Le Mairie had stood proudly dominant in the small square of Behagnies. The sturdy sandstone quoins and the carved Doric columns and moulded lintel of the elegant doorway had given the building a stately authority as it presided over the affairs of the community. Each Tuesday, in a tradition that had lasted for centuries and had survived various wars and deprivations, a market had been held in the square under the watchful eye of the mayor. In the last three years the farmers had braved the weather and the loss of so many of their young men, to defiantly bring into the village whatever produce they could gather.
Edward had recalled the colourful fruit and vegetables that he had seen on the stalls, the farmer’s wives chattering incoherently, the children who came to help their mothers then chased each other round the donkey carts. He had thought about the times that he had sat on the bench and watched the villagers weaving their busy patterns of social interactions and business transactions in the square. He had remembered the frequency of the visits that the locals made to Le Mairie and wondered on their nature. But mostly, and most personally, he had remembered the Mayor, Jacques Planche, who had farmed a smallholding adjacent to where they had camped. He had been a man of huge energy, despite his years, and he had used a very limited knowledge of English to make the British soldiers feel very welcome in his village. The Mayor had frequented the small bar in the square and had willingly spent time with the visiting troops to teach them how to count in French, to exchange greetings or to order drinks.
Edward had got to know him quite well, the previous year, when they had been based in nearby Gomiecourt for six weeks. He had been detailed to go and assist Jacques in harvesting one of the fields in exchange for which they were allowed its use for some of their sports fixtures. After an arduous afternoon in the fields, Edward had been invited back to the farm for a glass of wine and, on the way, he had been delighted to come across a small sawmill. In no time, he had been reminiscing about his job in the Salford sawmill and the two men had then spent a relaxed hour discussing and gesticulating their way through the relative merits of English and French oak, the best cuts for pine and the advantages of sycamore in kitchen furniture. After that, they had become firm friends and Edward had spent as much time as he could in the company of Jacques and his welcoming family. His parting from them, when the Division had moved up to Belgium, had been painful and sad.
When, just a few days before, he had arrived back in Behagnies with his Battalion he had been barely able to recognise it. He had looked up and down the main street and around the square at the broken buildings and had felt a penetrating cold down his back as he realised that there was not a single villager in sight. Had they all fled or had some been killed? There was an eerie silence hanging over the village but the thunder of the artillery rumbled on from the direction of Bapaume. There was a feeling of death hanging over the broken buildings; the gaping mouths of their wounds open to the skies like the bodies of so many of his dead comrades had been, laid in the mud.
Apart from two dogs rummaging in a semi-demolished house further up the street and a cat watching them guardedly from the top of a wall in the square, there had been no signs of the busy village life that he had known. There had been no chimney smoking, no garlic laden smells of cooking, no cries of children or their mothers. The German war machine had purged the village of human spirit and left behind lifeless rubble.
The Battalion had checked through all the buildings before taking up its defensive positions around the village. Unfortunately, because of the heavy volume of traffic on the roads, the British soldiers were still without the support of horses and vehicles, and communications between the Divisions had remained difficult. Reports had been coming through of the disposition of the enemy troops although many had proved inaccurate.
The Germans had attacked at dawn the following day along the whole of the front that the Division was holding. To the north, the 10th Manchesters had brought three companies through and had encountered men from the 40th Division in one of the trenches. These soldiers had been fighting for four days and, despite being totally exhausted, they joined with the Manchester men in taking the battle to the enemy.
It had been an uncanny experience for the soldiers moving up into the line. Behind them, the early morning sun had been bathing the relatively calm countryside and the birds had been singing their welcome to the day. Ahead of them a furious storm had raged as the German artillery spewed out its destructive power. Clouds of belching smoke from the guns, and the huge eruptions of debris, had rolled across the skies, blending with that from the fiercely burning landscape, and had cast great, night-black shadows over the approaching army.
That day the Germans had proved themselves to be a formidable fighting force but the training that the Salford Battalion had received had helped them to resist the attacks. The enemy soldiers had appeared, as expected, in very small groups on the skyline and had drifted down into the hollow, running and walking in different directions, but in a short time the British soldiers had been faced by a mass of Germans. Fortunately, the Battalion’s machine gun crews had finally arrived after carrying their equipment for seven or eight miles because the transport had not been able to get through the chaos on the roads.
The British had been able to meet the German assault with rifle and machine gun fire but the open order approach that they had adopted had made them a difficult target. It was at close quarters that the bayonets of the Salford soldiers had finally repelled them. Elsewhere, some British battalions had started to fall back but an order was received from Divisional Command that the line had to be held and they had regrouped and resisted.
During the morning, the Germans had succeeded in breaking through further up the line and had taken the village of Sapignies. A company of the 7th Lancashire Fusiliers, another Battalion from Salford, and men from the 5th had been fighting valiantly to check their advance but the Germans had massed machine gun units in the area and the Lancashire soldiers were being decimated.
