1915: The Death of Innocence

by Lyn Macdonald

  But the Commander-in-Chief had kept his promise to General Foch, although at a fearful price. No ground was captured which could not have been occupied if the fresh troops had simply walked forward under cover of darkness and now those badly needed troops who might have served to strengthen the line had themselves been decimated. They had lost most of their officers – including three Battalion Commanders – and more than half the men. It was only some consolation that matters might have been worse for, except at Lizerne, and apart from isolated bombing raids where the out flanked angle of the weak Canadian line turned to join the new extended front, the Germans had not followed up their success of the previous evening with a full-scale assault. But no one had any doubt that sooner rather than later they would, and every man would be needed to meet the attack when it came.

  It was Friday night, 23 April. St George was the patron saint of the Northumberland Fusiliers and, as they marched towards Ypres, there was not a man of the 7th Battalion who was not aware that today was St George’s Day. It was exactly seventy-two hours since the 50th Northumbrian Territorial Division had landed in France and its 149th Brigade had spent one night in troop trains chugging slowly north, and another in billets around Mount Kemmel. Now they were going into battle, and if any such thoughts as iambs to the slaughter’ occurred to the mind of their Divisional Commander he kept them to himself.

  L/cpl. J. Dorgan, 7th Bn., Northumberland Fusiliers, 50 Div. (TF).

  We arrived at the outskirts of Ypres and marched through the square, the market place of Ypres. Shells were dropping on the cobbled stones and some of the lighter shells and the shrapnel were spreading right across the square and the Cloth Hall and the Cathedral were on fire. We had our first casualty in going through the square, Tommy Rachael, who was a postman in Ashington. He was marching behind me and he shouted out, he said, ‘I’m wounded.’ Nobody would believe him and then somebody said, There’s blood coming down his legs,’ and another fellow said, ‘Help him, help him somebody. He’s not going to drop out. We’re the Northumberland Fusiliers!’ That was the spirit we had.

  As we reached the outskirts we didn’t know where we were going, neither officers nor men. After having an hour or two’s sleep just outside of Ypres we marched on in the early hours of 24 April under heavy shell-fire.

  Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien had spent an anxious dispiriting evening, counting the cost of the counter-attack and poring over maps, trying as a soldier to read the soldier’s mind of his opposite number at German Headquarters. In the position of the German Commander, what would he do? It was true that there had been local skirmishes but, from the German point of view, they had demonstrated very little other than their desire to improve their position. The absence of a full-scale infantry assault – which could hardly have been withstood – was a blessing, but the strange lack of movement was ominous. More than twenty-four hours had passed since the Germans had broken the allied line, and still their infantry hesitated. Why? Something was bound to happen. Somewhere the blow would fall. But where?

  Knowing, as the Germans must, that the allied line had been broken, guessing, as they surely would, that the scanty reserves had been used up to strengthen the new northern flank, knowing full well the extent of the casualties they had inflicted, Smith-Dorrien reasoned that a German General’s inclination might be to attack the southern face of the salient, to break through and take the northern flank from the rear or, by forcing the British to fight back-to-back on two flanks, to gradually squeeze them in and snuff them out. He was dismally aware that it was only one of several imponderable possibilities but it could not be discounted, and he made haste to send a signal to the troops in the thin denuded lines on the east and south of the salient to be vigilant and alert to the likelihood of attack.

  But the line on the eastern face of the salient was more vulnerable than the line facing south, and no one knew better than Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien just how inadequate it was. The British Army had only begun to take over this sector from the French in the early part of April, the defences were woeful and even after a lot of hard work they were not much improved. The sector held by the 27th and 28th Divisions ran from the Menin Road, a mile in front of the village of Gheluvelt, lost to the Germans in the autumn of 1914, crept out to enclose Polygon Wood, swung north past Broodseinde east of Zonnebeke, and jutted east again across a slope to enclose the farms the French called Seine and Marne. Here for a few hundred yards the line ran very close to the Germans, a matter of yards away, and from this point the salient began to tail down on its slow curve to the north-west.*

  Beyond the tiny copse they called Berlin Wood the Canadians took over the line that ran across the Ostnieuwkerke road half a mile north of the hamlet of Gravenstafel and on, sloping gently above the Gravenstafel Ridge, to the Poelcapelle Road half a mile in front of that village. It was here that the Canadians had joined hands with the French and it was just beyond the Poelcapelle Road that the French line had been forced in by the gas attack. The Canadians had been in the new line for just over a week and the defences they inherited from the French were lamentable. The front-line trenches were constructed of thin sandbagged parapets, far from bullet-proof, and with no sheltering parados to prevent shots striking from the rear. They were mere outposts grouped together at intervals with nothing to link them but a few shallow ditches, less than three feet deep, running back here and there to flimsy support positions behind. A few tumbledown dug-outs of wood and tarpaulin that were good enough to provide shelter from the rain would give much the same protection as umbrellas against bombardment.

  A little way behind the front, on the western edge of the Gravenstafel Ridge, some unfinished trenches straggled across ground that was still littered with the unburied bodies of French and German soldiers killed six months ago in the First Battle of Ypres. The army referred to this sector as ‘Locality C’. Canadian working parties, given the distasteful task of scattering chloride of lime in an effort to smother the stench of corruption, referred to it in less printable terms.

