- 'In Neuve Chapelle'
- by Frederick Palmer
- from his book 'My Year of the War' 1915
An American Reporter Views a British Offensive
the attack at Neuve Chapelle as portrayed in a British magazine
Typical of many others, this quiet village in a flat country of rich farming land, with a church, a school, a post-office, and stores where the farmer could buy a pound of sugar or a spool of thread, employ a notary, or get a pair of shoes cobbled or a horse shod, without having to go to the neighbouring town of Bethune, Neuve Chapelle became famous only after it had ceased to exist — unless a village remains a village after it has been reduced to its original elements by shell-fire.
It was the scene of one of those actions in the long siege line which have the dignity of a battle ; the losses on either side, about sixteen thousand, were two- thirds of those at Waterloo or Gettysburg. Here the British after the long winter's stalemate in the mud, where they stuck when the exhausted Germans could press no farther, took the offensive, with the sap of spring rising in their veins.
The guns blazed the way and the infantry charged in the path of the guns' destruction ; and they kept on while the shield of shell-fire held. When it left an opening for the German machine-guns through its curtain and the German guns visited on the British what their guns had been visiting on the Germans, the British stopped. A lesson was learned; a principle established. A gain was made, if no goal were reached.
The human stone wall had moved. It had broken some barriers and come to rest before others, again to become a stone wall. But it knew that the thing could be done with guns and shells enough — and only with enough. This means a good deal when you have been under dog for a long time. Months were to pass waiting for enough shells and guns, with many little actions and their steady drain of life, while everyone looked back to Neuve Chapelle as a landmark. It was something definite for a man to say that he had been wounded at Neuve Chapelle and quite indefinite to say that he had been wounded in the course of the day's work in the trenches.
No one might see the battle in that sea of mud. He might as well have looked at the smoke of Vesuvius with an idea of learning what was going on inside of the crater. I make no further attempt at describing it. My view came after the battle was over and the cauldron was still steaming.
Though in March, 1914, one would hardly have given Neuve Chapelle, intact and peaceful, a passing glance from a motor-car, in March, 1915, Neuve Chapelle in ruins was the one town in Europe which I most wanted to see. Correspondents had not then established themselves. The staff officer whom I asked if I might spend a night in the new British line was a cautious man. He bade me sign a paper freeing the British army from any responsibility. Judging by the general attitude of the Staff, one could hardly take the request seriously. One correspondent less ought to please any Staff; but he said that he had an affection for the regulars and knew that there were always plenty of recruits to take their places without resorting to conscription. The real responsibility was with the Germans. He suggested that I might go out to the German trenches and see if I could obtain a paper from them. He thought if I were quick about it I might get at least a yard in front of the British parapet in daylight. His sense of humour I had recognized when we had met in Bulgaria.
Any traveller is bound to meet men whom he has met before in the travelled British army. At the brigade headquarters town, which, as one of the officers said, proved that bricks and mortar can float in mud, the face of the brigadier seemed familiar to me. I found that I had met him in Shanghai in the Boxer campaign, when he had come across a riotous China from India on one of those journeys in remote Asia which British officers are fond of making. He was "all there," whether dealing with a mob of Orientals or with Germans in the trenches. I made myself at home in the parlour of the private house occupied by himself and staff, while he went on with his work. No flag outside the house ; no sign that it was headquarters. Motor-cars stopped only long enough for an officer to enter or alight. Brigade head-quarters is precisely the target that German aeroplanes or spies like to locate for their guns.
"Are you ready ? Have you your rubber boots ?" the brigadier asked a few minutes later, as he put his head in at the parlour door. It would not do to approach the trenches until after dark. Of course, I had rubber boots. One might as well try to go to sea without a boat as to trenches without rubber boots in winter. "I'll take my constitutional," he added ; "the trouble with this kind of war is that you get no exercise."
He was a small man, but how he could walk! I began to understand why the Boxers could not catch him. He turned back after we had gone a mile or more and one of his staff went on with me to a point where, just at dusk, I was turned over to another pilot, an aide from battalion headquarters, and we set out across sodden fields that had yielded beetroot in the last harvest, taking care not to step in shell-holes. Dusk settled into darkness. No human being was in sight except ourselves.