Edward and his company had then been transferred down to Sapignies at about 10.00 am and, after a bravely fought and cleverly devised battle, they had regained control of the village. As they had approached down a narrow, winding alley towards the square, they had been spotted by a German machine gun emplacement on the roof of a building flanking the square. Unfortunately for the enemy, Big Charlie, the Divisional potato lobbing champion and deadly accurate with a hand grenade, had been in another platoon that had skirted round and was coming down a different alley. It had been a mighty throw but the machine gun post was taken out with one grenade.
The noise had alerted the rest of the enemy troops, however, and the British soldiers had heard loud commands being shouted from a position to the south of the square. Almost instantly, hundreds of men had stumbled out of the bar, shouting loudly and tripping over their rifles. The German army had been a long time without food and even longer without alcoholic drink and they had found the large casks of vin rouge irresistible.
The inebriated soldiers had fought bravely but foolishly and, by the time their support arrived, the Salford men had gained an advantage. Shortly afterwards, the Germans had counterattacked and pushed, once again, through Sapignies only to be met on the other side by the 5th Manchesters who had driven them back into the village.
To the west of Sapignies, the small country roads had been growing increasingly congested as the day went on and, by midday, there was total gridlock. Nothing was moving anywhere and an artillery attack by the Germans would have been devastating. A solution had been needed urgently. The British army filled in ditches and cut down barbed wire and vehicles were sent across open fields. By the late afternoon, the traffic was on the move once more and the crisis had been averted.
All of that day the battle had raged over a wide front and villages had been lost and retaken only to be lost again. Artillery units had moved from one position to another and some had been wiped out. British planes had flown only feet above the ground and poured bulle
ts into the German lines. In the afternoon, the British had brought tanks into the line with dramatic effect.
The casualties on both sides, particularly for the Germans, had been enormous but the British had been fighting against overwhelming odds and, gradually, their line had fallen back. That evening, the Salford soldiers of the 1/8 Lancashires had withdrawn reluctantly back to the Gomiecourt Ridge. During the course of the next two days, they had fallen back, step-by-step, to Ablainzeville and then Essarts.
No ground had been given easily or cheaply. Sometimes it had been conceded in order to lure the enemy into a trap of enfilading machine gun fire and on occasions they had retreated to higher ground to enfold the German soldiers into a welcoming and visible valley. As they had withdrawn, groups had held back and maintained a level of fire on the Germans, slowing down their advance and inflicting severe casualties. In one area the Allied soldiers had been ably assisted by the German artillery who had mistakenly poured shells down onto their own troops. The number of deaths had been very high.
The British soldiers had not wanted to give an inch, but they much preferred this open, intuitive style of warfare to the rigid posturing formations of the earlier years. They had suffered losses but they had dealt bloody and fatal blows to the enemy.
The policy of slow withdrawal by the Allies, fighting against such overwhelming odds, had created major problems for the Germans. Their armies had already been severely weakened by the heavy casualties, that were mounting rapidly, and now they had found that the scorched earth policy that they had practised as they had withdrawn the previous year to the Hindenburg Line was starving their own soldiers. Their men were seriously fatigued and demoralised and they needed rest and food. But the German supply lines were failing and there were no crops in the fields and no livestock in the barns, the locals had been driven from their homes and their villages destroyed, so there were no stores to loot. Their soldiers were going hungry whilst the British soldiers, even in the front line, were getting at least some hot meals.
As the German front had become stretched and weakened, the British troops had occupied trenches that had not been used for a year and the line was eventually established and held. During the following two days the Germans had launched eight attacks on the British lines but only once had they succeeded in entering the trenches. On that occasion, they had met with a fierce bayonet response from the Lancashire soldiers and most of the enemy were killed or captured.
Edward’s battalion had finally gone into reserve at Gommecourt on the 29 March 1918 and the men, desperately tired after five days of almost continuous fighting, had enjoyed the few days’ opportunity to catch up with some restless sleep and their restricted personal hygiene. They had eaten good meals, burnt the lice from the seams of their clothing, cleaned their equipment with Big Charlie’s special cloths and collected their letters and parcels from home.
They had had the usual influx of new recruits into the ranks to replace the casualties; the fresh-faced and sparkling boys who had just come over from England with pristine uniforms and bursting enthusiasm and the grey faced, dead eyed men transferred from other battalions with stitched up uniforms supplemented by souvenirs collected from both British and German soldiers who now no longer had need of them. Each new batch had to be absorbed into the existing group and their skills understood and their style adapted. Each replacement brought something new but it was never enough to fill the gap left by the man who had gone. He didn’t have the steel ties that strapped his fear; he didn’t have the instinctive response to the tiniest facial movement that was the battlefield communication between long-serving soldiers and he didn’t have the evolving understanding of strategy that experience provides. Most importantly, few of them had the grit of Salford coursing through their veins.
For three days the 1/8 Lancashires had enjoyed this chance to relax, to tend their wounded and bury their dead and then, on the 2 April, they had moved into the front line at Bucquoy. That night, they had launched an attack on some new German constructions and then at 2.00am they had combined with the 32nd Division and had made a successful attack on Ayette, captured two hundred prisoners and established a new line to the east of Ayette.
