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A
wonderful weekend
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The progress made north
of Bapaume is more astonishing and perhaps more important than the gains in
any other sector
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The arrival of our forces at the outskirts of Bapaume yesterday set the seal on a wonderful weekend, and brought into view possibilities which were certainly not in sight a week ago. To the north of the Somme the Germans are retreating before the British at such a pace that people are beginning to ask whether they will be able to stand on the old Hindenburg line. Their movement is no planned and deliberate withdrawal, such as was witnessed last year. They are being driven by our troops in a manner which almost recalls Mackensen’s drive in Galicia. Their Somme front is said by one eye-witness to be “disintegrating”, and the word is apt. Though fierce resistance has been and is still being made by the enemy at many points, their opposition is patchy. The evidence of demoralization is increasing, their troops have lost cohesion, and their commanders appear to have lost control.
Every one expected that the Germans would make a great stand on the heights of Thiepval, which for so, long formed an unconquerable bastion in the first battle of the Somme. But our heroic troops overcame the difficulty of Thiepval by turning it from the north and the south, and then swarming over the crest when the encirclement was complete. We can see in these operations, as our Special Correspondent points out, the immense advantage of attacking the battle-scarred area of the Somme from the west, and not from the south, as we did in 1916. It is true that on this occasion we were fortunate in holding Gommecourt, where we met with such a rebuff at the opening of the battle two years ago. It may be also true, as some suggest, that we have caught the enemy at a moment when they were once more preparing to retire at leisure; but this time we are close at their heels, and our pursuit is plainly unflagging.
Over the whole front from Arras to Bray our Armies are moving in one great sweep, and the tale of successes grows almost too rapidly to be recorded. Each day places of tragic and glorious memories reappear in the bulletins. Albert has already been left far behind, and Bray has also fallen. At Contalmaison our men are deep in the scenes of the Iast fortnight’s fighting in July, 1916. They have take Mametz and many other points in their stride. The progress made north of Bapaume is more astonishing and perhaps more important than the gains in any other sector. At Croisilles, “about” which the Guards were fighting yesterday, we are almost in sight of the old Hindenburg line, which lies a couple of thousand yards beyond. There, more than anywhere else, comes the test. The enemy must either stand at that point or fall back to the famous “switch” line from Drocourt to Queant; and if they retire to the “switch” which they called the “Wotan line”, they must relinquish a large amount of territory where the Allies have not set foot for years. The belief grows that they must continue to retire. Every fresh dispatch carries the suggestion that their front is liquefying, that their troops have lost heart, and that surrenders are being made with a readiness which has never yet been known on such a wholesale scale by the enemy. It is still too soon to estimate or to forecast the full consequences of the collapse of the German line between Arras and the Somme. It may take us far, and in any case the moral effect upon the German nation is bound to be deep.
So far as can be judged, the onward movement of the British Armies is likely to be maintained. Le Sars, the limit of our northern advance in November, 1916, has been captured, and the advance has been pressed to Le Barque, outflanking that stubborn obstacle, the Butte de Warlencourt. All reports concur in declaring that the victories daily won are due in a large measure to the new Tanks. In their improved form the Tanks have been demonstrated to be, as their inventors claimed, the true antidote for the nests of machine-guns upon which the Germans have placed such reliance.
Attention has been so concentrated during the last day or two upon the triumphant march of the British north of the Somme that the fine attack of the Australians south of the river, which was delivered with much gallantry and dash, has been a little obscured. Yet the action was of a character which will give it a high place in the war annals of Australia. Farther south the enemy still cling desperately to Chaulnes and Roye, but the transformation wrought in the salient northwards, together with the steady advance of General Humbert’s Army on the Divetta and the Oise, is bound speedily to react on the Roye area, where the Germans have stayed overlong. Between the Oise and the Aisne General Mangin continues to gain ground, and though the Germans keep their positions on the line of the Vesle, they must be casting back anxious glances at the larger river in their rear. Since July 15, when General Gouraud broke in a single morning the German attack east of Reims, the Allied troops have gone steadily from success to success. The Allies have had no such month since the war began, and the British have had no such week as the last. We have fought and overcome the Germans in pitched and bloody battles, we toiled painfully after them last year while they withdrew in orderly fashion; but, except for a brief space after the battle of the Marne, never until now have we had the satisfaction of pursuing and harrying on a large scale masses of dispirited and defeated German troops who are quickly losing all semblance of battle order. May these changed and heartening times continue.
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Farther
east of Arras
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"Monchy and
Guemappe," said a Canadian to me today, "we took before
breakfast"
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Chief interest today centres in the northern sector of the battlefront, where Canadians and Scotsmen are hammering the Germans on both sides of the Scarpe. Hard fighting is going on here as I write. On the rest of the battle front we continue to press the enemy back, giving him little rest along more than 30 miles of line.
Progress can be briefly summarized. In the Bapaume area the New Zealanders, continuing the movement on the north of the town, are clear beyond it some miles to the north-east, near the railway line, which runs approximately parallel to the Bapaume-Cambrai road, while on their left our troops have gone through Beugnatre, and this morning were said to be near the sugar factory at the crossroads just outside Vaulx-Vraucourt. Farther to the south, eastward from Montauban, we had this morning apparently pushed through both Bernafay and Trones Woods, and are not far from Guillemont.
