The Old Front Line
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John Masefield >> The Old Front Line
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THE
OLD FRONT LINE
BY
JOHN MASEFIELD
Author of "Gallipoli," etc.
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1918
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1917
By JOHN MASEFIELD
Set up and electrotyped. Published, December, 1917.
Reprinted January, 1918.
TO
NEVILLE LYTTON
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
PAGE
The Road up the Ancre Valley 16
Artillery Transport in Bapaume Road 28
Troops Moving to the Front 38
An Artillery Team 40
View in Hamel 42
The Ancre River 44
The Ancre Opposite Hamel 48
The Leipzig Salient 58
Dugouts in La Boisselle 66
La Boisselle 70
Fricourt 74
Fricourt 76
Sandbags at Fricourt 78
Mametz 82
Sleighs for the Wounded 88
The Attack on La Boisselle 94
THE OLD FRONT LINE
This description of the old front line, as it was when the Battle of
the Somme began, may some day be of use. All wars end; even this war
will some day end, and the ruins will be rebuilt and the field full of
death will grow food, and all this frontier of trouble will be
forgotten. When the trenches are filled in, and the plough has gone
over them, the ground will not long keep the look of war. One summer
with its flowers will cover most of the ruin that man can make, and
then these places, from which the driving back of the enemy began,
will be hard indeed to trace, even with maps. It is said that even now
in some places the wire has been removed, the explosive salved, the
trenches filled, and the ground ploughed with tractors. In a few
years' time, when this war is a romance in memory, the soldier looking
for his battlefield will find his marks gone. Centre Way, Peel Trench,
Munster Alley, and these other paths to glory will be deep under the
corn, and gleaners will sing at Dead Mule Corner.
It is hoped that this description of the line will be followed by an
account of our people's share in the battle. The old front line was
the base from which the battle proceeded. It was the starting-place.
The thing began there. It was the biggest battle in which our people
were ever engaged, and so far it has led to bigger results than any
battle of this war since the Battle of the Marne. It caused a great
falling back of the enemy armies. It freed a great tract of France,
seventy miles long, by from ten to twenty-five miles broad. It first
gave the enemy the knowledge that he was beaten.
Very many of our people never lived to know the result of even the
first day's fighting. For then the old front line was the battlefield,
and the No Man's Land the prize of the battle. They never heard the
cheer of victory nor looked into an enemy trench. Some among them
never even saw the No Man's Land, but died in the summer morning from
some shell in the trench in the old front line here described.
* * * * *
It is a difficult thing to describe without monotony, for it varies so
little. It is like describing the course of the Thames from Oxford to
Reading, or of the Severn from Deerhurst to Lydney, or of the Hudson
from New York to Tarrytown. Whatever country the rivers pass they
remain water, bordered by shore. So our front-line trenches, wherever
they lie, are only gashes in the earth, fenced by wire, beside a
greenish strip of ground, pitted with shell-holes, which is fenced
with thicker, blacker, but more tumbled wire on the other side. Behind
this further wire is the parapet of the enemy front-line trench, which
swerves to take in a hillock or to flank a dip, or to crown a slope,
but remains roughly parallel with ours, from seventy to five hundred
yards from it, for miles and miles, up hill and down dale. All the
advantages of position and observation were in the enemy's hands, not
in ours. They took up their lines when they were strong and our side
weak, and in no place in all the old Somme position is our line better
sited than theirs, though in one or two places the sites are nearly
equal. Almost in every part of this old front our men had to go up
hill to attack.
If the description of this old line be dull to read, it should be
remembered that it was dull to hold. The enemy had the lookout posts,
with the fine views over France, and the sense of domination. Our men
were down below with no view of anything but of stronghold after
stronghold, just up above, being made stronger daily. And if the
enemy had strength of position he had also strength of equipment, of
men, of guns, and explosives of all kinds. He had all the advantages
for nearly two years of war, and in all that time our old front line,
whether held by the French or by ourselves, was nothing but a post to
be endured, day in day out, in all weathers and under all fires, in
doubt, difficulty, and danger, with bluff and makeshift and
improvisation, till the tide could be turned. If it be dull to read
about and to see, it was, at least, the old line which kept back the
tide and stood the siege. It was the line from which, after all those
months of war, the tide turned and the besieged became the attackers.
* * * * *
To most of the British soldiers who took part in the Battle of the
Somme, the town of Albert must be a central point in a reckoning of
distances. It lies, roughly speaking, behind the middle of the line of
that battle. It is a knot of roads, so that supports and supplies
could and did move from it to all parts of the line during the battle.
It is on the main road, and on the direct railway line from Amiens. It
is by much the most important town within an easy march of the
battlefield. It will be, quite certainly, the centre from which, in
time to come, travellers will start to see the battlefield where such
deeds were done by men of our race.
