SEPTEMBER 5, 1918
The Bolshevist murder
Bolshevist soldiers have broken into and sacked the British Embassy at Petrograd, looted the Embassy, destroyed the papers, murdered Captain Cromie, the British Naval Attache, who gallantly defended the building, mutilated his body, and even refused an English clergyman leave to pray over the dead. Our Government telegraphed to the People’s Commissary for Foreign Affairs a demand for immediate reparation and for the prompt punishment of all concerned. By the immemorial law of all communities who have emerged from primitive barbarism the persons and domiciles of foreign representatives are sacrosanct. The British people will regard this infamous act with the deepest horror and indignation, and require that searching and impartial investigation shall be made as to responsibility for the deed. We do not want hecatombs of the ruling party’s political enemies, such as they offered to the Germans after the murder of Count Mirbach, or executions confined to insignificant underlings. The report of the murder given in the official Bolshevist organ shows that the armed invasion of the Embassy was the considered act of the Soviet Government, and not a mere outbreak of irresponsible brigandage.
The Government have warned of the measures they will take if the Soviet Government fail to give complete satisfaction. About a hundred of our fellow-countrymen, including our distinguished Petrograd Correspondent, are believed to be still in Bolshevist Russia. There are also Bolshevists in England, among them M Litvinoff, the representative of the Soviet Government, and his staff. They have been placed under arrest until all British subjects under Bolshevist control have been set at liberty and allowed to proceed to the Finnish frontier. A group of 25 were to have left our shores on Tuesday, as a token of our good will, although negotiations for the mutual repatriation of British and Russian citizens had not been concluded. The treaties signed by the Bolshevists with Germany on Tuesday provide, we are told, that Russia will fight against the Entente in Northern Russia. If this is correct, they would seem to regard themselves as in a state of war with us. But only savages begin war by assassination.
SEPTEMBER 4, 1918
British airmen’s exploits
The following incidents, drawn from the battle zone records of the Royal Air Force, illustrate the nature of the day’s work of our airmen in France: A two seater machine was attacked by seven German machines, which surrounded it, firing at it from all sides. The Germans used explosive bullets. Fighting gallantly against these crushing odds, the British pilot battled his way through the enemy formation. In the course of the fight, however, one of his legs was hit five times, so that the limb was all but severed and fell among the controls. By a supreme effort he clung grimly to consciousness, and somehow managed to disentangle his leg from the controls. Not only so, but he succeeded in landing the machine safely behind the British lines.
Another two-seater machine, while escorting a bombing formation, sighted 20 German fighting planes. The pilot instantly dived to the attack and selected his first victim. He closed, and, putting in a burst of machine-gun fire at a distance of only a few feet, saw the German pilot go down in flames. Alarmed by the suddenness of his attack, the other Germans had scattered, and the Englishman was able to dive on another. Just as he came within range, however, his gun jammed, and several Germans attacked his machine from the rear. His observer, opening fire, sent one of the enemy machines spinning earthwards. Having cleared the jam the pilot, manoeuvring at great speed, got a third Hun across his front, where he opened fire at short range and sent his opponent whirling down, a burning mass.
The same day a successful raid was carried out on a German aerodrome by combined British and American squadrons. Successive formations flying very low, released bombs on hangars, machines on the ground, and hutments. The German petrol and oil store was set on fire, which, in turn, spread to the ammunition dump; six machines on the ground were destroyed by fire, and two more by direct hits; two large Gotha and several smaller hangars were enveloped in flames, as well as some living huts. The Germans desperately endeavoured to put out the flames, whereupon the raiders swooped down again to the attack, and plied the Germans with machine-gun fire, scattering panic-stricken mechanics in all directions.
SEPTEMBER 3, 1918
Venice in wartime
The population that had departed is now, since the victory of the Piave, gradually drifting back to Venice. Over ten thousand of the people who went away have returned, and the bath season has started again at the Lido, the island seashore of Venice. It must be the oddest seaside place in Europe, for the big bathing establishment which used in peace time to be a parade ground for the most daring bathing costumes which the taste of feminine visitors from Austria and Hungary could devise, now lies in the midst of the Lido defences against an enemy landing. The sand is dug into trenches, and a barbed-wire entanglement runs across the beach where bathers bask after their swim. The Venetians seem not to notice it, though, nor yet to hear the guns growling away at the mouth of the Piave, a few miles along the coast. It is odd to see this throng of people in bright bathing costumes sitting under gay sun-umbrellas with that belt of barbed wire among them, and sentries with fixed bayonets watching their water frolics. There are notices in each dressing cabin that the sentries have orders to fire on any bather going beyond the limits of water fixed for the establishment, and since the season opened they have already recalled three or four heedless swimmers by sending a bullet to splash up the water beside them. As one leaves the bathing place, too, there is a scrutiny by military police to be undergone, perhaps to defeat any attempt by the Austrians to land troops disguised as bathers.