"There's the first line of German trenches before the attack," said my companion. "Our guns got fairly on them." Dimly I saw what seemed like a huge, long, irregular furrow of earth which had been torn almost out of the shape of a trench by British shells." There was no living in it when the guns began all together. The only thing to do was to get out."
Around us was utter silence, where the hell of thunders and destruction by the artillery had raged during the battle. Then a spent or ricochet bullet swept over- head, with the whistle of complaint of spent bullets at having travelled far without hitting any object. It had gone high over the British trenches ; it had carried the full range, and the chance of its hitting anyone was ridiculously small. But the nearer you get to the trenches, the more likely these strays are to find a victim. "Hit by a stray bullet !" is a very common saying at the front.
At last we felt the solidity of a paved road under our feet, and following this we came to a peasant's cottage. Inside, two soldiers were sitting beside telephone and telegraph instruments, behind a window stuffed with sandbags. On our way across the fields we had stepped on wires laid on the ground ; we had stooped to avoid wires stretched on poles — the wires that form the web of the army's intelligence.
Of course, no two units of communication are dependent on one wire. There is always a duplicate. If one is broken it is immediately repaired. The factories spin out wire to talk over and barbed wire for entanglements in front of trenches and weave millions of bags to be filled with sand for breastworks to protect men from bullets. If Sir John French wished, he could talk with Lord Kitchener in London and this battalion head-quarters at Neuve Chapelle within the same space of time that a railroad president may speak over the Long Distance from Chicago to New York and order dinner out in the suburbs.
These two men at the table, their faces tanned by exposure, men in the thirties, had the British regular of long service stamped all over them. War was an old story to them; and an old story, too, laying signal wires under fire.
"We're very comfortable," said one. " No danger from stray bullets or from shrapnel; but if one of the Jack Johnsons come in, why, there's no more cottage and no more argument between you and me. We're dead and maybe buried, or maybe scattered over the landscape, along with the broken pieces of the roof."
A soldier was on guard with bayonet fixed inside that little room, which had passageway to the cellar past the table, among straw beds. This seemed rather peculiar. The reason lay on one of the beds in a private's khaki. He had come into the battalion's trenches from our front and said that he belonged to the D — — regiment and had been out on patrol and lost his way.
It was two miles to that regiment and two miles is a long distance to stray between two lines of trenches so close together, when at any point in your own line you will find friends. It was possible that this fellow's real name was Hans Schmidt, who had learned cockney English in childhood in London, and in a dead British private's uniform had come into the British trenches to get information to which he was anything but welcome. He was to be sent under guard to the D — — regiment for identification ; and if he were found to be a Hans and not a Tommy — well, though he had tried a very stupid dodge he must have known what to expect when he was found out, if his officers had properly trained him in German rules of war.
I had a glimpse of him in the candlelight before stooping to feel my way down three or four narrow steps to the cellar, where the farmer ordinarily kept potatoes and vegetables. There were straw beds around the walls here, too. The major commanding the battalion rose from his seat at a table on which were some cutlery, a jam pot, tobacco, pipes, a newspaper or two, and army telegraph forms and maps.
If the hosts of mansions could only make their hospitality as simple as the major's, there would be less affectation in the world. He introduced me to an officer sitting on the other side of the table and to one lying in his blankets against the wall, who lifted his head and blinked and said that he was very glad to see me.
It is a small world, for China cropped up here, as it had at brigade headquarters. The major had been in garrison at Peking when the war began. If my shipmate on a long battleship cruise, Lt.-Col. Dion Williams, U.S.M.C., reads this out in Peking let it tell him that the major is just as urbane in the cellar of a second-rate farmhouse on the outskirts of Neuve Chapelle as he would be in a corner of the Peking Club.
"How is it? Painful now?" asked the major of Captain P — — , on the other side of the table.
"Oh, no ! It's quite all right," said the captain.
