1915: The Death of Innocence

by Lyn Macdonald

  The mistake over the relief of the 2nd Rifle Brigade had caused some irritation at 8th Division Headquarters and it was too late now to put it right. After the failure of the early morning assaults it was highly likely that the Germans would counter-attack in the wake of their devastating bombardment and, if the Germans were to launch it while troops in the front line were changing over, the consequences did not bear thinking about. The orders, when they finally did reach Colonel Stephens, were surprising – if not downright contradictory. The RBs were to stay where they were but, although they were in the forefront, they should consider themselves to be in reserve. However, if the counter-attack developed, then (and only then) Stephens could attack in his turn.

  The Colonel lost no time in sending a reply that was more than a mere acknowledgement. Even before he received the message the heavy German bombardment had tailed away, the shelling had become spasmodic, and he was able to inform the staff that there was no movement in the enemy line and no sign whatever that they were preparing to attack. He reported his casualties and, putting his case as forcibly as brevity and military etiquette allowed, he requested permission to attack the enemy’s guns, near the Layes Bridge. They were only a short way ahead and Colonel Stephens was convinced, as he had been convinced the previous day, that the position could easily be captured and the guns knocked out. The reply, when he eventually received it, was stiff and coldly categorical. He was on no account to make any attack whatever without orders or permission. All the Battalion could do was to wait. They were still waiting at two o’clock when British guns began to thunder on the Bois du Biez. When the bombardment lifted the Gurkhas would go over. Two hundred yards behind their line close to the Layes Brook, the 4th Seaforth braced themselves to dash forward to reinforce the trench as the Gurkhas left it.

  Lt. C. Tennant.

  Just at this time the Germans got the range of our trench exactly and did some damage with high explosive and shrapnel. On seeing No. 1 Company move forward I ran across to get final instructions from Major Cuthbert, who was now in command. He was sitting in a shell hole with the adjutant, Macmillan and Sergeant Ross of the machine-gun team. Just after I had got there two shrapnel bursts clanged close beside us. Poor Macmillan got a terrible wound right across the forehead, and Cuthbert fell forward with the blood streaming from his head. I could see it was only a flesh wound and, as soon as I had put a field dressing on, the bleeding stopped, but Macmillan was in a bad state – so bad that the adjutant thought he was dying. I saw that his lungs and heart were still working, though part of his brain was laid bare, and I was going to put a field dressing on him too, when the adjutant said that as No. 1 Company had started off some time before, I should go on at once. So I got out and, having got hold of Jim, we gave a yell to the platoon and started off hell for leather across the open.

  We took breath under cover of the Smith-Dorrien trench, fifty yards in front, before starting off on the hottest bit of our advance – the hundred and fifty yards of open ground, sloping slightly towards the front, between the Smith-Dorrien trench and the Gurkha trench which we were reinforcing. About twenty yards before we got to it the ground was practically dead and there we flung ourselves down and crawled the rest of the way up to the trench. With my head well down in the mud and my pack in front of it I had a look round to see how the boys were getting on and I only realised when I saw how many of them had been stopped on the way what a hot fire we had come through. A nice cheerful Londoner, Appleton, was blown to pieces by a shell just as he was getting out of the trench, handsome Macdonald, the piper, was killed stone dead by a bullet through the heart, and Speer through the head, and a dozen or more, including my jolly little batman Simpson, were wounded.

  Jim had been close to me during the advance and we settled down together in a cramped but safe corner of the Gurkha trench to take stock of the position and to pull ourselves – literally – together. Both our kilt aprons had been practically torn off and I had lost my watch bracelet. Luckily I saw it lying only a yard or two back, so I rolled out at the back of the parapet and recovered it. Jim had a bullet right through his pack (there was hardly a man in the company who had not got a hole through him somewhere) and, generally speaking, it looked anything but tidy.

  I naturally expected that as soon as we had brought up supports the Gurkhas would go ahead but their colonel, after discussing the matter with Cuthbert, reported to Brigade HQ and was ordered not to advance further until the people on our left came up.

  This time it was Brigadier Jacob himself who made his way, fuming and incredulous, to confront Colonel Stephens in his cellar. What had caused the hold-up? Why had his troops been left out on a limb? Why had the 8th Division not advanced? The Brigadier was quivering with fury and frustration and when Stephens produced the order – the order that forbade him under any circumstances to attack – Jacobs read it, and then re-read it, hardly able to believe the evidence of his eyes. There was no more to be said. The Brigadier returned to his Headquarters and, angry, perplexed, and none the wiser, he called off his attack.

  But the 8th Division had advanced – or, at least, some of them had.

