B00D2VJZ4G EBOK

by Jon E. Lewis

  Soon after this, we were wire-cutting opposite Beaumont-Hamel. The trench conditions here in late October were appalling. Long communication trenches, full of thick sticky mud often waist deep and constantly shelled, led up to a similar front line. Good dug-outs were few, and the heavy rain made things about as bad as they could be. During the day we fired at the German wire and in the evenings returned to our billets in the smashed-up village of Mailly-Maillet. A 9-2 howitzer was in our back garden, and the whole dilapidated house shook to its foundations every time it fired. In spite of this, and the shelling of the village, we led a seemingly care-free life, spending most of the night playing poker and vingt-et-un, drinking enormous quantities of whisky, cursing the War, and wondering if we should ever go on leave.

  Beaumont-Hamel was taken on November 13th, and, as we had nothing to do, we volunteered to take stretcher-bearing parties over to the captured trenches. We crossed the old No Man’s Land in daylight, and, in spite of our being unarmed and carrying stretchers, were heavily fired on, and lost several men. It grew wetter and more misty, and just as we reached the newly won trenches, a German counter-attack started. We cumbered the trench rather uselessly until some of us were able to get hold of rifles from the killed and join in repelling the attack. There was little to be seen in the inferno of bursting shells ahead, though a few shadows in the mist were undoubtedly the advancing Boches. They never came any nearer, and gradually it became apparent that they had been kept off. Even so it was dusk before we could get away with our burdens, the number of whom had been vastly increased during the day. During the attack shells had come into the trench every minute, and it was completely blocked with dead and wounded. We removed as many as possible during the night, having more casualties ourselves on the way back from a raking machine-gun fire.

  It was not till four days before Christmas that we came out of the line definitely for a real rest, the first since early June. Six months of action! The crowning moment came when my turn for leave arrived at last. It was on the first day of the New Year, 1917. There are some things about the War one can never tell, and this is one. It is enough to say that it was a very different young officer who came home from the one who had gone out eleven months before. Mentally, physically, morally, I was changed, and I felt it myself very strongly.

  Further periods of action followed in various places, but my diary entries for this time record little beyond the cold, frosty weather, an occasional casualty, a note of a trip to Amiens. For the rest, there was nothing but the deadly monotony of trench warfare. None of us could understand why – just as the year before – the spring and early summer came and went without any resumption of the offensive. Not that we worried. We were one and all only too pleased to be in a quiet place, with nothing beyond a raid or two now and then to disturb us.

  In July, however, there was a recrudescence of activity. We took over from the Belgians at Nieuport, but the projected attack was prevented by the German capture of our jumping-off ground beyond the Yser Canal. It was here that we first met the new ‘mustard’ gas. Our division suffered heavily; men dropped in the streets, on the roads, in billets, often many hours afterwards. New respirators had to be served out.

  Meanwhile the Third Battle of Ypres was continuing. We came into the Salient in the autumn, and, there being no scope for trench mortars, we were scattered among field batteries, on ammunition dumps, and other jobs mostly as inglorious as they were necessary. Not that I personally had any longer any illusions about glory. In common with most others, I considered going up the line little more than a horrible necessity, the odd periods of rest in uncomfortable cold tents or huts surrounded by seas of mud a heavenly respite almost too good to be true.

  I doubt if anyone who has not experienced it can really have any idea of what the Salient was like during those ‘victories’ of 1917. The bombardments of the Somme the year before were nothing to those round Ypres. Batteries jostled each other in the shell-marked waste of mud, barking and crashing night and day. There were no trees, no houses, no countryside, no shelter, no sun. Wet, grey skies hung over the blasted land, and in the mind a gloomy depression grew and spread. Trenches had disappeared. ‘Pill-boxes’ and shell holes took their place. We never went up the line with a working party with any real expectation of returning, and there was no longer any sustaining feeling that all this slaughter was leading us to anything. No one could see any purpose in it.

