1915: The Death of Innocence

by Lyn Macdonald

  Beyond the Layes Bridge, in front of the Bois du Biez there were no redoubts, no defences. The Indian Corps had advanced with ease and the Gurkhas were lining the road along the near edge of the wood, cheerfully digging in by the light of a burning cottage on the edge of the wood. As they did so the first of the German reserves, under cover of darkness, were starting to file into the wood from the opposite side. They sent scouts ahead of them, and one of them had the misfortune to run into a Gurkha patrol. They captured him with glee, and sent him back to be interrogated. The information was disquieting, for the prisoner declared (or so the interpreter understood) that two German regiments were in the Bois du Biez.*

  It was past seven o’clock when this information reached Brigadier General Jacob, and it faced him with a dilemma. His troops were on the right-hand extremity of the battle, his left had been held up by long-range fire from the Layes Bridge and, since there was no sign of the 2nd Rifle Brigade advancing to assist them, both his flanks were ‘in the air’. His men at the Bois du Biez were well ahead of their comrades on either side and with what seemed to be a significant force of Germans immediately in front of them. General Jacob was forced to a hard decision. His Brigade had waited all day to advance but, for safety’s sake, he had no choice but to order them back again. Shortly after nine o’clock, as the German reserves began to consolidate their position in the wood, the Gurkhas moved back across the Layes and began to dig in thirty yards behind it.

  The 4th Seaforths, who had at last been able to move forward, were obliged reluctantly to move back in their wake.

  Lt. C. Tennant.

  We moved forward to the River Layes – a ditch about three or four feet deep and just too wide to jump in the dark. Some wading, some jumping (or trying to!) and some crossing by a small planked bridge we got across and advanced another hundred and fifty yards towards the Bois du Biez, when we received orders to stand fast and allow the Gurkhas who were in front of us to retire through us. While this was going on we lay down flat and watched a large house burning brilliantly a hundred yards away on our right front. To the left and right of us firing was still going on and a great many German flares were going up. We could see by their position that the attack on our flanks had not got nearly so far forward as where we were. Our position was so precarious that we were sent orders to retire after the Gurkhas and to dig in fifty yards behind the old Smith-Dorrien trench.

  My own feeling is that if we and the 9th Gurkhas had been allowed to go on and take the risk of being cut off we would have carried the wood. The shelling of the morning had so demoralised the Germans that I am fairly confident that a determined advance at the Bois du Biez, which would have threatened the German rear on the right and the left, would have demoralised them even more and made it possible to advance along the whole front. As it was we reached the new position about 9 p.m. We sent a party back for rations which only arrived at 2 a.m. After getting the men to work I borrowed an entrenching tool and dug a scrape, where I lay down and slept for half an hour at a time from 3 a.m. until 5 a.m.

  During the hours of darkness long-delayed messages and orders began to trickle through bottlenecks in the chain of communication and finally reached Battalions in the line. One order had been a long time on the way. It had gone out from Sir Douglas Haig’s Head-quarters the previous evening, just too late to inspire the assaulting troops whose morale it was intended to boost. They were already on the move, it would be days before it could be posted up to be read by the rank and file and, by that time, the words rang painfully hollow. Most Battalion Commanders, obliged even so belatedly to make it public, only had the heart to display it in an obscure corner of the orderly room.

  SPECIAL ORDER

  To the 1st Army

  We are about to engage the enemy under very favourable conditions. Until now in the present campaign, the British Army has, by its pluck and determination, gained victories against an enemy greatly superior both in men and guns. Reinforcements have made us stronger than the enemy on our front. Our guns are now both more numerous than the enemy’s are and also larger than any hitherto used by any army in the field. In front of us we have only one German Corps, spread out on a front as large as that occupied by the whole of our Army (the First). We are now about to attack with about 48 Battalions a locality in that front which is held by some three German Battalions. It seems probable also that for the first day of the operations the Germans will not have more than four Battalions available as reinforcements for the counter attack. Quickness of movement is therefore of first importance to enable us to forestall the enemy and thereby gain success without severe loss. At no time in this war has there been a more favourable moment for us, and I feel confident of success. The extent of that success must depend on the rapidity and determination with which we advance…

  (Signed) D. HAIG (General)

  Commanding 1st Army.

