The waiting is the most difficult part for a soldier prior to battle. Fortunately for us, we were kept busy around the Dobsavage farm so we had little time to become stressed over the impending fight.
A small group of fellows who apparently had been separated from their unit joined us one night. They were old salts, hardcore killers who were on their way to re-up with their regiment “The London Scottish.”
These men had been on the Western Front for over a year and were truly hardened veterans of the trenches. At night, after supper, we coaxed them into telling us stories of their experiences. One by the name of Pinkerton, had been in the Battle Lille and recounted the tragic losses sustained by the Blackwatch, which was, of course, my grandfather’s regiment.
The London Scottish was among the regiments waiting in the trenches for the word to advance, but those in command were having mixed thoughts about when to start the charge. “We were in the second wave, ready to go; the delay was driving us all mad. After hours of standing ready in the muck of the front trenches and just minutes before we were supposed to charge, we received the order to stand down.”
We were all riveted to what Pinkerton was saying as he paused to take a drink of some rum that we had commandeered.
“The word didn’t get to the forward trenches in time. The Black-watch Regiment was to be the first over the top. They were prepared, ready, and able. When the time came to finally start the attack, they charged up and over, unaware of the order to stand down. Into the fire of the deadly barking maxim 08 machine guns they ran, and we could only watch in horror,” Pinkerton recalled.
“One hundred yards of No Man’s Land to cross before they reached the German trenches. One hundred yards, without a walking artillery blanket being laid down as cover. We in the Scottish were screaming for them to return, but the battle noises drowned out our pleas. They charged ahead into the onslaught. At the fifty yard point they had lost half of the five hundred men in the regiment. But they continued, never looking back, and as they made it to the German’s 1st trench there were only about a hundred men remaining.
“We in the Scottish began to charge to help our comrades, but were ordered to stand down by our officers. They threatened us at gunpoint to obey their orders. We could do nothing but watch the carnage,” Pinkerton said, his voice cracking and his eyes welling. “Thirty men from the Blackwatch were battling hand to hand when they realized there would be no backup support. They threw off their packs and webbing and sprinted back across No Man’s Land. These men had shown unspeakable bravery and gallantry in this unaided charge and how did the Huns show respect? They mowed them down–shot these unarmed brave men in their backs without mercy.”
Pinkerton let go with an uncontrollable sob, but quickly regained his composure. “The entire regiment had been wiped out in a matter of minutes.”
We all sat silently, stunned and horrified by this account.
“That night we formed a large, all volunteer, recovery party, of which I was a member. We retrieved all but fifty of these fallen heroes and made sure that they received the proper burial that they deserved,” Pinkerton said with a heavy sigh. “Our pipers played them under to ‘Flowers of the Forest.’ I can tell you this: After that night, the London Scottish and the Blackwatch have taken not one German prisoner.”
Pinkerton’s fellow Scottish grinned with sardonic smiles but Pinkerton had a cold cruel gaze as he spoke.
Bill Lewis looked at me and shook his head. “Five hundred men lost because of a blunder in communications and indecisive leadership.”
“A frighteningly horrible waste,” I agreed.
Sean and several of the 36th Ulster lads were talking about the account and it seemed to have motivated them with a desire to go into the battlefield so that they could return some of the kindness that was metered out to The Blackwatch.
Pinkerton overheard some of their conversation and felt that he should impart some battlefield wisdom to these novices.
“Lads, the worst parts of a battle are the waiting before and the roll call after,” he said. “During the battle itself you think of nothing, you react as you were trained to do and you fight, not for God or country, but for your comrades that are dropping around you.”
Pinkerton asked if anyone could spare a fag and several men quickly produced cigarettes for him. One of the Irishmen asked Pinkerton where he and his group had come from.
“We five men have just finished training for sniper and are now going to Verdun to practice our newly learned skill.” He smiled and took a drag on his smoke. The stories were clearly over and the men were breaking up into small groups and discussing Pinkerton’s recounting of his experiences.