It is not now (after three years of war and many bombardments) an
attractive town; probably it never was. It is a small straggling town
built of red brick along a knot of cross-roads at a point where the
swift chalk-river Ancre, hardly more than a brook, is bridged and so
channeled that it can be used for power. Before the war it contained a
few small factories, including one for the making of sewing-machines.
Its most important building was a big church built a few years ago,
through the energy of a priest, as a shrine for the Virgin of Albert,
a small, probably not very old image, about which strange stories are
told. Before the war it was thought that this church would become a
northern rival to Lourdes for the working of miraculous cures during
the September pilgrimage. A gilded statue of the Virgin and Child
stood on an iron stalk on the summit of the church tower. During a
bombardment of the town at a little after three o'clock in the
afternoon of Friday, January 15, 1915, a shell so bent the stalk that
the statue bent down over the Place as though diving. Perhaps few of
our soldiers will remember Albert for anything except this diving
Virgin. Perhaps half of the men engaged in the Battle of the Somme
passed underneath her as they marched up to the line, and, glancing
up, hoped that she might not come down till they were past. From some
one, French or English, a word has gone about that when she does fall
the war will end. Others have said that French engineers have so fixed
her with wire ropes that she cannot fall.
* * * * *
From Albert four roads lead to the battlefield of the Somme:
1. In a north-westerly direction to Auchonvillers and Hebuterne.
2. In a northerly direction to Authuille and Hamel.
3. In a north-easterly direction to Pozieres.
4. In an easterly direction to Fricourt and Maricourt.
Between the second and the third of these the little river Ancre runs
down its broad, flat, well-wooded valley, much of which is a marsh
through which the river (and man) have forced more than one channel.
This river, which is a swift, clear, chalk stream, sometimes too deep
and swift to ford, cuts the English sector of the battlefield into two
nearly equal portions.
Following the first of the four roads, one passes the wooded village
of Martinsart, to the village of Auchonvillers, which lies among a
clump of trees upon a ridge or plateau top. The road dips here, but
soon rises again, and so, by a flat tableland, to the large village of
Hebuterne. Most of this road, with the exception of one little stretch
near Auchonvillers, is hidden by high ground from every part of the
battlefield. Men moving upon it cannot see the field.
Hebuterne, although close to the line and shelled daily and nightly
for more than two years, was never the object of an attack in force,
so that much of it remains. Many of its walls and parts of some of its
roofs still stand, the church tower is in fair order, and no one
walking in the streets can doubt that he is in a village. Before the
war it was a prosperous village; then, for more than two years, it
rang with the roar of battle and with the business of an army.
Presently the tide of the war ebbed away from it and left it deserted,
so that one may walk in it now, from end to end, without seeing a
human being. It is as though the place had been smitten by the plague.
Villages during the Black Death must have looked thus. One walks in
the village expecting at every turn to meet a survivor, but there is
none; the village is dead; the grass is growing in the street; the
bells are silent; the beasts are gone from the byre and the ghosts
from the church. Stealing about among the ruins and the gardens are
the cats of the village, who have eaten too much man to fear him, but
are now too wild to come to him. They creep about and eye him from
cover and look like evil spirits.
The second of the four roads passes out of Albert, crosses the railway
at a sharp turn, over a bridge called Marmont Bridge, and runs
northward along the valley of the Ancre within sight of the railway.
Just beyond the Marmont Bridge there is a sort of lake or reservoir or
catchment of the Ancre overflows, a little to the right of the road.
By looking across this lake as he walks northward, the traveller can
see some rolls of gentle chalk hill, just beyond which the English
front line ran at the beginning of the battle.
A little further on, at the top of a rise, the road passes the village
of Aveluy, where there is a bridge or causeway over the Ancre valley.
Aveluy itself, being within a mile and a half of enemy gun positions
for nearly two years of war, is knocked about, and rather roofless and
windowless. A cross-road leading to the causeway across the valley
once gave the place some little importance.
[Illustration: The Road up the Ancre Valley through Aveluy Wood]
Not far to the north of Aveluy, the road runs for more than a mile
through the Wood of Aveluy, which is a well-grown plantation of trees
and shrubs. This wood hides the marsh of the river from the traveller.
Tracks from the road lead down to the marsh and across it by military
causeways.
On emerging from the wood, the road runs within hail of the railway,
under a steep and high chalk bank partly copsed with scrub.
Three-quarters of a mile from the wood it passes through the skeleton
of the village of Hamel, which is now a few ruined walls of brick
standing in orchards on a hillside. Just north of this village,
crossing the road, the railway, and the river-valley, is the old
English front line.
The third of the four roads is one of the main roads of France. It is
the state highway, laid on the line of a Roman road, from Albert to
Bapaume. It is by far the most used and the most important of the
roads crossing the battlefield. As it leads directly to Bapaume, which
was one of the prizes of the victory, and points like a sword through
the heart of the enemy positions it will stay in the memories of our
soldiers as the main avenue of the battle.