The next two days had been relatively quiet and the soldiers had done their best to improve the old trench that they now occupied. They had reinforced the parapets, repaired the dugouts, strengthened old flunk holes and built new ones, replaced the firing step where it had been washed away by the rain, reinstated the latrines and tried to build some drainage to help to clear the foot deep mud at the bottom of the trench. In parts, it had been difficult to follow the line of the trench because heavy shell fire had caused it to collapse and the men had had a major task to excavate it.
Then at 5 o’clock that morning, the 5 April 1918, in the dark before the light of the day began to streak the clouds, the tenuous calm had been pierced by the shriek of heavy artillery. Screaming shells had shredded the air above their trenches and thudded mercilessly into the distressed ground. They listened to the emerging drone of destruction, sensing its ultimate proximity by the arcing intensity of the sound. Their bodies were rocked by the thunderous roar as high explosive and gas shells blasted earth and men into the air. For hour after hour, the Germans had sustained this destructive downpour and the British troops had pressed back into their dugouts seeking the limited shelter that they could give.
The heavy, cold night air had pushed the gas immediately into the trenches and Edward had felt the burning throat and smarting eyes even as he was pulling on his mask. They were uncomfortable and restricting but they offered the only chance of protection against the poisonous vapours. The men had stumbled around in the dark and slipped on the water-logged duckboards as they had struggled to their watch positions or to help their injured friends.
The sky had become a symphony of flashing lights and glowing clouds, traced through by the fiery trails of the arcing shells. As the hours had passed, the stretcher bearers had trudged up the communications trench carrying their bloody burdens with increasing frequency. Progress through the deep mud became increasingly difficult and the soldiers’ uniforms were coated with the stinking slime.
The light of day had revealed the grey gloom of gas and explosive clouds hanging only feet from the ground and the plumes of earth rising into the air as the shells rained down. Mud fell around them as they peered into the desolate landscape for signs of the inevitable attack and they listened keenly to the whistle of the shells to judge where they would land. It was always a comfort to hear the thud as it landed
Edward had coughed and spluttered inside his mask then lifted it briefly to sip some water. The deafening noise had numbed his senses; an iron band had tightened round his head.
The Germans had come at 8.00am. The mask had blurred Edward’s vision. He had desperately wanted to remove it and wipe his face and his eyes. When he could see more clearly, he had picked out the grey uniforms emerging through the copse of trees. He had been struggling to regain control of his mind and focus on the fight for survival when he saw them swarming forward, rifles at the ready, grenades strapped to their bodies, knives sheathed at their sides. As they approached, he had seen the cold determination in their desperate faces and he knew then that these soldiers were playing their final card. The muscles in his neck and chest had tightened and a vein in the side of his head was thudding as he had lifted his rifle to prepare for the onslaught.
The machine guns were pouring bullets into the oncoming army and his mind was closing down when he had heard the familiar voice whispering in the depths of his body.
‘Keep safe, Love’ he had heard as the cataclysm had descended.
***
The fighting had been ferocious and the German attack had been executed like a mindless machine. Their soldiers were men crazed by hunger, by fierce alcohol poured into empty stomachs and by a fear of the consequences of failure. They had been demented and inflamed. The Salford men had responded with a courage and pride
that words would only humble. They had met steel with steel and they had overcome, they had responded to bullet with bullet and their enemy had fallen, and they had faced murderous insanity with determined and unflinching bravery. The blur of the battle, the frenetic fighting against hurling humanity, the shouted warnings, the screams of attackers and the cries of the dying had lasted for over an hour. They had stood shoulder to shoulder with their fellow Salfordians of the 1/7 Lancashires and looked into the staring, fanatical eyes and the spitting mouths, and the Lancashire bayonets had prevailed.
They had begun to push their way northwards up the trench but had, eventually, been forced back. The 1/8 Lancashires and the 10th Manchesters had suffered severe casualties on their left flank and these positions were now surrounded by the Germans.
The rest of the Lancashire men had withdrawn to the line which they now held and yearned for the cigarette that they couldn’t smoke because of their masks. They had paired off and begun to sort through the casualties.
***
They were still processing the dead and attending to the injured in the deep mud of the trenches when the order came through that they had to clear the enemy out of the lines immediately. The two brothers were listed as ‘KIA’, their identity cards were filed and their bodies were laid side-by-side on the cart ready for burial. The men who had shared so much in their lives would now be embraced into eternity by the same piece of war ravaged French soil.
It was 11.40am and the men were weary and hungry but their determination was strong. They sensed that a corner had been turned and they felt a powerful need to press home their advantage. A wind had now lifted the gas away from the trenches and they gratefully removed their masks. They strapped on their rounds of ammunition and their grenades, shouldered their packs, cleaned the mud off their rifles and within minutes they were on their way.
Made in Myrtle Street (Prequel) Page 27
