1915: The Death of Innocence

by Lyn Macdonald

  This was a wonderful system where the gunners ran with the hare and hunted with the hounds! Even we gunners on the instrument used to laugh at it, but to no avail. Fancy intelligent officers of the Royal Artillery falling for this daft idea which could only be carried out in practice camp!

  Since mid-February a series of urgent telegrams had been flying between Staff Headquarters at St Omer and Ordnance Headquarters in England, and they grew more and more fiery as the weeks passed and there was no sign of the two missing batteries. First came the assurance that they would sail on 26 February, then without fail on 1 March. On the 3rd Sir John French was cast down by the news that the batteries had not yet left England. Time was running out. If they did not arrive soon they would hardly have time to dig in the guns or to range on targets before the battle began. Their targets had already been allotted, and both of them were crucial. The particular task of 59th Battery was to smash the German strongpoints around Mauquissart on the front of the 22nd Brigade who would attack it.

  Chapter 7

  Mauquissart was a cluster of ruined houses on the left of the planned attack. It was clear enough to see for it was barely a quarter mile behind the German line directly in front of Aubers on the ridge a mile beyond. Between them, close to Mauquissart, another landmark rose out of the tumbled grey waste. It was the Moulin du Pietre, a large double-storeyed working mill that had served local farmers for miles around and now doubtless served the Germans as a useful place from which to make observation close to their line. Beyond Mauquissart the enemy line began to curve, dipping back slightly behind the Ferme van Biesen, brooding, abandoned, a hundred yards ahead in No Man’s Land. It was a large farm, almost a manor, surrounded by trees and a once-ornamental waterscape that had doubled as a drainage ditch in the low-lying farmland. A hundred yards beyond it, British troops, looking from their own lines into No Man’s Land, christened it the Moated Grange.

  The line that looked so clear-cut and distinct drawn as a firm black line on war maps in the newspapers was different when looked at from the air or the line itself. The two sets of trench-lines, separated by a hundred yards or so, straggled and meandered through a mish-mash of splintered trees, crumbling buildings, ruined roadways, here switching back to take advantage of higher ground, there jutting out to protect the prize of a fortified village or wood. As often as not the trenches ran in untidy loops and angles where the last loss or gain of a local attack had left them. There was nothing clear-cut about them.

  Beyond the Moated Grange the German trenches ran south to cross the track the British called Signpost Lane, and then pushed out to form the salient enclosing Neuve Chapelle. Where that salient ended another began, jutting this time into the German lines. The British called it Port Arthur and it was small, but it was theirs, and this was all to the good, for it enclosed the crossroads where the Estaires road met the Rue du Bois that ran back towards Béthune and these were the vital, the indispensable routes to the trenches. Before the lines had been rudely carved across it the Rue du Bois had also led to the Bois du Biez, a large rectangular wood, half a mile in length and half a mile behind Neuve Chapelle. It was empty and untouched. In early March, as buds on the trees slowly opened, the wood beyond the Indians’ front line was gradually turning green.

  This, then, was the battlefield. It was such a small stretch of land that an onlooker at a vantage point not much above ground level could have surveyed it at a glance, barely turning his head. The headache for artillery observation officers was that vantage points above ground level near their lines were few and far between. For want of anything better, haystacks were burrowed out to serve as makeshift observation posts and on the day before the battle no fewer than thirty observation officers crowded into a single ruined house at Pont Logy, training binoculars on the trenches of the salient that protected Neuve Chapelle. It was here at Pont Logy that the twenty machine-guns of the Indian Corps would be massed to cover the advance. The ammunition had been brought up and sandbagged emplacements constructed in the front line. All the previous night Arthur Agius and his men had been working. At six in the morning they returned to la Couture and Agius turned in to sleep for a few hours, stretched out on a wooden table. With so many troops crammed behind the front there was neither a bed nor floor-space to be found. But he slept the sleep of the just. In a short time they would be off and so far as his part went, he was satisfied that everything was ready.