  But the one bright spot in this pathetically weak front was the deep belt of barbed wire entanglements that protected it and the French had depended on this, on machine-gun posts behind it, and on their excellent quick-firing .75 guns to defend it. And they had constructed another line, far stronger than the first. It was the line of last resort and it ran not far in front of Ypres, from Hill 60 to the Menin Road, across a gradual slope to pass north of Potijze, to encircle Wieltje and cross the low ridge between Mouse Trap Farm and Kitchener’s Wood. It was so far back that the British, dearly wishing when they took over their stretch of it that their allies had constructed a line half as strong two miles ahead, little thinking that they would ever need to make use of it as a front, named it ‘the GHQ line’. Now, pushing against the newly formed and fragile defensive flank, the Germans were ranged against its northern extremity.

  The Germans had made the most of the twenty-four hours’ breathing space, and they were thinking on their feet, because the gas attack had been a tactical experiment and had not figured in their overall strategy as the preliminary to a full-scale planned campaign. But the opportunity presented by such remarkable success was too tantalising to resist. Their misfortune was that no reserves had been on hand to exploit it to the full. Even now there were few reserves to call on for their own casualties had not been small and the counter-attacks had taken them by surprise and even demoralised their troops.*

  The best that could be done in the short term was to depend on heavy artillery fire to soften the British front and create havoc in Ypres, to fight on at Steenstraat and Lizerne, and to warn the tired troops facing the British defensive flank to dig in and stand fast. Even though these troops were in the best position to make a successful assault they were in no fit state to undertake it. But there was still the gas, and with gas they could repeat their success. On 23 April, all during the hours of daylight, through the dusk and on into the dark, while their big guns fired incessantly, the Germans
moved up field guns and trench mortars to support their captured front and dug in fresh gas cylinders in front of the Canadians in their unbroken original line still facing them to the east. This time the Germans were determined to make no mistake and to give themselves ample time to press home their advantage.

  The wind was steady and blowing in the right direction. Long before dawn they began to bombard the Canadians’ vulnerable line. An hour later the gas cylinders were opened and the gas was released across the centre of their front. It was four o’clock in the morning and the moon behind the flashes of the guns had barely begun to wane in the night sky when the first fumes drifted across. Drifting ghostly and lurid in the dim light in a bank fifteen feet high, it rolled across the wire and engulfed the Canadians in the makeshift trenches inherited from the French. They had nothing to protect them from the gas – only handkerchiefs, towels, even cotton bandoliers, hastily clapped across mouth and nose, and soon there was no time even for that, for the enemy was advancing in the wake of the fumes and the men who had not immediately collapsed had to mount the parapets to meet them. Only where the gas was thickest in front of part of Jim Keddie’s 48th Highlanders did the line give way after a bitter fight.

  L/cpl. J. D. Keddie.

  Just before 4 a.m. on the 24th we managed to get a mouthful of rum each. We had no sooner got it down than the enemy started an attack, beginning with gas. They then began to shell the reserve trenches, and they did it to some tune. You could hardly get breath for the concussion! They also had the range, and the loss of life was awful, and oh, the horrors, the sights were dreadful. One poor beggar came along crying for someone to tie up his arm. Nobody seemed to care for the job, so I got hold of him and did my best. The arm was completely off up to the elbow – a fearful sight. While I was attending to him, I got a flesh wound on the head, and, Lord, did it bleed! But it wasn’t sore. I’d fired about a hundred and fifty rounds by this time, and I’d sent two men to get more ammunition. I saw them coming back and they only had about thirty yards to go when one of them was shot right through the head. Well, I knew the other couldn’t carry it himself, so I crawled out to give him a lift, and on my way I got it through the sole of my right foot. It wasn’t very painful at the time. We got the box of ammunition to the trench somehow, then I looked for the quickest way to a First Aid Station and beat it as quick as I could. I could walk on the foot fairly well, and in fact I could sometimes do a little trot. But when I got there I found that an order had been given to retire, so they could do nothing for me.

  The previous day when they had been brought up towards the line, the raw inexperienced troops of the 50th Northumbrian Division had only been intended to act as reserves. Now that every man of the reserves was needed, raw or not, they were pushed up into the salient and ordered to press on through the shelling to the front line.

  L/cpl. J. Dorgan.

  We suffered many casualties on the road up, many, many casualties. I remember a shell dropping when we were lying behind a hedge, and two men had both their legs taken off. One lived a few minutes, the other lived about half an hour. One was called Jackie Oliver and the other was Bob Young. Bob Young was the first to go. When he was hit he said, ‘Will you take my wife’s photograph out of my pocket?’ He was sensible to the last and jokingly, as I thought, he kept saying to me, he says, Tut my legs straight.’ Well, he’d no legs to put straight, and I just made a movement, touched the lower part of his body. What could I do? He died with his wife’s photograph in his hand.