The road leaves Albert in a street of dingy and rather broken
red-brick houses. After passing a corner crucifix it shakes itself
free of the houses and rises slowly up a ridge of chalk hill about
three hundred feet high. On the left of the road, this ridge, which is
much withered and trodden by troops and horses, is called Usna Hill.
On the right, where the grass is green and the chalk of the old
communication trenches still white and clean, it is called Tara Hill.
Far away on the left, along the line of the Usna Hill, one can see the
Aveluy Wood.
Looking northward from the top of the Usna-Tara Hill to the dip below
it and along the road for a few yards up the opposite slope, one sees
where the old English front line crossed the road at right angles. The
enemy front line faced it at a few yards' distance, just about two
miles from Albert town.
The fourth of the four roads runs for about a mile eastwards from
Albert, and then slopes down into a kind of gully or shallow valley,
through which a brook once ran and now dribbles. The road crosses the
brook-course, and runs parallel with it for a little while to a place
where the ground on the left comes down in a slanting tongue and on
the right rises steeply into a big hill. The ground of the tongue
bears traces of human habitation on it, all much smashed and
discoloured. This is the once pretty village of Fricourt. The hill on
the right front at this point is the Fricourt Salient. The lines run
round the salient and the road cuts across them.
Beyond Fricourt, the road leaves another slanting tongue at some
distance to its left. On this second tongue the village of Mametz once
stood. Near here the road, having now cut across the salient, again
crosses both sets of lines, and begins a long, slow ascent to a ridge
or crest. From this point, for a couple of miles, the road is planted
on each side with well-grown plane-trees, in some of which magpies
have built their nests ever since the war began. At the top of the
rise the road runs along the plateau top (under trees which show more
and more plainly the marks of war) to a village so planted that it
seems to stand in a wood. The village is built of red brick, and is
rather badly broken by enemy shell fire, though some of the houses in
it are still habitable. This is the village of Maricourt. Three or
four hundred yards beyond Maricourt the road reaches the old English
front line, at the eastern extremity of the English sector, as it was
at the beginning of the battle.
These four roads which lead to the centre and the wings of the
battlefield were all, throughout the battle and for the months of war
which preceded it, dangerous by daylight. All could be shelled by the
map, and all, even the first, which was by much the best hidden of the
four, could be seen, in places, from the enemy position. On some of
the trees or tree stumps by the sides of the roads one may still see
the "camouflage" by which these exposed places were screened from the
enemy observers. The four roads were not greatly used in the months of
war which preceded the battle. In those months, the front was too near
to them, and other lines of supply and approach were more direct and
safer. But there was always some traffic upon them of men going into
the line or coming out, of ration parties, munition and water
carriers, and ambulances. On all four roads many men of our race were
killed. All, at some time, or many times, rang and flashed with
explosions. Danger, death, shocking escape and firm resolve, went up
and down those roads daily and nightly. Our men slept and ate and
sweated and dug and died along them after all hardships and in all
weathers. On parts of them, no traffic moved, even at night, so that
the grass grew high upon them. Presently, they will be quiet country
roads again, and tourists will walk at ease, where brave men once ran
and dodged and cursed their luck, when the Battle of the Somme was
raging.
Then, indeed, those roads were used. Then the grass that had grown on
some of them was trodden and crushed under. The trees and banks by the
waysides were used to hide batteries, which roared all day and all
night. At all hours and in all weathers the convoys of horses slipped
and stamped along those roads with more shells for the ever-greedy
cannon. At night, from every part of those roads, one saw a twilight
of summer lightning winking over the high ground from the
never-ceasing flashes of guns and shells. Then there was no quiet, but
a roaring, a crashing, and a screaming from guns, from shells bursting
and from shells passing in the air. Then, too, on the two roads to the
east of the Ancre River, the troops for the battle moved up to the
line. The battalions were played by their bands through Albert, and up
the slope of Usna Hill to Pozieres and beyond, or past Fricourt and
the wreck of Mametz to Montauban and the bloody woodland near it.
Those roads then were indeed paths of glory leading to the grave.
During the months which preceded the Battle of the Somme, other roads
behind our front lines were more used than these. Little villages, out
of shell fire, some miles from the lines, were then of more use to us
than Albert. Long after we are gone, perhaps, stray English tourists,
wandering in Picardy, will see names scratched in a barn, some mark or
notice on a door, some sign-post, some little line of graves, or hear,
on the lips of a native, some slang phrase of English, learned long
before in the wartime, in childhood, when the English were there. All
the villages behind our front were thronged with our people. There
they rested after being in the line and there they established their
hospitals and magazines. It may be said, that men of our race died in
our cause in every village within five miles of the front. Wherever
the traveller comes upon a little company of our graves, he will know
that he is near the site of some old hospital or clearing station,
where our men were brought in from the line.
