That is the human mechanical side of things. More horrible to the unfortunate soldiers of the German army is the devilish punishment inflicted upon them during the past ten days, culminating on that day of battle when every weapon for the slaughter of men, from the heaviest of high explosives to boiling oil and gas-shells, was let loose upon them in one wild tempest of destruction, which blew them out of the earth and off the earth, and frizzled them and blinded them, and choked them and mutilated them, and made them mad.
One German boy, who looked not more than fifteen years of age--a child--was found yesterday lying in a shell-hole by the side of a dead man who had been shot through the temple, and he was a gibbering idiot through fear. Not the only one. German officers say that many of their men went raving mad under the strain of our bombardment, and tried to kill their comrades or themselves, or fell into an ague of terror, clawing their mouths, with all the symptoms of the worst shell-shock.
Many of our prisoners believe they were betrayed, and were sacrificed coldly and deliberately by their higher command. Before the battle an order of the day was issued to them, telling them to hold out if surrounded and fight their way back with the bayonet, because behind them would be fresh divisions ready to support immediate counter-attacks. Those fresh divisions never appeared. We know that they had no chance of getting near our lines because of our far-reaching fire, and the work of our aircraft--and the men of Messines and Wytschaete and all the ground south of St.-Eloi were cut off and captured, if they did not die. After our first assaults, the enemy, panic-stricken, were more concerned in getting away their guns than in protecting their troops, and they were left to our mercy.
Walking about those monstrous mine-craters which we tore out of the earth at dawn on June 7, and across the old German lines beyond St.-Eloi on the left of our attack, southwards by Wytschaete and the lower slopes of Messines, to-day, as after the morning of battle, I pitied any human souls who had to suffer what these German soldiers must have suffered in the agony of fear before death came to many of them. All this wide area of country is blasted and harrowed and holed with monstrous pits. There was at least one great shell to every nine yards, and at 200 yards its flying steel has a killing power. No idea of it all can be conveyed by many words describing this upheaval of sand-bags and barricades and trenches and redoubts, and this sieve of earth, pitted by countless shell-craters. All the woods where the Germans lived--Oaten Wood and Damstrasse Wood and Ravine Wood, down to Wytschaete Wood and Hell Wood--are but gaunt stumps sticking out of ash-grey heaps of earth. German dead lie here and there in batches or in rows as they were shot down by enfilade fire, but I have seen very few bodies, for the most of them were buried in the upheaved earth, as one can tell by the foul vapours which creep out from the smashed trenches, where the deep dug-outs have collapsed and tunnels have fallen in, so that all this battle-ground is a graveyard of men, buried as they died or before they died.