  9th March, 1915.

  But the fact was that everyone had spent the day waiting for a move – and waiting for someone else to make it. By midnight, almost all the infantry were back on the line which had been captured in the first rush of the battle fifteen hours before. Sir Douglas Haig’s special order had accurately summed up the situation of the morning but while the troops rested and cat-napped as best they could in the hours of darkness, the Germans were gathering their resources and the situation was changing. The bulk of their reserves were still on the way, but two Battalions which had been reasonably close at hand had moved into position as darkness fell – and there were no cat-naps for them. They were labouring through the night to stiffen their defences, to haul up more guns, to set up machine-guns, to dig a snaking line that would link up the redoubts and create an unbroken front. Every man was working flat out and in front of the Bois du Biez, where there was no stronghold nearer than the Layes Bridge, they took particular pains. Creeping stealthily from the wood across the ground the Gurkhas had given up, the German soldiers began to dig fifty yards in front of it. Long before dawn they were lining the new trench just half-way between the wood and the Layes Brook, thankful for the chance to ease aching muscles as they waited wearily for reinforcements and the chance to get their own back in the morning.

  Chapter 9

  The German Command, with no disruptions of their own communications, had no difficulty in transmitting orders to the front and they were precise and unequivocal. Within three hours of the launch of the battle they had ordered that ‘The 14th Infantry Division will recapture Neuve Chapelle’, and at 10 p.m. that evening more precise instructions arrived:

  Major-General von Ditfurth will carry out the attack on Neuve Chapelle. In case the troops at his disposal are not sufficient for the recapture of our former positions west of the village, the 14th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Brigade is placed at General von Ditfurth’s disposal. This Brigade must be in position in the Bois du Biez at 6 a.m. on the 11th.*

  But they were not in the line by 6 a.m. Before midnight the troops from Lille had all arrived at the nearest railheads, three hours’ strenuous march from the front, but the night had been so dark, there were so many battalions travelling along narrow roads through unfamiliar country that they had been a long time on the way. As they assembled behind the Aubers Ridge dawn was reaching up the eastern sky behind them. Fog lay across the low ground but it might easily disperse, it was almost half-light, and it would clearly be madness to string a large body of troops along the skyline and march them down the ridge in full view of the British lines. General von Ditfurth had no alternative but to postpone his counter-attack and to order the troops to fan out into the villages behind Aubers, to hide from reconnaissance planes and lie low until dusk. Without them, even though the Germans had been able to double their numbers in the line, there were still only four Battalions facing the British troops and it would be twelve clear hours before darkness fell and reinforcements could come to their aid.

  Twelve hours was enough, and more than enough, if all went well, for the British Army to sort
out yesterday’s muddle, to keep up the pressure and thrust forward from the Rubicon of yesterday’s success. If all went well. But the second day of the battle was destined, like the first, to be a day of lost opportunities, of misunderstandings, mounting confusion, and unforeseen fatal delays.

  The attack was due to take place at seven in the morning and at 6.45 the guns would open the bombardment. They had specific orders to destroy the strongpoints which had caused the infantry to founder in yesterday’s advance, but it was easier said than done. Peering into the foggy morning from their old observation posts, luckless artillery officers found it almost impossible to pinpoint targets. Firing blind and mostly by guesswork, they were horribly aware of the danger that they might be firing on their own troops – the ragged lines of survivors lying somewhere in front of the redoubts that had brought them to a standstill when they had first advanced. No one knew precisely where they were. And no one had the shadow of an inkling that a new defensive line was concealed in the mist beyond. When the guns lifted and lengthened range to cover the infantry’s advance the redoubts had hardly been touched – and the new trench that ran the length of the battle front had not been touched at all. At seven o’clock when the troops tried to advance they ran into an inferno. The air tingled with bullets streaming from machine-guns and the very earth seemed to explode beneath their feet as the German guns answered the bombardment with a bombardment of their own. It was fierce and it was accurate and the shells pounded the front for three hours. By the time it tailed away some thousands of British soldiers had been killed, Neuve Chapelle was a heap of smoking ruins, every line and wire had been severed in a dozen places and communication, even the sketchiest, was non-existent. The signallers had done their best, frantically repairing wires that were ruptured in another place even as they were mended, but the odds were against them.