Few places in a war-zone can be more agreeable than is Venice now. On these warm evenings when the Grand Canal is flooded with silver twilight, the Piazzetta is fuller at midnight than at noon. Last night there were hundreds of people standing between the Doges’ Palace and the gleaming lagoon, to look at the red flashes of anti-aircraft shell along the Piave front. Outside the colonnades of St Mark’s Square, which have been built up with sandbags into air-raid shelters, there were dozens of little tables at which sat Venetians eating ices. A dreamy spell seemed to rest on the city, deepened by the call of the aircraft look-outs from the roofs of the palaces, as at regular intervals they chanted through megaphones the wailing cry, “Nell’aria buona gardia.” “In the air, good watch.”
SEPTEMBER 2, 1918
Great British weekend
The outstanding incidents of the weekend have been our occupation of Kemmel Hill on the extreme north and the capture of Mont St Quentin on the south, with the subsequent fall of Peronne. The distance between these points is something like 54 miles, and on all this front, except for the stretch of 10 miles or so in the middle from below Lens to by Givenchy, the enemy is not only on the defensive, but retiring. The one section about Lens where he is not retiring is where we pushed him back in 1917, and where he failed this year to recover any ground. His present retreat covers practically all his advances of the spring and summer, as well as some parts of the line where he advanced not at all. Whether he will be compelled to relinquish all his gains remains to be seen, but on the parallel of Amiens, where he was once within nine miles of the city, he is now 27 miles away. In the centre, along the Scarpe, we are farther east at some points than we have ever been. On the north, by giving up Kemmel, he has yielded what at the time seemed the most important of all his winning. All this dramatic change has taken place since the end of the first week of August, and at the close of the month we can look back on the last three weeks with some satisfaction. Beside these two points, at the farthest northern and southern ends of our front, the chief interest centres in the extremely severe fighting which has been going on about Bullecourt. Here it is that our most spectacular advance of the past week has been made, involving the evident menace to the German main line of resistance — the Drocourt-Queant Hindenburg line. That the Germans regard the threat as serious is plain from the desperate character of their resistance. Much the heaviest attacks and largest masses of troops employed have been by the enemy in his counter-attacks. In some of these he has gained ground, to lose it again. In others he has made none. Some of the heaviest fighting went on around Vraucourt and Ecoust on Friday, and both places seem that evening to have been in the enemy’s possession. Since then an almost continuous struggle has gone on, and today I understand that both those places are ours, as well as all Bullecourt. Both the Germans and ourselves seem to hold posts in Reincourt.
AUGUST 31, 1918
German retreat in Flanders
The German retreat across the Somme is complete. Even the resistance which might have been offered to delay us in the angle by Peronne, where the river turns south, vanished at our approach, and of the enemy who failed to get away we had by last evening captured some 260 in this area. Just south of Peronne our patrols have even pushed across the stream above La Chapellette, and farther south we are in possession of the river bank at the main crossings by Brie and Saint Christ. All down the line of the river the flight of the enemy was hurried and disorganized, and everywhere we have rounded up small batches of laggards. All yesterday and through the night our guns and aeroplanes harassed the crossings of the river at Brie, Saint Christ, Eterpigny, and other points, as well as around Peronne, and the wreckage shows a great number of casualties and transport destroyed. On the north of the river we have pushed through Hem and Maurepas, and both ends of the viaduct which crosses the stream at Clery are apparently in our hands. Almost all the crossings of the river have been more or less completely destroyed, either by our shells and bombs or by the enemy themselves in their withdrawal. That matters little, for all along this bend of the river, as well as below, the canalized current is narrow, while the flat bottom of marsh and pool offers no obstacle to delay our engineers. The prisoners taken will be considerable in number, and we have besides not a few new guns.
Bapaume is ours. When I wrote yesterday it seemed foregone that it must fall, and by night our troops had worked well through it and out beyond. It has, perhaps, sentimental rather than real importance, but its capture marks a definite stage in our advance and in the German defeat. The road, with its familiar landmarks of the Voisselle craters, Pozieres and its monuments, the Butte de Warlencourt, with the crosses of the Durhams undisturbed, comes back to us so nearly unimpaired that this morning a motor-car could run comfortably along its whole length into Bapaume.
Fighting today has been going on to the east of the town in the region of Bancourt and Fremicourt and north-east beyond Vaux-Vraucourt, all of which were this afternoon reported to be in our hands.
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