  It was almost a quarter to three when the orders for the attack reached Brigadier General Carter at 24th Brigade headquarters and he knew very well that, in the thirty-three minutes that remained until zero, it was useless even to hope that a runner might reach the troops in the forefront of the line where the Worcesters, the Northants, and the Sherwood Foresters were still lying out – still taking punishment, if they raised so much as a finger, from the fortress strongholds between Mauquissart and Pietre. Already the guns which were meant to destroy them had begun to fire. When they stopped the men must be ready to spring forward and capture the redoubts. They were barely five hundred yards away from their support line, but it was five hundred yards of open ground without a tree, without a bush, with no hollow, no incline, no single feature that would conceal a running man from the fire of the enemy, alert and watching in their line beyond. And yet the attack must go in. The Army Commander himself had insisted on it and such direct orders had to be obeyed.*

  With deep misgivings General Carter issued his instructions. They were addressed to Colonel Woodhouse who waited with the two remaining companies of the 1st Worcesters in a captured German trench on the northern edge of Neuve Chapelle. The Colonel had spent an anxious, sleepless night and his anxiety had not diminished in the course of his restless morning. It had been hard to concentrate on routine duties, hard to hide his concern at the lack of definite news from his two companies in front, harder still to conceal his impatience at the absence of orders. He had spent much of his time in the line scanning the ground beyond and had seen for himself the faint flutters of movement in the distance, had guessed at the futile attempts to get forward, had heard for himself the lethal rap of the machine-guns that laid every attempt to waste. When the orders finally reached him from Brigade Headquarters they were not much to his liking, for General Carter had resorted to desperate measures. The advance was to be made at once. Under cover of the bombardment Woodhouse must push his two reserve companies up to the outpost line, scoop up the survivors of the three Battalions, and by their own impetus carry them forward to the assault.

  It was well past two before the message reached Colonel Woodhouse and the bombardment that was to lead the way had finished five minutes earlier. It was all too clear that it had been intended as the prelude to an attack and the Germans were prepared for it. Shells were falling thick and fast across the open ground and machine-guns blazed out as the three hundred soldiers of the Worcesters began to cross it. Fewer than forty of them made it. They brought little in the way of impetus but they did bring the message that ordered the attack. A dozen copies had been distributed for fear of misunderstanding, and one of the men who carried it had managed to get through. It was passed to Major Winnington and, as second-in-command, it was his responsibility to decide what must be done. It was also his responsibility to pass it to the N
orthants on his left and the Sherwood Foresters on his right. A little later, from his position in the shallow trench in front of Nameless Cottages, he heard the faint sound of whistles, and the fire and the fury as the Sherwood Foresters tried to go over the top. They tried once, twice, three times to make headway, but, at the fourth attempt, they were successful, for they managed to get forward close to the Mauquissart Road and seized two abandoned buildings close to the German line. It cost many men to gain that hundred yards and the line beyond remained impregnable.

  The Worcesters also tried to advance. Two platoons started out on a leap towards a ditch thirty yards from the German trench. Only a handful of them reached it. Lieutenant Conybeare was the only officer who had survived the rush, for Lieutenant Tristram, like so many of the men, had been killed on the way across. All he could do was to gather the shaken survivors of two platoons, to crouch squelching in the mud up to their knees in water, waiting for the rest of the Worcesters to come up. They waited a full half hour but no help came. And then the shells began to fall, coming closer and closer, and they were British shells. At last the guns had got the range of the German line and were exultantly bombarding it. At least it kept the Germans’ heads down and stopped them firing at the few survivors on their long crawl back.

  The Northamptonshires on their left did not advance at all. Colonel Pritchard had lost half his men that morning, his Battalion had been cut to shreds, and the order that three hundred exhausted men should now renew an attack that was clearly futile was the catalyst that reduced him to cold fury. He did not try to dodge the issue and, with an angry disregard for discipline, quite at odds with his long service and training, he took pains to make his feeling perfectly clear in his reply.

  I received a note from the Worcestershires, ‘We have got to advance. Will you give the order?’ I answered ‘No! It is a mere waste of life, impossible to go twenty yards much less two hundred yards.’ The trenches have not been touched by the artillery. If artillery cannot touch them the only way is to advance from the right flank. A frontal attack will not get near them.

  When it finally arrived at Brigade Headquarters and wound its way up to Division, Corps, and Army Headquarters this message caused deep disappointment and put paid to any hopes of success that day. In front of Mauquissart and Nameless Cottages the survivors clung on, digging deep and toiling to improve their perilous positions. They were completely isolated. Far on the right the Dehra Dun Brigade precariously situated with both flanks ‘in the air’ retired after dark to a safer position behind the first of the captured trenches. The British line had advanced by hardly an inch since the morning.

  Lt. C. Tennant.

  At about sunset we received orders to retire to our last night’s position and as soon as the light began to fade I went back to look after the wounded. Thank Heaven I am not a thirsty person and though my water bottle had not been replenished for two days, it was more than half full and I was able to supply the terrible need of some of the sufferers. Poor John Allan (whom I have always liked best of all my NCOs – and he was in my opinion undeniably the best soldier of them all) was hit in three places – the leg, shoulder and stomach, and was in a bad way. Luckily an officer of the Gurkhas had some morphia tabloids with him and he gave them to the men who needed them most. As soon as I had done all that I could for the wounded I hurried back to get stretchers, but it was a desperate task as our casualty list during the afternoon had been very heavy, and moreover our first aid post was a long way back. It had been shelled out of the houses on the Neuve Chapelle Road and had had to go back into safety, so the few stretchers we had took a long, long time on the way. Finally we rigged up stretchers with puttees and greatcoats and rifles, but they were not very satisfactory and it took three hours and a lot of time and trouble to get the wounded carried down. Poor Allan died on the way, to my great sorrow.