"Using the sling ?"
"Part of the time. Hardly need it, though."
Captain P — — was one of those men whose eyes are always smiling ; who seems, wherever he is, to be glad that he is not in a worse place; who goes right on smiling at the mud in the trenches and bullets and shells and death. They are not emotional, the British, perhaps, but they are given to cheeriness, if not to laughter, and they have a way of smiling at times when smiles are much needed. The smile is more often found at the front than back at headquarters ; or perhaps it is more noticeable there.
"You see, he got a bullet through the arm yesterday," the major explained. " He was reported wounded, but remained on duty in the trench." I saw that the captain would rather not have publicity given to such an ordinary incident. He did not see why people should talk about his arm. "You are to go with him into the trench for the night," the major added ; and I thought myself very lucky in my companion.
"Aren't you going to have dinner with us ? " the major asked him.
"Why, I had something to eat not very long ago," said Captain P — — . One was not sure whether he had or not.
"There's plenty," said the major.
"In that event, I don't see why I shouldn't eat when I have a chance," the captain returned; which I found was a characteristic trench habit, particularly in winter when exposure to the raw, cold air calls for plenty of body-furnace heat.
We had a ration soup and ration ham and ration prunes and cheese ; what Tommy Atkins gets. When we were outside the house and starting for the trench this captain, with his wounded arm, wanted to carry my knapsack. He seemed to think that refusal was breaking the Hague conventions.
Where we turned off the road, broken finger-points of brick walls in the faint moonlight indicated the site of Neuve Chapelle ; other fragments of walls in front of us were the remains of a house ; and that broken tree-trunk showed what a big shell can do. The trunk, a good eighteen inches in diameter, had not only been cut in two by one of the monsters of the new British artillery, but had been carried on for ten feet and left lying solidly in the bed of splinters of the top of the stump. All this had been in the field of that battle of a day, which was as fierce as the fiercest day at Gettysburg, and fought within about the same space. Every tree, every square rod of ground, had been paid for by shells, bullets, and human life.
But now we were near the trenches ; or rather the breastworks. We are always speaking of the trenches, while not all parts of the line are held by trenches. A trench is dug in the ground ; a breastwork is raised from the level of the ground. At some points a trench becomes practically a breastwork, as its wall is raised to get free of the mud and water.
We came into the open and heard the sound of voices and saw a spotty white wall; for some of the sandbags of the new British breastworks still retained their original colour. On the reverse side of this wall lines were leaning in readiness, their fixed bayonets faintly gleaming in the moonlight. I felt of the edge of one and it was sharp, quite prepared for business. In the surroundings of damp earth and mud-bespattered men, this rifle seemed the cleanest thing of all, meticulously clean, that ready weapon whose well-aimed and telling fire, in obedient and cool hands, was the object of all the drill of the new infantry in England ; of all the drill of all infantry. Where pickets watched in the open in the old days before armies met in pitched battle, an occasional soldier now stands with rifle laid on the parapet, watching.
British trenches at Neuve Chapelle under attack
Across a reach of field faintly were made out the white spots of another wall of breastworks, the German, at the edge of a stretch of woods, the Bois du Bies. The British reached these woods in their advance ; but, their aeroplanes being unable to spot the fall of shells in the mist, they had to fall back for want of artillery support. Along this line where we stood outside the village they stopped ; and to stop is to set the spades going to begin the defences which, later, had risen to a man's height, and with rifles and machine-guns had riddled the German counter-attack.
And the Germans had to go back to the edge of the woods, where they, too, began digging and building their new line. So the enemies were fixed again behind their walls of earth, facing each other across the open, where it was death for any man to expose himself by day.
"Will you have a shot, sir ?" one of the sentries asked me.
"At what ?"
"Why, at the top of the trench over there, or at anything you see moving," he said.
But I did not think that it was an invitation for a non-combatant to accept. If the bullet went over the top of the trench it had still two thousand yards and more to go, and it might find a target before it died. So, in view of the law of probabilities, no bullet is quite waste.