* * * * *
So much for the roads by which our men marched to this battlefield.
Near the lines they had to leave the roads for the shelter of some
communication trench or deep cut in the mud, revetted at the sides
with wire to hinder it from collapsing inwards. By these deep narrow
roads, only broad enough for marching in single file, our men passed
to "the front," to the line itself. Here and there, in recesses in the
trench, under roofs of corrugated iron covered with sandbags, they
passed the offices and the stores of war, telephonists, battalion
headquarters, dumps of bombs, barbed wire, rockets, lights,
machine-gun ammunition, tins, jars, and cases. Many men, passing these
things as they went "in" for the first time, felt with a sinking of
the heart, that they were leaving all ordered and arranged things,
perhaps forever, and that the men in charge of these stores enjoyed,
by comparison, a life like a life at home.
Much of the relief and munitioning of the fighting lines was done at
night. Men going into the lines saw little of where they were going.
They entered the gash of the communication trench, following the load
on the back of the man in front, but seeing perhaps nothing but the
shape in front, the black walls of the trench, and now and then some
gleam of a star in the water under foot. Sometimes as they marched
they would see the starshells, going up and bursting like rockets, and
coming down With a wavering slow settling motion, as white and bright
as burning magnesium wire, shedding a kind of dust of light upon the
trench and making the blackness intense when they went out. These
lights, the glimmer in the sky from the enemy's guns, and now and then
the flash of a shell, were the things seen by most of our men on their
first going in.
In the fire trench they saw little more than the parapet. If work were
being done in the No Man's Land, they still saw little save by these
lights that floated and fell from the enemy and from ourselves. They
could see only an array of stakes tangled with wire, and something
distant and dark which might be similar stakes, or bushes, or men, in
front of what could only be the enemy line. When the night passed, and
those working outside the trench had to take shelter, they could see
nothing, even at a loophole or periscope, but the greenish strip of
ground, pitted with shell-holes and fenced with wire, running up to
the enemy line. There was little else for them to see, looking to the
front, for miles and miles, up hill and down dale.
The soldiers who held this old front line of ours saw this grass and
wire day after day, perhaps, for many months. It was the limit of
their world, the horizon of their landscape, the boundary. What
interest there was in their life was the speculation, what lay beyond
that wire, and what the enemy was doing there. They seldom saw an
enemy. They heard his songs and they were stricken by his missiles,
but seldom saw more than, perhaps, a swiftly moving cap at a gap in
the broken parapet, or a grey figure flitting from the light of a
starshell. Aeroplanes brought back photographs of those unseen lines.
Sometimes, in raids in the night, our men visited them and brought
back prisoners; but they remained mysteries and unknown.
In the early morning of the 1st of July, 1916, our men looked at them
as they showed among the bursts of our shells. Those familiar heaps,
the lines, were then in a smoke of dust full of flying clods and
shards and gleams of fire. Our men felt that now, in a few minutes,
they would see the enemy and know what lay beyond those parapets and
probe the heart of that mystery. So, for the last half-hour, they
watched and held themselves ready, while the screaming of the shells
grew wilder and the roar of the bursts quickened into a drumming. Then
as the time drew near, they looked a last look at that unknown
country, now almost blotted in the fog of War, and saw the flash of
our shells, breaking a little further off as the gunners "lifted," and
knew that the moment had come. Then for one wild confused moment they
knew that they were running towards that unknown land, which they
could still see in the dust ahead. For a moment, they saw the parapet
with the wire in front of it, and began, as they ran, to pick out in
their minds a path through that wire. Then, too often, to many of
them, the grass that they were crossing flew up in shards and sods and
gleams of fire from the enemy shells, and those runners never reached
the wire, but saw, perhaps, a flash, and the earth rushing nearer, and
grasses against the sky, and then saw nothing more at all, for ever
and for ever and for ever.
* * * * *
It may be some years before those whose fathers, husbands and brothers
were killed in this great battle, may be able to visit the battlefield
where their dead are buried. Perhaps many of them, from brooding on
the map, and from dreams and visions in the night, have in their minds
an image or picture of that place. The following pages may help some
few others, who have not already formed that image, to see the scene
as it appears to-day. What it was like on the day of battle cannot be
imagined by those who were not there.
It was a day of an intense blue summer beauty, full of roaring,
violence, and confusion of death, agony, and triumph, from dawn till
dark. All through that day, little rushes of the men of our race went
towards that No Man's Land from the bloody shelter of our trenches.
Some hardly left our trenches, many never crossed the green space,
many died in the enemy wire, many had to fall back. Others won across
and went further, and drove the enemy from his fort, and then back
from line to line and from one hasty trenching to another, till the
Battle of the Somme ended in the falling back of the enemy army.