  Jackie Oliver had a brother in our Battalion and I shouted to our fellows who had to leave me with these two wounded men, Tell Weedy Oliver his brother’s wounded.’ He never recovered consciousness but eventually, some time later, Weedy Oliver came back and was with his brother when he died. No doctors available. No first aid available. I don’t know where they were, because our Battalion was still advancing towards the front line. I just had to leave them. I don’t know where they were buried. I never saw them or heard of them again. I had to go as fast as I could to catch up with our Battalion.

  We went on and on and, as we went up the Canadians and the Highlanders were retreating from the front line because they had been under gas. There was no gas-masks, nothing for gas casualties, and all they had on was their bandage out of their first aid kit which every soldier carried in a pocket in his tunic, and they had these bandages on their eyes and there they went staggering back. Gas never affected me and there was fellows dropping behind all the time – I must have been one of the lucky ones. We came to the reserve trenches, but we didn’t recognise them as trenches, nobody in them, they were all retired. So we just jumped over, but we never reached the front line. The gas was too dense and then we had to retire. We never reached St Julien. I think we only got as far as St Jean but, wherever it was, we had to retire from there. We didn’t come out of the line for four days.

  The Canadians had finally ‘budged’ – but only some of them, only in the last resort, and only because the odds against them were not humanly possible to overcome. But, on either side of the gap in the line they had left, others like Jim Keddie were fighting on, manning the parapets with rifles, blazing machine-gun fire to break up the German ranks as they closed in ahead of them, swinging round to pour crossfire on the enemy soldiers as they attempted to advance to ‘Locality C’. As soon as the situation was known in the scattered batteries every available gun joined in the fight to beat them off. The Germans took heavy punishment, but they had twenty-four Battalions against the Canadians’ eight to envelop the angle of the line that ran in front of Gravenstafel and swung back in front of St Julien to Kitchener’s Wood, with a dangerous gap in the eastern face where the Royal Highlanders of Canada had been forced to retire and part of the 3rd Battalion had been overrun in the first onslaught.

  L/cpl. J. W. Finnimore, 3rd Bn., 1st Canadian Brig., 1st Canadian Div.

  I’d only been four years in Canada when the war started. Before that I was an apprentice at Woolwich Arsenal, but times were slack and I knew perfectly well that as soon as my time was out and I reached twenty-one I would be sacked. It didn’t seem worth waiting around for that, so I emigrated to Canada in 1910. Still, I considered myself to be a Canadian, though proud of my British descent, and I considered it my duty to join up. I was glad to do it.

  That day, 24 April, was the worst day of my life. It started with a really violent bombardment and then – you could only call it a cloud of death when the gas came over, and this time it was directed straight at us. People were suffocating, but some were worse affected than others and the word was passed down that we were to hold on at all costs. We did our best, but first I was wounded in the leg and then, when the Germans were advancing and we got the order to retire, I couldn’t move – naturally. All I can remember much later is a German soldier standing over me pointing his rifle and bayonet at my chest. It was my worst moment of the whole war because, being wounded in the leg, I couldn’t get up and I couldn’t walk. I thought he was going to let me have it. But he didn’t. We were near a deserted farmyard and he handed his rifle to a comrade and went off into this farm and came back a few minutes later with a wheelbarrow. He put me in it and then he pushed me all the way through to their rear dressing station – and it must have been a good mile behind their lines. The German doctors and orderlies were up to their eyes with their own casualties. They couldn’t do a lot for us. We wounded prisoners were laid down on some straw in a church hall and there we lay from Saturday to Monday. Then they put us in box-cars and took us to Paderborn in Westphalia, a journey of two or three days. They gave us a meal, and I remember thinking it was the first hot food I’d had for a week.

  But the Canadians were holding the Germans at one dangerous point they had even counter-attacked, but they could not hold out indefinitely. Nor could the guns. And if the troops were forced to retire, the guns would be in danger.

  Lt. Col. P. Burney, 9th Heavy Brig., RGA.

  I was commanding the 9th Brigade of Heavy
Artillery, consisting of the 71st Heavy Battery of four 4.7-inch guns and the 121st Battery, also 4.7-inch guns. The 121st Battery was in action at Wittepoert Farm, firing in a southerly direction. It was in the forenoon that I got a message by telephone to say that masses of Germans were advancing up the Poelcapelle to St Julien road. I kept Owen’s gun teams near his farm billet, to the rear and towards the railway, and had arranged with him for his line of retreat in case of emergency. Just about 11 a.m. my adjutant, Captain Pask, came up to say that numbers of Canadians were coming back from Zonnebeke and that they were not wounded, but he could not get them to turn back, although he had threatened to shoot them! I went down and in the hall of my billet I found about half a dozen Canadians looking very pale, having choking fits and asking for water. Many others were in the road outside, and none could explain what had happened to them.

  I went back to my telephone room and called up Owen, told him the situation, and I asked him to turn his guns end for end (no easy job with a 4.7-inch deep in mud), and get on top of his billet at the farm, where he would probably get a view of the Poelcapelle to St Julien road, and keep up a heavy shrapnel fire on the advancing Germans. As soon as he had used up all his shrapnel he was to report to me on the telephone, or if that was cut, to use his own discretion about retiring along our prearranged route.