"Now, which is my house ? " asked Captain P — — . "I really can't find my own home in the dark."
Behind the breastwork were many little houses three or four feet in height, all of the same pattern, and made of boards and mud. The mud is put on top to keep out shrapnel bullets.
"Here you are, sir !" said a soldier.
Asking me to wait until he made a light, the captain bent over as if about to crawl under the top rail of a fence and his head disappeared. After he had put a match to a candle and stuck it on a stick thrust into the wall, I could see the interior of his habitation. A rubber sheet spread on the moist earth served as floor, carpet, mattress, and bed. At a squeeze there was room for two others besides himself. They did not need any doormat, for when they lay down their feet would be at the door.
"Quite cosy, don't you think ? " remarked the captain. He seemed to feel that he had a royal chamber. But, then, he was the kind of man who might sleep in a muddy field under a wagon and regard the shelter of the wagon body as a luxury. "Leave your knapsack here," he continued, "and we'll see what is doing along the line."
In other words, after you had left your bag in the host's hall, he suggested a stroll in the village or across the fields. But only to see war would he have asked you to walk in such mud.
"Not quite so loud! " he warned a soldier who was bringing up boards from the rear under cover of darkness. "If the Germans hear they may start firing."
Two other men were piling mud on top of a section of breastwork at an angle to the main line.
"What is that for ? " the captain asked.
"They get an enfilade on us here, sir, and Mr. — — (the lieutenant) told me to make this higher."
"That's no good. A bullet will go right through," said the captain. "We'll have to wait until we get more sandbags."
A little farther on we came to an open space, with no protection between us and the Germans. Half a dozen men were piling earth against a staked chicken wire to extend the breastworks. Rather,. they were piling mud, and they were besmirched from head to foot. They looked like reeking Neptunes rising from a slough. In the same position in daylight, standing full height before German rifles at three hundred yards, they would have been shot dead before they could leap to cover.
"How does it go ?" asked the captain.
"Very well, sir ; though what we need is sandbags."
"We'll have some up to-morrow."
At the moment there was no firing in the vicinity. Faintly I heard the Germans pounding stakes, at work improving their own breastworks.
A British soldier appeared out of the darkness in front.
"We've found two of our men out there with their heads blown off by shells," he said. "Have we permission to go out and bury them, sir ?"
"Yes."
They would be as safe as the fellows piling mud against the chicken wire, unless the Germans opened fire. If they did, we could fire on their working-party, or in the direction of the sound. For that matter, we knew through our glasses by day the location of any weak places in their breastworks, and they knew where ours were. A sort of "after-you-gentlemen-if-you-fire-we-shall" understanding sometimes exists between the foes up to a certain point. Each side understands instinctively the limitation of that point. Too much noise in working, a number of men going out to bury dead or making enough noise to be heard, and the ball begins. A deep, broad ditch filled with water made a break in our line. No doubt a German machine-gun was trained on it.
"A little bridging is required here," said the captain. "We'll have it done to-morrow night. The break is no disadvantage if they attack; in fact, we'd rather like to have them try for it. But it makes movement along the line difficult by day."
When we were across and once more behind the breastworks, he called my attention to some high ground in the rear.
"One of our officers took a short cut across there in daylight," he said. "He was quite exposed, and they drew a bead on him from the German trench and got him through the arm. Not a serious hit. It wasn't cricket for anyone to go out to bring him in. He realized this, and called out to leave him to himself, and crawled to cover."
I was getting the commonplaces of trench life. Thus far it had been a quiet night and was to remain so. Reddish, nickering swaths of light were thrown across the fields between the trenches by the enemy's Roman candle flares. One tried to estimate how many flares the Germans must use every night from Switzerland to the North Sea.
On our side, the only light was from our braziers. Thomas Atkins has become a patron of braziers made by punching holes in buckets ; and so have the Germans. Punch holes in a bucket, start a fire inside, and you have cheer and warmth and light through the long night vigils. Two or three days before we had located a sniper between the lines by seeing him swing his fire-pot to make a draught against the embers.