  I remember watching a company of infantry marching up the greasy duckboard track one evening. A young subaltern with them recognized me. We had been in the same sector once south of Arras.

  ‘Our turn now,’ he said, without a smile. ‘Bye-bye.’

  They marched on, bowed, hopeless.

  I had all sorts of escapes; in fact they were so frequent that I got into a strange frame of mind, and became careless. It seemed as if I couldn’t bother to try and avoid unnecessary danger. The only matters of importance were whether the rations would come up promptly and if the bottle of whisky I had ordered would be there. It was for me the worst part of the War. Even now it looms like a gigantic nightmare in the back of my mind.

  Rest came again, and my third leave. I did not enjoy it. I was bitterly unwilling to go back. How I envied those who had never gone out or had never joined the Army!

  In February 1918 we were in the Salient again, this time with new 6-inch mortars. Attacks and raids were fairly frequent, but our work was mechanical and had no interest for any of us. We hated our turns in the trenches, and thought only of when we should come out. Most of my friends had left, some for the Flying Corps, the majority for ever. Gas, death, and wounds had accounted for them. New officers and men came out, the proceeds of conscription, but, whatever their quality, they were not like the old lot. How could they be? I began to feel like one who had outlived his time, and grew more and more depressed, I certainly had no hope of surviving much longer. The odds were heavily against it.

  After the big attack on the Somme in March, we evacuated the Salient. It presented a strange empty and quiet appearance as we marched out. I think many of us could have sat down on the duckboards and wept that April day. All the fruits of the appalling struggle of the year before were given up in a night. We were sent to field batteries again, and there was some excitement in the new open fighting. We would trot calmly into action in full view of the Boches as steadily as on parade. But we were never left long in peace, and had to endure a great deal of heavy shelling and gas bombardment.

  At last, one early morning, at the beginning of the last German attack south of Ypres (as I learned later), in the middle of an S.O.S. a perfect deluge of 4-2s rained on the unsheltered battery. I was one of the first to be hit, and, despite the pain of the wound and the terror that I should bleed to death before I was attended to, I kept on repeating to myself, ‘It’s over now. It’s over now.’

  And so it was, for me at any rate. When I came out of hospital many months later the Armistice had been signed. I was just twenty-one years of age, but I was an old man – cynical, irreligious, bitter, disillusioned. I have been trying to grow young ever since.

  George F. Wear enlisted in the R.A.M.C. on August 9th, 1914; went to France with the 7th, Clearing Hospital at the end of October, and returned to take up a commission in the R.F.A. in July 1915. In February 1916 he returned to France, joining the 49th Division. He served with them till April 1918, when he was wounded near Kemmel, and he was afterwards in hospital in London and Newcastle till August 1919. The chief engagements he took part in were the Somme, 1916; Ypres, 1917; and Ypres 1918.

  A WIRELESS OPERATOR

  B. Neyland

  At the age of eighteen I crossed to France early in 1917, a sapper in the Royal Engineers Wireless Section. We operators had only a vague idea of our likely duties, for the Wireless Section was only then becoming of use in the trenches.

  I was sent via St. Pol to Arras, and with a fellow-operator was led into the trenches at Roclincourt. There I first experienced the bu
rsting of a shell near me, and I laughed at the frightened manner in which our guide flung himself down when the shell fell about thirty yards away. It was not long before I took to flinging myself down on such occasions. When our guide led me into a trench filled waist deep with muddy water, I could not believe he was serious – and I hesitated – I was wearing brand-new riding-breeches, puttees, and boots. However, I waded in, and it was seventeen days before my boots touched dry soil again.

  We were left in a muddy dug-out at Roclincourt with an officer and his batman, waiting for the attack. We spent our time experimenting with a small British Field set – the Trench set – and we still had no idea of our purpose.

