. In a leap of nearly 1-1/2 miles the batteries have advanced at the same pace as the troops, taking such cover as Heaven sends them. All this sector smokes and roars to its farthest extremities. ”

“ Thousands of men moved over it and drenched it with their blood.
This ground has seen the French Army, in a transport of courage, bind for an instant the wings of victory; it has seen our battalions burst at racing speed over trenches that were deemed impregnable ”

“ Every 20 yards along it there was a machine-gun. The Germans believed it to be impregnable. This evening the English had their own guns in it.
Victory everywhere! Three villages taken; more than 2,000 prisoners counted already! I have just been to see them. They are encamped along the edge of an immense bivouac. All about them the heaviest of the guns spit out, minute by minute, their delicate ton-weight mouthfuls. The prisoners are identified, questioned, and searched. A dazed stupor is all that their terrified faces declare. ”

“ Here again there has been a famous haul of prisoners. More than 300 unwounded soldiers have been compelled to surrender. In a short time the first of them cross in front of our observation post. They are haggard, covered with mud, and their eyes are the eyes of trapped beasts. Two of them, converted into impromptu stretcher-bearers, are carrying a wounded officer on a stretcher that is soaked in blood.
And now the battle increases everywhere in violence. We hear that on this side of Beaucourt some strong reserves, collected there by the Germans, have just been surrounded and taken prisoners. ”

“ The rolling clouds of the shrapnel seem to frame one regiment.
Ah! Bad luck! That one was well timed which burst over there on the right, just above the company that was lying down there. The damage must have been serious. Men lie on the ground who will never pick themselves up again. A cloud, the colour of absinthe, hangs sullenly over those little khaki spots.
On the right, on the left, in front, behind, with a disquieting skill and precision, the Germans pile barrage upon barrage. Meanwhile, without a pause, the troops advance across this hell. ”

“ The Tommies who fell in this fight were collected into vast common graves, which kindly hands have marked out with frames of pebbles. As for the German bodies, they were buried in their own trenches—to fill them up was all that was necessary—or in the shell craters where the machine-gun had dropped them. And so in this ravine Death is on every side, and the ground has, in many places, taken the shapes of the bodies that lie beneath it. ”

“ I send you the thanks of a French girl for the gallant deed—the deed à la française—which you have performed. We do not know one another, perhaps we never shall, but in the sky there is many a meeting between the stars. Why should not souls on earth come sometimes, then, together? ”

“ To the right—Beaucourt. Here the ruin is absolute. I have hunted in vain for any trace of man's handiwork. Even the dust of the stones has blown away.
A few hundred yards ahead of us the men have just rushed forward. With rifles held high they spring from the parapet into the open. They look like an army of ants, that now moves along in a stream, now closes together like a vice, now marks time, now plunges into vast funnels, and again, at racing speed, surges up the gentle slope. The barbed-wire entanglements cover acres of ground ”

“ Everything rusts and crumbles under the rain, and in many places the wind has finished their work for the guns. Grass sprouts among the ruins; moss grows on stone and timber. The work of Death goes on, slowly but surely.
It is not a little astonishing to meet civilians now and then in Arras. Here and there the white head of some old man or woman appears from a cellar or from behind a bit of wall. There are some hundreds of such French people, who have refused to leave their homes.
They have sent away the "jeunesse," as they say, so that the Boches may have no more children to kill. ”

“ CANADIANS FRESH FROM THE TRENCHES.
But, as in a boxing match, it is not necessary, in order to win, to drive one's opponent over the ropes and out of the ring; in the same way it may happen that the German Army is "knocked out" in the positions where it is fighting to-day.
That, at least, is the opinion of the British soldier.
It is, indeed, no more than a paraphrase of that dictum, pronounced not long ago by General Nogi, and as true of the ring as it is of war: "Complete victory is to him who can last a quarter of an hour longer than the other fellow." ”

“ Round the blockhouses the machine-guns rattle. We listen anxiously to these thousand voices of the attack. Every man has vanished. The field of vision is empty. Only the variegated smokes of the different shells spread themselves slowly abroad. The uncertainty is unbearable. Half an hour later we learn from the telephone that the attack has succeeded. The brigade has done its work. We have just witnessed, on the north bank of the Ancre, the capture of an important trench, or rather redoubt, nearly 450 yards away from Beaumont—the Munich Trench. ”

“ I cannot close this Despatch without alluding to the happy relations which continue to exist between the Allied Armies and between our troops and the civil population in France and Belgium. The unfailing co-operation of our Allies, their splendid fighting qualities, and the kindness and goodwill universally displayed towards us have won the gratitude, as well as the respect and admiration, of all ranks of the British Armies. ”