  In the early evening Sir Douglas Haig went forward to assess the situation for himself and to find out from personal meetings with his Generals and Brigadiers closer to the battlefront what had gone wrong. The reasons were all too clear. The breakdown in communications, the difficulties of relaying messages to and from the line, could not easily be rectified – but something could be done. The guns could be brought closer to the line – dangerously close if need be – and positioned to make such an all-out effort to destroy the German defences that, with one more push, the infantry would be able to sweep across and carry the day. To make doubly, trebly, sure, to give the gunners ample time and the advantage of good light to register their targets, the attack this time would be scheduled for ten thirty in the morning. The night lay before them, and four full hours of daylight. There was time, and surely time enough, for even such feeble strands of communication as there were to carry instructions to the front, to move the guns forward, to bring up the reserves, and to ensure that every infantryman was prepared to play his part tomorrow morning.

  But the Germans also were preparing for tomorrow. Under the cloak of the darkness the movement of many men was masked by the enemy guns as the six battalions which had been skulking out of sight all day crossed the Aubers Ridge and took their places in the German line. They were well fed and well rested and it was all to the good for there was not much left of the night. Just before dawn they would launch the counter-attack.

  The 4th Seaforths were out of it but they had waited six hours for their relief and it was a long, weary wait. Charles Tennant had formed up his men on open ground behind their trench and it was two in the morning before the HLI arrived to take over.

  Lt. C. Tennant.

  The C.O. told Jim and me to show their officers our line. By this time I was beginning to feel very sleepy – consequently stupid, though not really tired – and I felt as if I was handing over an unsolved Chinese puzzle in pieces instead of a fairly simple position, complicated only by the rather vague whereabouts of the shattered remnants of the Garhwalis and the 9th Gurkhas in front. Why we should have been ordered to hand over the old line to the HLI instead of putting them into the front trench with the Gurkhas I’m still at a loss to understand, but the whole strategy (or want of it) throughout the action was utterly incomprehensible to the lay mind. As a result on the following morning the Gurkhas (who for some unknown reason were not relieved that night) were driven in by a German counter-attack and the HLI lost heavily in men and officers recovering the position we could have put them into with no difficulty on the evening before. Such is war – at least under anyone but a Napoleon!

  About 2.45 a.m. we roused the men who were sleeping like logs on the bare ground and marched back to la Couture – an uncomfortable march over smashed-up roads dodging shells and being chased by shrapnel. One burst on the road just before we passed and left six or seven wounded and moaning Gurkhas in its train: another passed over the rear of the column just clear of No. 3 Company. It was five o’clock by the time we reached la Couture and the men were pretty well done up but the transport had got hot tea and rations ready for them which cheered them up and then they turned in for a short hour’s rest. I made some Oxo in my mess tin and then lay down on some straw and had a glorious sound sleep for twenty-five minutes.

  There were fewer of the Seaforths now as they marched away from the line and as they re-formed on the road it was all too clear that they had left many men behind them. As they closed up the thinned ranks and continued on the journey back to blessed rest and billets, the sound of the battle, carried west on the wind, followed them along the road. It had been raging for hours past.

  The Germans attacked through the morning mist in the half-light of false dawn.

  Capt. A. J. Agius, MC.

  We’d been building up the parapet and, just before dawn, we got back into the trench and stood to. At this moment the Hun attacked. It was still dark but round the horizon it was growing light so that the enemy’s legs were clearly defined. It was an extraordinary sight to see this mass of legs coming forward. The mist was lying just above the ground, and at first, yo
u couldn’t see their bodies. In our immediate front and half-right, they’d been able to get up through their trenches to within forty or fifty yards of us before they delivered their assault. Sutcliffe was with my left gun firing to the right, I was with the right gun firing to the left. We aimed low and just sat down to it. The guns fired beautifully. The Germans came on in dense lines about eight to ten yards between each line. We absolutely caught them in the dim light, in enfilade.

  L/cpl E. Hall.

  I was in the front line attending to wounded men who needed attention, and so I had a good view of the Germans as they were advancing. They came over in mass formation. Our reinforcements had come up after dark and they’d brought several machine-guns, so we were prepared to give the Germans a fight to the finish. There was thick wire in front of our position and our officers knew that the Germans would never be able to break through it under a hail of lead, so they gave strict orders that no one was to fire until the Germans were up to the entanglements. The idea was that at such short range the slaughter would be much greater, and fewer Germans would have a chance of getting back to their own lines when we forced them to retreat.