  At the eleventh hour and some eighteen hours before they were due to take part in the battle, the 59th Siege Battery finally arrived.

  Bdr. W. Kemp.

  We detrained at Estaires and went into action off the la Bassée Road. We pulled into the orchard of a farm and I was detailed to join the signallers – or telephonists as we really were. There was very little morse code used and visibility didn’t allow us to use flags. But we all had to set to and get our heavy guns set up double-quick and it was some job, although we were trained to do things double-quick and it seemed like practice camp all over again. It was what we had been used to and the only difference was the country we were in. The detachments put down their double-deck platforms and bulk holdfast – the guns were anchored to them by a volute spring. But the volute springs had been left behind! That was the first panic. The consequence was that when the guns fired they recoiled about ten yards and had to be run-up by hand to the correct position – just like the old days in India.

  The line of fire was the next question. What to do? Well, what we did was to ask another battery not far away. We could only see about two hundred yards on account of trees, but we could see the spire of Neuve Chapelle Church. The officer on this job was told to get a line on the church, hit it, and then register this as his line of fire and switch from it to other targets. He set up a plane table with a map of the area, put a pin on the church and another in the centre of the battery position. Then, with a director marked in a 180 degrees left and right, he took a zero line from the pins and then gave individual angles to all the guns, which brought them into parallel lines with the line of his director. One gun fired and hit the church and the others took parallel lines to it. But, needless to say, it didn’t fire that afternoon, and it was doubtful if we could even be ready to fire a shot in the bombardment next day.

  The Colonel of the Brigade came along about this time and spoke to the Major to tell him about the battle tomorrow. They stood at the plane table and the Colonel pointed to the map. I heard him say, ‘One division will go in and swing left, the next one will go in and swing right, and then the cavalry will go through.’ The Major looked at him and said, ‘Like Hell they will!’ I heard him say it.

  The Major had good reason to be despondent. The Colonel had spared no pains to stress the importance of the role his Howitzers were expected to play, and the Battery-Commander well knew that it would be a near-impossibility to achieve it. Despite the gargantuan efforts of his men, he would be lucky if his guns were able to fire a shot in the next twenty-four hours, let alone hit the target, and on this occasion the enemy would not be so obliging as to fire puffs of signal smoke to help them. But, in the late afternoon, as the troops were assembling for the move to the line, there was hardly another man from Sir John French himself to the most newly arrived Territorial who was not full of optimism and confident of success.

  L/cpl. W. L. Andrews.

  We felt honoured to think we’d been chosen to serve in the battle. We were eager to fight, smarting to avenge the things that had been said about the Territorials. We might be raw – we’d only been out a couple of months – but we were keen men, intelligent men, and every one a volunteer. We meant to do our best and we were convinced that this was the battle that might end the war! In those days we thought we only had to break through the German front and the enemy would crumple up and we would be done with trenches because, once we had thrust through the trench system the line would be rolled up. That was a favourite phrase then, rolled up!

  Later on, battles were more mysterious and the ordina
ry soldier never knew what was happening except in his own bit of battlefield. You could get stuck in a reeking shell pit for a whole day and night and not know whether it was friend or foe in the trench fifty yards away. Of course battle plans were not revealed to a humble lance-corporal like myself, but at Neuve Chapelle we had a good idea what we were after. We had a very fair idea of the ground to be covered and in our stints in the line we studied it as much as we could. The ground slowly rose towards the village of Aubers and we knew that about nine miles beyond was the city of Lille. We were hopeful and innocent enough to believe that there would be cosy billets for us in Lille on the night of the battle.

  The men from Dundee knew that they were not to take part in the opening stages of the battle. Their job was to wait until Neuve Chapelle had been captured, only then would they move forward to hold the first captured trenches while the victors swept ahead. Every man knew what he had to do. Alex Letyford had spent most of the day making the scaling-ladders that would take the troops across the enemy’s sandbags, but he would be in the thick of it when the battle began. Around the salient, as aeriel photographs had shown, some trenches straggled back deep into German territory to link up with others that could not possibly be taken in the first assault. As soon as the first wave had gained a foothold engineers would go forward to construct barricades that would protect them as they consolidated and dug in, and a thousand Sikhs of the Lahore Division were standing by to repair the surface of the shattered road that ran through the German front line into Neuve Chapelle. As darkness fell and the troops began to gather for the move to the line, the Battalions who held it shuffled right or left to make room for them.