This was a fine time to break out the pipes and drum and change the somber mood of the evening. Pinkerton and his men were delighted with our practice. They were good Scotsmen and the pipes were in their blood. Sean chose to keep it light and snappy with lots of jigs and reels and the men were soon up beat and lively. We laughed, drank our rations of rum, smoked and spoke of anything other than the war.
Pinkerton beginning to feel the rum said in a loud brogue, “Only real Scotsmen can appreciate such fine pipe’n, you’re wasting your talent on these Irishmen.”
If not for his playful smile, some of the boys would have taken exception to such a remark. Lieutenant McDonnell, always quick on his feet, replied, “We Irish gave the pipes to you Scots hundreds of years ago as a joke and you still haven’t figured it out yet!”
All the Ulstermen burst into raucous laughter, even Pinkerton and his men couldn’t hold back their laughter and joined in.
At the beginning of the evening, Pinkerton and his men seemed, at first glance, to be so young. All the men were in their early twenties. Now at the end of the night, I saw hardened soldiers that had been at the gates of hell and the experience had changed them. They now seemed to be able to switch off their innate sense of humanity and become killers showing no more consideration than does a lion for the killing of a gazelle. I prayed that this war wouldn’t rob me of my capacity for humanity, but I was beginning to realize that the instinct for survival was so strong in us all that we protect ourselves anyway we can and suppressing our feelings was one of those ways.
“MY LODGINGS IN THE COLD, COLD GROUND”
Deadly Moles – June 25, 1916
Bert Carol was a master at his trade. He truly was worth his weight in gold. Sir John Norton-Griffiths was keenly aware of the value of men like Bert, which is why he was in the process of recruiting as many men with these unique talents as was possible. Prior to the war, Bert had provided his family with a respectable income, although his field was now in decline.
By today’s standards, he would be considered upper middle class, however, the upper class still looked down on him because of his profession. Bert, being good-natured, would toss it off. He knew that because of him they were warm and dry, but they were just too dull witted to realize it.
Most of the houses in the British Isles were protected from the rain and sleet by slate roofs and were kept warm on those cold damp nights with coal, both mined in Welsh mines by men like Bert. Before he was recruited, Bert was a foreman for Ebbw Vale Steel, Iron and Coal Company. He had followed the footsteps of his father in the mining profession at the early age of sixteen and was recognized quickly as a natural miner and leader. He rapidly developed both technical and practical talent which, along with his good nature and leadership qualities, allowed him to advance to lead and then to foreman, a position well above that of his father.
His father was immensely proud of Bert’s achievement and would regularly brag about his boy, whom he called “the boss.” Both men were well respected by miners and management alike and were often teased good naturedly as a sign of affection.
If asked to do so, Bert and his team of tunnelers could efficiently and quickly build a mine or tunnel from here to there with remarkable accuracy. And now, that is exactly what Sir John Norton- Griffiths was asking of him. Nor
ton-Griffiths wanted it to be a tunnel of deadly accuracy, not just remarkable accuracy.
Bert and many men like him were being employed by the B.E.F. to dig mines–land mines, that is. These were not the land mines of today, consisting of small yet powerful explosives, buried not too deep below the ground surface. The kind of land mine that Bert specialized in were actual tunnels dug under the British trenches and continuing under no-man’s land, and ending under German positions of interest. At the end of the tunnel, a large vault would be dug in which tons of explosives would be placed for detonation.
In late 1914, several months after the start of the war, the German forces dug and detonated ten land mines on the Western front in hopes of breaking up the stalemate produced by trench warfare. The desire was to break a hole in the allied resistance. The result was devastating and wiped out the better part of a British colonial Indian regiment. It did not, however, breach the front as was desired, although it did prove to be a formidable and valuable weapon.