Still farther south, I understand, the Australians have taken Maricourt and the Vaux Wood, which crowns the heights above the Somme, and from which there is a wonderful view eastwards over the enemy positions. South of the river the Australians are reported to be within a mile of Dompierre, along the plateau east from Chuignes. A glance at the map will show that on the whole length of front all salients are practically flattened out and all irregularities straightened, so that for 25 miles on the southern portion, from Bapaume to near Roye, our battle line now runs almost due north and south, while for a dozen miles and more above Bapaume to beyond the Scarpe it is hardly less straight, only bulging a little where the Canadians have thrust forward in the last 36 hours to and beyond Monchy.
On all this stretch there is no point where we have not advanced some two to three miles, while where the gain is greatest, south of the Somme, we are 12 to 13 miles farther east than we were three weeks ago. The actual gain of ground is something between 150 to 200 square miles, and the prisoners taken must be getting on for 50,000, of whom nearly 23,000 have been taken since August 21. This is no inconsiderable success.
PROGRESS ON THE SCARPE
Reverting to progress of the latest advance in the area on both sides of the Scarpe, I told yesterday that Monchy and Guernappe had been taken by the Canadians. To these can be added Wancourt, on the south, and, apparently, Pelves, on the bank of the river. On the other side of the river Scottish troops again, as a year ago, have fought their way through Roeux, and lower down other Scotsmen have taken Heninel.
This was the situation up to noon today, and it will be noticed that, while on most of this area we have now practically reached the farthest points we, touched last year, along the river itself, at Pelves, we seem to be farther than we ever went in 1917. Today we have also broken new ground to the south of there. In its initial stages yesterday the attack was easy. The Germans say they expected it, and they had plenty of guns, but their shelling was at first light and indifferent, and the infantry hardly fought at all.
“Monchy and Guemappe,” said a Canadian to me today, “we took before breakfast,” which, so far as the villages themselves are concerned, was literally true. For some three miles eastward from our starting-point, on the line northwards from Neuville Vitasse, there was hardly any serious opposition. Beyond Guemappe, however, there wa’s hard 0ghting, and especially for the famous Wancourt Tower, which crowns the plateau dominating nearly aIl this region due south of’ Guemappe and south-east of Wancourt. The German resistance here was stiff and fighting went on all night, and it was not till early this morning that the Tower and plateau were ours.
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Rapid
German retreat
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Looked at from the west,
Montdidier is a particularly gruesome spectacle. It is not only that the
insides of the houses are exposed. The very foundations of the town are laid
bare
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Do not imagine that the day’s advance, during which the two armies snatched from the grasp of the enemy over 40 towns and villages of Santorre, was made without most gallant fighting and skilful generalship. Position after position, village after village, was strongly defended by murderous machine-gun fire, and they were only carried after being first turned, generally on two sides at least, by clever and. patient but extraordinarily rapid, manoeuvring. That was how Chaulnes was taken, and the same system is sure to compass the fall of Noyon. The general scheme of the enemy’s retreat was to hold as long as he could not only towns and villages with forces of a few men and many machine-guns, but to dot the whole area of the ground over which he was falling back at intervals of 500 or 600 yards with small packets of infantry, armed either with rifles or machine-guns, and with orders to delay our advance up to the last moment that they could without being captured. As a natural consequence of his manoeuvre I believe that yesterday’s tally of prisoners was considerably smaller than what we have lately been accustomed to take.
At the same time, with long-distance guns and field-guns, the latter posted close to the sides of the roads ready to be withdrawn when they were forced, they have kept up a steady bombardment of the main roads over which we were advancing, especially the highways from Roye to Nesle and Roye to Noyon, with yperite shells. They have thus, in spite of the rapidity of the French progress, undoubtedly gained a few hours during which it is probable that they are hastily organizing and strengthening their system of defensive works, not only, as I telegraphed, yesterday, on the heights east of Ecuvilly; but on the whole tangle of hills and broken ground still farther east along the north side of the Valley of the Oise in the direction of Chauny.
The towns and villages that fall one by one into the hands of the advancing troops are a sorry sight. They are battered out of all recognition. The phrase exactly expresses the facts. Most of them I know, some of them well. When I went the other day to Moreuil and since then to Montdidier I simply did not recognize them. I could not place any of the houses and not many of the streets I had known. Looked at from the west, Montdidier is a particularly gruesome spectacle. It is not only that the insides of the houses are exposed. The very foundations of the town are laid bare. They seem to have been turned inside out, and upside down. It is like looking at a grave that has been burst open and violated. The naked cliff of sandstone on which it stands is thrown open to view instead of being hidden by a clustering mass of houses, and cliff and fallen stonework form an indistinguishable and formless jumble of chaos and destruction which in no sort of way suggests that it could ever have been the handiwork of man.
Roye, fortunately, is not so bad. Some of the streets have been blown up by mines; the church and a certain number of houses have been destroyed by shells, but it still looks like a town, and there are still houses standing, on the walls of which the Germans have left characteristic inscriptions as a trace of their occupation. The brick ramparts overhanging the Avre facing west across the Santerre Plateau have suffered particularly badly, but they are wonderfully, picturesque in their ruin. It is not much consolation to reflect that in the case of these recently destroyed places the ruin is mostly the result of the fair wear and tear of war.
But it is in a way comforting to feel that the Germans must by now be bitterly regretting the wantonness with which they blotted out of existence with fire and dynamite during their last retreat the great mass of the towns and villages of the district behind their present line. They are in something the same plight as the ancient wanderers in the wilderness, whose soul fainted within them because they found no city to dwell in. And it is their own doing.
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