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Updated: May 19, 2025
Even if it had not been recovered at the time, the British would have regained possession with their next advance; for the Germans had no way of taking a tank to the rear. There are no tractors powerful enough to draw one across the shell-craters. It can be moved only by its own power, and with its engine out of order it becomes a fixture on the landscape.
It was in rain and mist after the battle, while the dead still lay on the field, that I went over the Ridge and along the path of the Canadian charges, wondering how they had passed through the curtains of fire when I saw shrapnel cases so thick that you could step from one to another; wondering how men could survive in the shell-craters and the poor, tumbled trenches in the soft, shell-mashed earth; wondering at the whole business of their being here in France, a veteran army two years after the war had begun.
In the underground tunnels and chambers the Germans gathered for their counter-attacks, which they attempted with something of their old precision and courage. This was the opportunity of the machine gunners in shell-craters and the snipers and the curtain of artillery fire. Sometimes the Australians allowed the attack to get good headway.
So it was that Delville Wood was captured and lost several times and became "Devil's" Wood to men who lay there under the crash and fury of massed gun-fire until a wretched remnant of what had been a glorious brigade of youth crawled out stricken and bleeding when relieved by another brigade ordered to take their turn in that devil's caldron, or to recapture it when German bombing-parties and machine-gunners had followed in the wake of fire, and had crouched again among the fallen trees, and in the shell-craters and ditches, with our dead and their dead to keep them company.
It's from your own side!" said one Briton to a German who had been knocked over by a German "krump" when he picked himself up; and the German answered that this did not make him like it any better. Scattered with British wounded taking cover in new and old shell-craters was No Man's Land as the living passed. A Briton and his prisoner would take cover together.
All around where this Briton had held the fort there were shell-craters like the dots of close shooting around a bull's-eye; no tell-tale blood spots this time, but a pile of two or three hundred cartridge cases lying where they had fallen as they were emptied of their cones of lead. Luck was with the occupant, but not with another man playing the same game not far away.
Just before dawn, with zero at dawn, when the Canadians were forming on the reverse slope for their charge, the Germans laden with bombs made theirs and secured a footing in the thin front line among the shell-craters and, grim shadows in the night lighted by bursts of bombs and shells, struggled as they have on many similar occasions. Then came the "surprise party."
John Wood who took me to the battalion headquarters located under some sand-bags in a German dug out. All the way up to Contalmaison and beyond there were the signs of recent bloodshed and of present peril. Dead horses lay about, disemboweled by shell-fire. Legs and arms protruded from shell-craters where bodies lay half buried.
Out in No Man's Land the wounded hugged their shell-craters until the fire slackened or night fell, when they crawled back.
It was bitterly cold and we groped about among the shattered barbed-wire entanglements searching for wood to light a fire. There was no difficulty in finding shell-craters in which to sleep the ground was so pockmarked with them that it seemed impossible that it could have been done by human agency.
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