Norton-Griffiths was, at that time, a representative of the House of Parliament, and a former mining engineer. He took immediate interest in the incident and seeing the value of the weapon, began lobbying for the formation of a Royal Engineer Corps with the specific task of engineering and building land mines. Both houses of Parliament quickly approved the proposal, and the Royal Engineers corps came into existence.
Promoted to the rank of major, Norton-Griffiths was put in charge of the project and quickly began recruiting men from the fertile Welsh, Scottish, and Australian mining industries which were suffering the recent loss of their second biggest customer, Germany.
Simply to demonstrate the value of these mining engineers one need look no further than their pay stubs. The engineers were collecting six shillings a day. The “Sappers,” who were included in the Royal Engineers, received two shilling, six pence, and the average “Tommy” got just one shilling.
Bert was among the most experienced and respected of the engineers, which was the reason his command placed him in charge of the Hawthorn Ridge Mine. This was to be one of the three big mines that were to be detonated along with eleven smaller mines prior to the attack. Bert had been present when the plans were being discussed and his feeling was that many of the mines were simply being used as the icing on the cake. It seemed to him they were to be nothing more than exclamation points at the end of the artillery sentence.
His tunnel, however, was planned to blow up the Hawthorn Ridge Redoubt, a large and very strategic German fortification that had been responsible for the deaths of a great number of allied soldiers.
The Redoubt was occupied by the German 119th, a battle-hardened division that was the object of Bert’s efforts along with the redoubt structure itself. The work had to be stepped up due to the time constraints imposed by Haige and his Big Push plan. There was just a week left before the ground assault and the B.E.F. artillery barrage had begun in earnest.
Bert knew the earth-pounding artillery onslaught increased the chances of a tunnel collapse, so he took special care to brace his tunnel beyond that which was required by a normal “hole”.
He also remained at least fifty feet below the surface where there was a layer of hardpan. Unlike the softer, moist earth of the Flanders section farther north, the rolling hills of the Picardy region had abundant chalk beneath the topsoil, which proved to be a much sturdier material for tunnel walls and thus increased the safety of the project.
An added bonus was less silting and better footing. Chalk did make for a hard dig, but most of his men were coal and iron pickers, so the white material was no great effort. At fifty to sixty feet, even a Brit 60-pounder wouldn’t rattle the timbers, but under the British trenches, the Germans would occasionally lob Big Bertha’s pill, and Bert was unsure of how his tunnel would fare. The task of engineering a tunnel of more than four hundred yards with the objective of pinpointing a location–while maintaining a precise depth–was a marvel.
Bert had his surveyors check the direction and level every one hundred feet of progress. He dug the first 100 yards at sixty feet, the total rise was ten feet overall, to put the vault at fifty feet below the redoubt.
Bert had helped develop a system to expedite the removal of the earth from the Hawthorn Ridge tunnel. Every one hundred yards, his engineers elevated the floor two-and-a-half feet to compensate for the rise in floor elevation. The ore car held about four yards of earth and would roll easily along the gentle decline from the dig to the end of its rail, where it would tip up and dump its load into the next cart waiting two-and-a-half feet below it.
This relay system cut the removal time to a fraction of what it would have been had one cart been used to travel the entire length of the tunnel, and reduced the manpower needed for the movement of debris.
With the advent of every new weapon comes the necessity for counter measures and the land mine was no exception. The British had developed listening devices to detect the sounds of mining below the surface. One was called a Geo phone, an Australian had invented another he called “The Wombat,” and of course, the Germans had their own mining detection inventions.
To counter the counter measure and reduce the possibility of detection, rubber wheels had been installed on the ore carts to muffle the noise caused by steel wheels clanking over steel rails. The earth was relatively rock free so the shovel and pick ax made minimal noise. When a rock was hit, all digging would stop, in fact, all movement would stop, everyone would wait ten minutes to prevent detection and triangulation by those listening up top or in nearby enemy tunnels. The rock would gently be pried out of its resting place and placed in a dug out in the tunnel wall. Every effort was made to avoid transporting rocks because of the noise created when being transferred from one steel cart to another.