If you have ever sat around a camp-fire in the forest or on the plains you need be told nothing further. One of the old, glamorous features of war survives in these glowing braziers, spreading their genial rays among the little houses and lighting the faces of the men who stand or squat in encircling groups around the coals, which dry wet clothes, slake the moisture of a section of earth, make the bayonets against the walls glisten, and reveal the position of a machine-gun with its tape ready for firing.
Values are relative, and a brazier in the trenches makes the satisfaction of a steam-heated room in winter very superficial and artificial. You are at home there with Tommy Atkins, regular of an old line English regiment, in his heavy khaki overcoat and solid boots and wool puttees, a sturdy, hardened man of a terrific war. He, the regular, the shilling-a-day policeman of the empire, was still doing the fighting at the front. The new army, which embraces all classes, was not yet in action.
This man and that one were at Mons. This one and that one had been through the whole campaign without once seeing Mother England for whom they were fighting. The affection in which Captain P — — was held extended through his regiment, for we had left his own company behind. At every turn he was asked about his arm.
"You've made a mistake, sir. This isn't a hospital," as one man expressed it. Oh, but the captain was bored with hearing about that arm! If he is wounded again I am sure that he will try to keep the fact a secret.
These veterans could " grouse," as the British call it. Grousing is one of Tommy's privileges. When they got to grousing worst on the retreat from Mons, their officers knew that what they really wanted was to make another stand. They were tired of falling back ; they meant to take a rest and fight a while. Their language was yours, the language in which our own laws and schoolbooks are written. They made the old blood call. For months they had been taking bitter medicine ; very bitter for a British soldier. The way they took it will, perhaps, remain a greater tribute than any part they play in future victories.
"How do they feel in the States ? " I was asked. "Against us ?"
"No. By no means."
"I don't see how they could be !" Tommy exclaimed.
Tommy may not be much on argument as it is developed by the controversial spirit of college professors, but he had said about all there was to say. How can we be ? Hardly, after you come to know T. Atkins and his officers and talk English with them around their camp-fires.
"The Germans are always sending up flares," I remarked. "You send up none. How about it ?"
"It cheers them. They're downhearted! " said one of the group. "You wouldn't deny them their fire-works, would you, sir ?"
"That shows who is top dog,'' said another. '' They're the ones that are worried."
I had heard of trench exhaustion, trench despair, but there was no sign of it in a regiment that had been through all the hell and mire that the British army had known since the war began. To no one had Neuve Chapelle meant so much as to these common soldiers. It was their first real victory. They were standing on soil won from the Germans.
"We're going to Berlin! " said a big fellow who was standing, palms downward to the fire. "It's settled. We're going to Berlin."
A smaller man with his back against the sandbags disagreed. There was a trench argument.
"No, we're going to the Rhine," he said. "The Russians are going to Berlin." (This was in March, 1915, remember.)
"How can they when they ain't over the Balkans yet ?"
"The Carpathians, you mean."
"Well, they're both mountains and the Russians have got to cross them. And there's a place called Cracow in that region. What's the matter of a pair of mountain ranges between you and me, Bill ? You're strong on geography, but you fail to follow the campaign."
"The Rhine, I say!"
"It's the Rhine first, but Berlin is what you want to keep your mind on."
Then I asked if they had ever had any doubt that they would reach the Rhine.
"How could we, sir ?"
"And how about the Germans. Do you hate them ?"
"Hate !" exclaimed the big man. "What good would it do to hate them ? No, we don't hate. We get our blood up when we're fighting and when they don't play the game. But hate! Don't you think that's kind of ridiculous, sir ?"
"How do they fight ?"
"They take a bit of beating, do the Boches !"
"So you call them Boches !"
"Yes. They don't like that. But sometimes we call them Allemands, which is Germans in French. Oh, we're getting quite French scholars !"
"They're good soldiers. Not many tricks they're not up to. But in my opinion they're overdoing the hate. You can't keep up to your work on hate, sir. I should think it would be weakening to the mind, too."
"Still, you would like the war over ? You'd like to go home ?"