  Capt. A. J. Agius, MC.

  Until five o’clock we worked on the guns then we pushed up to the front again, via Richebourg St Vaast and Windy Corner. Our brigade was to make the attack on the Indian Corps frontage, four Battalions in the front line, with ours in support, and behind them the remainder of the Corps. The Brigade Machine-Guns were divided into two; half went forward with their own Battalions just behind the attacking line, the remainder were to bring supporting fire to bear from the trenches on the left flank south of Pont Logy and this was where I was with my colleague, Johnnie Sutcliffe.

  Lt. C. Tennant.

  On 9 March we were still at Vieille Chapelle, because our brigade had been in reserve. We had received orders on the 8th to be ready for a move and we spent the 9th packing up and sending away all superfluous kit to store at la Couture. We took nothing with us but rations, coats, a spare pair of socks and twenty rounds per man.

  I turned in at 10.30 leaving orders that I was to be woken at one o’clock. Breakfast for the men was punctually at 2 a.m. and the Battalion was ready formed up in the road by 2.55. It was dry, but cold and rather misty. We marched to Richebourg and passed through it to a redoubt in an orchard and the companies were put into trenches and dug-outs and were all settled by about 5.30. An occasional shot from a field battery made the morning sound like any other morning during the last two months.

  The troops were packed so tightly, the narrow country roads were so congested, and their progress was so slow and full of checks that it was dangerously close to dawn before the last of them reached the line. It was no bad thing that waiting time was shortened, for the assembly points were still wet and muddy and trenches that had been put into reasonable order had been soaked yet again by frequent showers of rain and sleet. It was dry now, but it was cold. A light mist carried frost across the battlefield and in the early hours, mercifully for the men who would advance across it, the ground froze hard. Stew that was still more or less hot had been carried up in dixies for the soldiers of the first wave who had been longest in position and, as they chewed and waited, they could hear movement in front, a medley of muffled voices, of chinking and loud twangs, as parties of Royal Engineers cut wide openings in their own barbed wire. In a little while the first wave would be charging through them on their way to the enemy line.

  L/cpl. W. L. Andrews.

  Snow swept down on us as we waited in the flooded trenches near Neuve Chapelle. We grew colder and colder – so cold that I never thought I could be so chilled and still live. It was sheer biting torture. We could hardly drag our feet along when the orders came to move from the trench to the Port Arthur dug-outs for a few hours sleep before the battle.

  At five in the morning my platoon was routed out again to move to a reserve trench. We shambled over ground hardened by frost. It was colder than ever. We called it a trench, but it was more of a breastwork like a stockade strengthened with sandbags of earth, my pals Nicholson and Joe Lee and myself huddled together close to each other with our backs to the stockade. When dawn came we peered across at the German lines, wondering if Jerry knew we were coming.

  Dawn broke on the day of battle at half past six in the morning. At just about that time the 6th Bavarian Reserve Battalion were marching to billets in Tourcoing. They were weary, for they had spent two weeks in the wintry trenches near Ypres. They had marched ten kilometres before transport met them at Menin and it had been a long cold night. Now they were looking forward to hot coffee, a breakfast of bread and sausage and cabbage soup, a wash to get rid of the mud, and two blessed weeks away from the dangers and discomfort of the front. In the courtyard behind the Dewavrin house a cooker had already been set up, and the family wakened to the sound of tramping feet and shouted commands as a half company of Bavarians marched in.

  Lt. C. Tennant.