  Then, on April 5th, we were called into Arras where a R.E. officer ‘put us wise.’ The attack was to be made within the next few days, the infantry waves were to advance under cover of a formidable barrage, and each wave was to be provided with a wireless station. The Roclincourt station was to go over with the first infantry wave. The Roclincourt station! That was Hewitt and I and an officer! Four infantrymen were to assist us in carrying our weighty apparatus, the set, accumulators, dry cells, coils of wire, earth mats, ropes, and other details.

  We returned to Roclincourt and sent many practice messages to our Directing Station at Arras. That night one of our aerial masts was shattered and we were instructed to erect another. We had no reserve mast, but, fortunately, we found a large crucifix nearby.

  ‘That’s it,’ said the officer. ‘Hewitt, climb up there and attach the aerial as high as possible.’

  Hewitt clambered up over the figure of Christ just as a German machine gun swept the line, the Verey lights revealing Hewitt distinctly. He soon fell into a depth of slime, frightened, but unhurt. It was our first experience of enemy machine-gun fire.

  ‘You try,’ the officer pointed to me.

  It is an eerie sensation to climb over an effigy of Jesus, to dig your feet into any parts of the figure offering foothold, to hold on to the outstretched arms, and breathe on to the downcast face, to fix a rope somewhere on the Cross and to hear the German machine gun tat-tatting all around. Failing to secure the rope, I slid down and we returned to the dug-out with our officer extremely annoyed. Early the next morning we secured the aerial to the ruins of a building.

  On April 7th our officer laid a plan of the German sector opposite us on the table, and he detailed our instructions. At a particular tree-stump far over in the enemy’s Blue Line we were to erect a station as rapidly as possible and transmit any messages handed in by the officers engaged in the attack.

  I felt intensely relieved that I was to be given an opportunity of doing something useful, and of feeling that at last I was to play a real part in the Great War. I found that Hewitt, too, experienced this sense of relief.

  On the evening of the 7th some letters came up. There was one from my father telling me he had bought a new bicycle, a Raleigh, for ‘when I came home.’ It affected me strangely, and when I mentioned the new cycle in the dug-out, our officer grunted ‘some hopes!’ When I considered our immediate future I must have echoed the sentiment.

  Our officer’s nerves were rather frayed that evening. Perhaps in the infantry he had led many attacks, perhaps he had been badly knocked about before he came to us. We didn’t know; nobody seemed to know much about him.

  Through the night we waited for the signal. One o’clock, two, three, four (or was it five?)…the barrage started! A roar all along the line. Then suddenly, with a similar ‘snap’ to that with which it started, the barrage stopped. Sunday, April 8th, dawned and passed without the attack having been made. Had a change of plans taken place?

  Sunday night – further infantry poured into the trenches, slowly, nervously, pressing along. All was tense…no laughter, no jesting, no conversation. There was no doubt that the attack would take place on the morrow.

  All night the muddied figures stood outside our dug-out; inside we sat, each with his load close at hand. Apart from wireless material we carried ground sheets, rifles (unloaded!), bandoliers, each holding fifty rounds, gas masks, iron rations, and our clothes.

  At 3.30 a.m., we went out into the trenches, eight in all: the officer, his batman, two operators, and four infantry carriers. We threaded our way along the crowded trenches as best we could until we reached a company of Tyneside Scottish. There we waited.

  The silence remained tense, more awful than ever. Everyone ‘standing to’ awaiting the barrage and the signal!

  4 a.m. The barrage opened with a mighty roar and there it fell incessantly just across the waste. ‘Go!’

  Over the top we clambered, over the stricken wilderness we stumbled. We wireless ‘merchants’ mixed with the infantry, hoping for some protection. We carried no bayonets, our unloaded rifles were strapped across our backs and our only means of defence was apparently fists. Why wireless operators were not allowed to load their rifles we never learned.

  We attained the enemy lines. Jerry was engaged in peaceful domestic functions! Some washing, others making coffee, and many had to be awakened to be taken captive. The blow had fallen before they expected it.