  Bdr. W. Kemp.

  We signallers were still in the straw stack. We’d been there all night trying to keep the lines open to the battery. I’d been issued with wire-cutters – proper wire-cutters, the same as they used for barbed wire. They weighed about one and a half pounds, and I was supposed to use these on the D-3 telephone wire! I soon lost them. We had one pair of pliers for all of us. I don’t really know at this stage how we did manage to cut and mend the phone wire. I do know that the telephone we had was a C-Mk-11 magneto and you had to ring it by hand, but the batteries were six large cells in a wooden box. They had to be excited by adding water and leaving them for a few hours before they were any use. Well, some of them were ready to use when the battle started, but next morning when all hell was let loose it didn’t matter anyway.

  The fog was lifting from the battlefield but it still hung thick around Brigade and Divisional Headquarters where the anxious staff were groping for vital information. Messengers were slow in coming and, when they did, the news they brought was mostly out-of-date and often contradictory or untrue. It was not the fault of the troops. The Grenadier Guards, starting off close to the Moated Grange, were brought to a halt at a stream not three hundred yards ahead, and the runner who struggled back through the bombardment reported in all good faith that they had been held up at the Layes Brook. It was the first good news General Capper had received, for here, on the left, the Layes ran well behind the German line and he joyfully ordered up the guns to bombard beyond it to clear the way for the Grenadiers to advance.

  The Layes Brook (described ambitiously on local maps as a river) was an artificial drainage ditch, inexpertly dug by local farmers, and it straggled across the fields in front of the Bois du Biez and the Aubers Ridge to join a tributary of the River Lys. On the staff officers’ maps it stood out as an unmistakable feature which could safely be described as an objective on terrain that was singularly short of landmarks, but to a man on the ground itself the Layes could not easily be distinguished from a hundred other ditches that trickled in all directions across the dead and battered marsh. Few of them were narrow enough to leap, even without the weight of extra ammunition and equipment, and they were filled to the brim with filthy brackish water. It was deep enough to lap the chins of all but the tallest guardsmen as they floundered through. Now, soaked and shivering, they were digging in on the other side, and, even if most rifles were clogged with mud, trying to reply to the fire that pinned them down. Waiting for supports. Waiting for the guns. Waiting to get forward.

  But the deep ditch they had forded was not the Layes Brook, and the guardsmen had advanced only half as far as the unfortunate Worcesters the evening before. When the bombardment began the shells fell far ahead of their position, far behind the strongholds that faced them, and far, far behind the enemy line. And there they stopped when the bombardment lifted. There was nothing else they could do.

  The Meerut Division was stuck in front of the Bois du Biez. The opening bombardment had done them no good at all, for Corps Headquarters, knowing nothing of the new trench that now lay between them and the wood, had instructed the guns to bombard the edge of the wood and the wood itself, well behind the enemy and the enemy, safely entrenched on ground that had been occupied and given up without a fight, were unharmed.

  Lt. C. Tennant.

  The repellent facts are that the Germans (who were now well entrenched on this side of the Bois du Biez) at once opened a hot rifle and machine-gun fire both on the Gurkhas in the front trench and ourselves behind it. Our first orders were to attack again at 7.15, but owing to the want of support on our left, the colonel of the 9th Gurkhas came back to report to our Battalion Headquarters that he found it impossible to get forward with the heavy rifle and machine-gun fire, and he was ordered to stand fast. We had several casualties and our own colonel was wounded in the thigh at 7.30. One of the stretcher-bearers going to fetch him was shot stone dead through the head. His body fell back into my scrape in the ground. I’d left it just a moment before and moved to a neighbouring shell-hole where I’d started to dig a new shelter. Minchin very pluckily at once came out of his scrape and took the stretcher-bearer’s place and brought the C. O. in, but the firing was so heavy that we couldn’t send him back to the field ambulance post for some time. When he did go, he was unlucky enough to be hit again in almost exactly the same place high up in the thigh.