  The daylight, as it strengthened, showed no sign of anything unusual taking place on our front. But at 7.30 punctually the whole sky was rent by noise – about four hundred British guns all opening fire at once in a concentrated bombardment of two hundred yards of German trenches. We had a battery of – I think – 4.7s only forty yards behind us and the din was terrific. The whole air and the solid earth itself became one quivering jelly. After the first few minutes and after I had gone round and told them to keep their mouths open (instead of trying to look grim with clenched teeth!) the men didn’t seem to worry much about the row which was enough to give anyone a sick headache. Funnily enough, I normally have a fanatical dislike for mere noise of any kind, but I was conscious of nothing except the extraordinary sense of security the infantry man gets from hearing artillery fire from his own side.

  L/cpl. W. L. Andrews.

  The bombardment started like all the furies of hell. The noise almost split our wits. The shells from the field guns were whizzing right over our heads and we got more and more excited. We couldn’t hear ourselves speak. Now we could make out the German trenches. They were like long clouds of smoke and dust, flashing with shell-bursts, and we could see enormous masses of trench material and even bodies thrown up above the smoke clouds. We thought the bombardment was winning the war before our eyes and soon we would be pouring through the gap.

  Capt. W. G. Bagot-Chester, MC, 2/3 Gurkha Rifles, Garhwal Brig., Meerut Div.

  At 7.30 a.m. artillery bombardment commenced, and never since history has there been such a one. I should think for a full half hour our guns, four hundred and eighty of them, fired without the fraction of a second’s break. You couldn’t hear yourself speak for the noise. It was a continual rattle and roar. We lay very low in our trenches, as several of our guns were firing short. Later I picked up two shrapnel bullets and the bottom of a shell fuse. They’d landed right beside me.

  Lt. C. Tennant.

  An aeroplane was observing not very far in front of us and flying fairly low down. A very risky job with that tremendous amount of big ‘iron ration’ flying about. Through all the bombardment and in fact through all the heavy shelling of that day and the next, the larks mounted carolling up to the sky with shells screaming all round them, as though all that devil’s din was only some insane nightmare and as though all that was really true was the coming of spring.

  Capt. A. J. Agius.

  It was hell let loose. The village and the trenches in front of it were blown to bits. The villag
e seemed to melt away before our eyes. The Hun bracketed one of my guns and finally buried it, but no harm done. The infantry assault was launched at 8.05. Nearest us on the right were the 2/39 Garhwals. They went trotting over. Suddenly I saw a fellow stop then spin and spin till he fell. Others pushed on, tried to get through a hedge, eased to their left and got in further along. It was wonderful to watch the two attacks converge and meet.

  Capt. W. G. Bagot-Chester, MC.

  Our first attacking line of two double companies advanced, and our guns increased their range so as not to hit our men. Our first and second lines reached the enemy’s trenches without much loss because the Boche were obviously quite demoralised by the bombardment. I followed close behind with H Company. Last of all Major Dundas brought along G Company. We advanced right through to the front line under very light fire. We all reached our objective, an old trench-line called the Smith-Dorrien Line, with only about 96 casualties in the whole Battalion, and started to dig ourselves in in case of a counter-attack. There was very little firing from the German side and our attack seemed to have taken them completely by surprise. Some snipers left behind in our advance troubled us for some time until they were cleared out by the Leicesters on our right.

  Since the 3rd Londons were in reserve for the early part of the action, Arthur Agius and his machine-gunners were the only men of their Battalion who had taken part in the first attack. His guns had covered it from emplacements in the front line and he had seen it all – the dash across No Man’s Land when the barrage lifted, the charge into the trenches of the salient and the signal flags that appeared in an encouragingly short time to show that the line had been captured. For the Germans had indeed been demoralised by the bombardment and they were overrun before they could recover. On the left, Captain Peake of the Lincolns, a blue flag held high above his head, rushed along behind his bombers while they cleared the trenches. Away on the right, Lieutenant Gordon of the Berkshires, waving a flag of bright pink, was doing the same thing. It was the signal for sappers to rush to block the captured trenches, and the signal for the second wave to pass across them and rush the defences of Neuve Chapelle.