  It was not long, however, before the German defences, the colossal barrage tearing into their supports, were roused to a fierce retaliation. Heroic and desperate Germans mounted machine guns, and knowing they could not withstand our onslaught they exacted a heavy toll for their own lives. One enemy sergeant I saw shot twenty of ours before he was bayoneted in his back. Then a rain of spluttering ferocious shrapnel fire came over from the German artillery and ‘heavy stuff’ crashed into us. The waves of our infantry became somewhat disorganized owing to the difficulty of moving over the heavy, pitted land and to the congestion of the German prisoners, who were dazed by their good fortune in being taken.

  The second wave passed – the third – the fourth, and soon the well-defined waves were indistinguishable.

  We wireless ‘blokes’ struggled on with our burdens, aiming, of course, for the tree-stump by the Blue Line. When daylight came we found we were only seven – our officer, carrying no burden, had hurried on with the leading infantrymen.

  Through the hours we continued stumbling, sinking, slipping, into old trenches, shell holes, all the time in the midst of a scattered but advancing infantry.

  Noon – we still struggled, overburdened with wireless parts. The wounded were limping or being carried in, the thousands of prisoners formed long, straggling processions, the dead lay unnoticed.

  At 12.30 we reached the tree-stump. Our officer stood in a deep trench scowling at us.

  ‘Get into communication at once, I have messages here.’ He waved a sheaf of papers in his hand.

  Hewitt and I immediately set about erecting a 6o-yard aerial on 18-foot masts. It was an uneasy task erecting this fully exposed to the vicious enemy fire. Actually I counted afterwards ten men who had been killed outright by shrapnel near us, as we secured the masts. Presently we dropped into the dug-out allotted us and we tuned in for our D.S. I was told to operate. At length I heard D.S. ‘Wait,’ he said. He was dealing with early morning codes from other corps. At length I seized my turn and transmitted as many messages as I could before I lost my priority. I continued sending messages at intervals (but listening-in all the time) until 8 p.m., when our work died down, land-line communication having been established.

  But the officer forbade me to get up.

  ‘Continue listening-in. Hewitt will relieve you at midnight.’

  So I sat huddled on a box in a narrow tunnel with the candlelit set before me and the telephones tightly gripping my ears. In the dug-out the officer, his batman, and Hewitt sat, while in a stifling den underneath the dug-out the four infantrymen rested. On this part of the Hindenburg line the trenches were ‘double-deckers.’ Sometimes my back touched the clay wall behind me, and my eyes; when turned from the set, blinked into clay – clay everywhere. Two candles flickered above the set, resting on bayonets stabbed into the clay.

  Just on the side of the set, away
from the dug-out, the tunnel had been shelled, and it opened into the yawning shell hole. Deep in this a young, handsome Tyneside Scottish soldier lay dead. His feet pointed upwards, his body lay on his back with his face upturned. He was not more than five yards from me.

  The night air became chill and the rain drizzled.

  I asked Hewitt to string up some sacking. I wanted it for two reasons – to reduce the draught and to help me forget the dead soldier lying there. Presently the others curled themselves up, and their snores soon assured me that-they were asleep. I remained listening-in for a possible emergency call.

  10.30 p.m. An eerie silence on the ether, pierced only by atmospherics crackling in my ears. As the time went on the strange quietude became ghastly, and; all the time, the Tyneside soldier lay there, just the other side of the sack, his eyes probably still gazing blindly to the darkened skies.

  A wind sprang up, blowing the sacking in towards me, as though some enfeebled soul pressed against it. Sometimes the wind lifted a corner of the sack, and I peered through into the darkened shell hole.

  The rain became sleet, and it turned to snow. I knew because the snow soon attained sufficient weight to bear down lumps of earth, and fugitive flakes drifted into the tunnel.

  12 o’clock. Hewitt’s turn! Was it worth his listening-in? Perhaps I would get instructions to close down any minute…pity to wake him! I decided to continue the watch myself. (I should have stated before that Hewitt suffered from cramp in his right elbow and our officer had no confidence in his operating, hence the long watch that fell to me.)