They certainly would. Back to the barracks, out of the trenches! They certainly would.
"And call it a draw ?"
"Call it a draw, now ! Call it a draw, after all we've been through — — "
"Spring is coming. The ground will dry up and it will be warm."
"And the going will be good to Berlin, as it was back from Paris in August, we tell the Boches."
"Good for the Russians going over the Carpathians, or the Pyrenees, or whatever those mountains are, too. I read they're all covered with snow in winter."
It was good, regular soldier talk, very "homey" to me. As you will observe, I have not elided the h's. Indeed, Tommy has a way of prefixing his h's to the right vowels more frequently than a generation ago. The Soldiers Three type has passed. Popular education will have its way and induce better habits. Believing in the old remedy for exhaustion and exposure to cold, the army served out a tot of rum every day to the men. But many of them are teetotalers, these hardy regulars, and not even Mulvaney will think them effeminate when they have seen fighting which makes anything Mulvaney ever saw child's play. So they asked for candy and chocolate, instead of rum.
Some people have said that Tommy has no patriotism. He fights because he is paid and it is his business. That is an insinuation. Tommy doesn't care for the " hero stuff," or for waving flags and speechmaking. Possibly he knows how few Germans that sort of thing kills. His weapons are bullets. To put it cogently, he is fighting because he doesn't want any Kaiser "in his."
Is not that what all the speeches in Parliament are about and all the editorials and the recruiting campaign? Is not that what England and France are fighting for ? It seems to me that Tommy's is a very practical patriotism, free from cant; and the way that he refuses to hate or to get excited, but sticks to it, must be very irritating to the Germans.
"Would you like a Boche helmet for a souvenir, sir ?" asked a soldier who appeared on the outer edge of the group. He was the small, active type, a British soldier with the élan of the Frenchman. "There are lots of them out among the German dead" — the unburied German dead who fell like grass before the mower in a desperate and futile counter-attack to recover Neuve Chapelle. "I'll have one for you on your way back."
There was no stopping him ; he had gone. "Matty's a devil !" said the big man. "He'll get it, all right. He's equal to reaching over the Boches' parapet and picking one off a Boche's head !"
As we proceeded on our way, officers came out of the little houses to meet Captain P — — and. the stranger civilian. They had to come out, as there was no room to take us inside ; and sometimes they talked shop together after I had answered the usual question, "Is America against us ?" There seemed to be an idea that we were, possibly because of the prodigious advertising tactics of a minority. But any feeling that we might be . did not interfere with their simple courtesy, or lead them to express any bitterness or break into argument. "How are things going on over your side ? "
"Nicely."
"Any shelling ?"
"A little this morning. No harm done."
"We cleaned out one bad sniper to-day."
"Ought to have some sandbags up to-night."
"It's a bad place there. They've got a machine-gun trained which has quite a sweep. I asked if the artillery shouldn't put in a word, but the general didn't think it worth while."
"You must run across that break. Three or four shots at you every time. We're gradually getting shipshape, though."
Just then a couple of bullets went singing overhead. The group paid no attention to them. If you paid attention to bullets over the parapet you would have no time for anything else. But these bullets have a way of picking off tall officers who are standing up among their houses. In the course of their talk they happened to speak of such an instance, though not with reference to the two bullets I have mentioned.
"Poor S — — did not last long. He had been out only three weeks."
"How is J — — ? Hit badly ?"
"Through the shoulder ; not seriously."
"H — — is back. Recovered very quickly."
Normal trench talk, this! A crack which signifies that the bullet has hit — another man down. One grows accustomed to it, and one of this group of officers might be gone to-morrow.
"I have one, sir," said Matty, exhibiting a helmet when we returned past his station. " Bullet went right through the head and came out the peak !"
It was time that Captain P — — was back to his own command. As we came to his company's line word was just being passed from sentry to sentry : "No firing. Patrols going out."
It was midnight now.
"We'll go in the other direction," said Captain P — — when he had learned that there was no news.
This brought us to an Irish regiment. The Irish naturally had something to say.