  All morning the batteries kept up a very heavy fire against the Bois du Biez, and the Germans replied with high explosive, shrapnel and Jack Johnsons. A great many heavy shells were being fired with great effect into Neuve Chapelle. There was nothing we could do and, in spite of all the row, I managed to sleep very soundly for a good forty-five minutes in my shelter.

  It was the first of the unfortunate misconceptions which, before the end of the day, were to cause the Commander of the Meerut Division to tear his hair and reduce the staff of the Dehra Dun Brigade first to bafflement and then to a state of despair. For Brigadier General Jacobs’s instructions, passed down to him from Indian Corps Headquarters, had been perfectly clear. From their forward position the leading Battalions of the Dehra Dun Brigade were to attack towards the Bois du Biez as soon as the 8th Division on their left arrived alongside them. But the Battalion of the 8th Division which stood immediately on their left, although slightly behind them, was the 2nd Rifle Brigade. The riflemen were still holding the trench on the outskirts of Neuve Chapelle and Colonel Stephens was not the only one who was fed up, because the Battalion, or what was left of it, was due to be relieved and to move back into support with the remainder of the 25th Brigade. The relief had duly taken place but, by some oversight, no one had appeared to take over from Stephens’s battalion. At eight o’clock, forty-five minutes after the Dehra Dun Brigade had tried vainly to advance, Major Walker, its Brigade Major, braved the storm of shelling to go personally to Colonel Stephens to demand the reason for the delay. He found him in the cellar of a tumbledown house behind the RB’s trench. Its brick walls had been white-washed by the Germans and ‘Gott Strafe England’ had been scrawled in many places and signed with the initials of the bored German soldiers who had once shel
tered there. Half a dozen runners, sunken-eyed with fatigue, slumped near the cellar stairs, each awaiting the order that would send him out to take his chance in the inferno, dodging to the line or to the rear with the next urgent message. Inside, under the anxious eye of the Colonel, signallers hunched over their instruments were ringing and buzzing repeatedly without much hope of making contact. They worked by the light of candles that flickered and dimmed with close explosions. The circumstances were not conducive to pleasantries or the exchange of the usual courtesies; although a mug of lukewarm tea was offered it was brusquely refused and, from time to time, the two officers had to raise their voices to be heard above the thunderous explosions that were rocking Neuve Chapelle. Perhaps it relieved their feelings of frustration, for they were both equally in the dark. Colonel Stephens was obliged to confess that he had received no orders from IV Corps, from Division or from Brigade, that contained any mention of an advance. Quite the contrary. His last instructions had been to stand fast and consolidate and, in the absence of any others, he could only obey.

  Major Walker returned in bewilderment to report to his Brigadier and it was some hours before his unpalatable news travelled up the chain of command and arrived at Indian Corps headquarters where it baffled Sir James Willcocks, for in a subsequent conversation with IV Corps he was assured by the Corps Commander that the 8th Division had advanced and, without the support of the Meerut Division on their right, had failed to get forward. It was a sad mix-up, they agreed, but it was vital to retrieve the situation and to try again. A fresh attack was arranged for 2.15 – but only the timing was changed and the new orders were precisely the same as the old ones. In the Indian Corps the Meerut Division was instructed, as before, to advance to the Bois du Biez as soon as the 8th Division was seen to be advancing alongside, and IV Corps had assured them in all good faith that the 8th Division would advance. No one passed on the vital information – and at that stage perhaps no one at IV Corps Headquarters knew – that the Battalion of the 8th Division which happened to be standing immediately beside the Meerut Division had been ordered to stay where it was.