Bert had been ordered to build a vault capable of housing twenty tons of explosives. He quickly set out to calculate what would be required to house such a charge and was stunned by his findings. Each crate of explosives weighed one hundred pounds and was three feet long, two feet wide, and one foot high. Twenty tons was equal to four hundred boxes, and would require a vault eight feet high, thirty feet wide, and forty feet long-– an enormous room. This room allowed for the stacking of crates two feet above the floor to prevent water damage due to constant seepage and left room around the stacks for proper bracing and movement.
One of the major problems in any mine is lack of breathable air, so a large bellows was operated at the mouth of the tunnel that pumped a constant supply of fresh air through a pipe to the furthest point of the mine. The fresh air would then travel from farthest point back to the mouth pushing the foul air back out of the opening.
The miners had small cages set up every fifty feet or so with canaries in them. A light was placed next to the cage to illuminate the small bird, and if the bird fell from its perch, the men would take immediate note suspecting either gas or lack of oxygen.
Bert had designed the mine to have a gradual grade at the mouth rather than a vertical drop like many other engineers preferred. The slope made the removal of dirt faster and easier employing a mule to pull the cart up the incline. The progress on his tunnel was right on schedule and, in fact, with the artillery bombardment commencing, the bombing allowed his diggers to pretty much disregard the caution they had been exercising concerning noise. No one was going to detect their digging with an artillery barrage going on around them.
The vault was near ready and had passed Bert’s initial inspection and approval on the morning of 26 June. He was making the hike back alone and whistling “My Lodgings in the Cold, Cold Ground” a Scottish funeral favorite. Walking up the shallow incline at the end of the tunnel, the muffled and muted noises of cannon fire was becoming louder with each step. He had made the trek along the entire length of the tunnel many times and despite the cool air underground he had beads of sweat forming across his brow. His headlamp cast a dim beam of light illuminating the well-worn dirt path that paralleled the rails for the coal carts.
Several hundred feet ahead the midday sun was providing an ever increasing amount of light that over powered the dim head lamp, but caused a glare that actually made seeing the path more difficult.
Bert put his left hand out and ran it along the rough tunnel wall to keep a steady bearing and to avoid vertigo, a trick miners learned to rely on in poorly lit areas. Up ahead, Bert could make out two figures near the entrance of the mine. The silhouetted figures seemed to be arguing over something but the brilliant sunlight made it impossible to make out who they were.
The timbers and earth shook as the Germans delivered the first shell in a return barrage. Loose dirt fell from the cross beams, but the mine held fast. The men ahead stopped talking for a moment, the taller of the two looked around nervously, the other shorter man, remained unflinchingly fixed on the tall one. The tall man started to lecture again and his voice was becoming more audible as Bert drew closer. From behind him, the clip, clop of a mule pulling a cart up the rail was catching up, accompanied by the sound of the gentle coaxing of the mule driver.
“See here, ol’ boy,” the tall man said. “I am going to have to take something substantial to my superiors about this matter and I am going to hold you personally responsible if I don’t get any resolution soon.”
Bert could just begin to make out the figure of one of his lead engineers, Mel Bohlig. The taller man an officer, was pointing his finger at Mel and doing all the talking. Bert stepped up his gait, someone was chewing on one of his men and he was not about to tolerate it. Bohlig was a broad powerful man who could have snapped the spindly British officer like a toothpick but, like most of Bert’s team, he was quiet and unemotional with an overall good nature.
“Sir, the gentleman you want to talk to is coming up the ramp, perhaps you should address him for your resolution,” Bohlig said with a steady voice.
“Very well then,” the pompous officer said turning toward Bert. “With whom am I speaking?” he demanded walking toward Bert with a purposeful strut.
The Last Lady from Hell Page 18
