1915: The Death of Innocence

by Lyn Macdonald

  All round the salient the air was whirling in a ferment of smoke and flying mud. The din was deafening, shock waves vibrated along the front, and the earth quaked and heaved and blew apart with the force of the explosions. Fields disappeared. Trenches disintegrated. Men were blown to bits. Two miles away from the Suffolks, and separated from them by the front of the 83rd Brigade, the Princess Patricias were having just as gruelling a time. Shortly after 6.30 a.m. Major Gault had managed to scribble a message to Brigade HQ reporting ‘very, very heavy shelling’ – but Brigade hardly needed to be told. In Brigade Headquarters dug-out, half a mile away at the western corner of Railway Wood, they were taking punishment on their own account, for the German guns were searching wide and probing deep and there was little doubt that this was the prelude to an all-out attack. It was hard to credit that the bombardment could possibly get worse but at seven o’clock the fire grew even stronger, the shells flew thicker, and every gun seemed to be trained on the sector where the Patricias and the Suffolks and the unfortunate battalions of the 83rd Brigade were clinging on at the crest of the battered salient. The Patricias’ front line was all but obliterated by high-explosive and shrapnel shells that, bursting high, rained red-hot fragments of metal that wiped out whole sections of men at a stroke, while machine-guns on the high ground, sweeping methodically from side to side, sprayed the trenches with incessant fire.

  At eight o’clock Gault dispatched a second message to Brigade Headquarters:

  Have been heavily shelled since 7 a.m. Sections of front trenches made untenable by enemy’s artillery, but have still about 160 rifles in front line. German infantry has not yet appeared. Should they rush our front trenches will at once counter-attack if possible… In lulls of gunfire there is heavy fire from rifles and machine guns. Please send me 2 machine guns if possible. I have only two left in the front line. None in support… Most of my wire gone.

  The runner managed to dodge through the bombardment and safely reached Brigade HQ. It was the last direct news of the Patricias and already it was out of date. Even as the Brigadier was reading it the German infantry was swarming down the Westhoek Ridge to attack the British trenches. And they were whooping as they came.

  Looking back on it, even the Patricias themselves found it difficult to believe that they had beaten the Germans back. The line was feeble, their front-line trench was almost non-existent, but every man, even the wounded who were still capable of raising a rifle, poured such accurate and such deadly fire into the German infantry as they advanced that the attack hesitated, faltered, and finally petered out as the survivors began to work their way cautiously back up the hill. When they saw that their infantry attack had failed the German guns opened up again more furiously than before and machine-gun crews which had managed to reach the ruined buildings in the first rush were firing in unison at almost point-blank range. The silence when the guns stopped was almost as stunning as the noise of the bombardment. Then there was a throaty rumbling from beyond the ridge that rose to a roar as the Germans poured down in a mass, running and shouting as they came. The front line was almost obliterated now and there was little point in trying to hold on. In the lull small groups of men had begun to make their way back to the support line and although the rearguard did their best to hold the enemy off, this time the attack was unstoppable. Watchers, peering anxiously from the support line a hundred yards behind, saw with astonishment a row of small white flags appear in part of the line where the fire of a few desperate survivors kept the enemy pinned down but the optimists whose first incredulous thought had been that the enemy was surrendering were soon disillusioned. The Germans were signalling their position to their own guns, warning them to lengthen range, to punish the second line as they had punished the first, and to finish the job.

  Pte. J. W. Vaughan.

  We were hit dead centre with heavy guns and machine-guns and then we were enfiladed from the right and enfiladed from the left along the trench both ways and it seems that they were using tear-gas too because your eyes were smarting and watering and you had quite a time fighting that off. All the officers practically were gone and of course these trenches weren’t much good even to begin with. Then they blew what there was to pieces and there was practically no protection at all.

  You didn’t have much chance. I was hit with a shell splinter and I was just laying there in the trench, what there was of it, and Lieutenant Papeneau came along. He was a wonderful man from Quebec. He came from one of the oldest French-Canadian families, so he came along, and he had his automatic in his hand ready for the Germans to come on, but he stopped and knelt down beside me. One of my buddies had already ripped my puttees off and slit my pants down because I was hit in the leg and my leg had started to swell. Lieutenant Papeneau looked at it and he shoved a cigarette in my mouth and lit it, and he said, ‘Don’t worry, Vaughan, we’ll get you out just as fast as we can.’ I said, ‘That’s fine, sir.’ But I lay there for six hours. That’s as fast as they could get me out. Six hours! I was lucky to get out at all. One fellow had just been leaning over talking to me and he stood up and the next minute he got it, and he fell down dead nearly on top of me. That really upset me because he was one of the married men. In fact that’s when I began to get scared. It was all hell let loose, and laying there at the foot of that trench you didn’t know what was going on – except that it was bad!

  Now that the Patricias’ front line had been withdrawn the support line was literally the line of last resort – and things were bad. But they were not so bad as they might have been. The 4th Rifle Brigade, in reserve in the lee of the Bellewaerde Ridge, took advantage of a brief pause in the shelling and managed to send forward a company to help out. They walked upright, for they were heavy laden, and the Patricias cheered them on as they came. ‘I don’t know if there were angels at Mons,’ remarked one soldier later, ‘but we saw angels that day at Bellewaerde, and they had RB on their shoulders.’ They brought boxes of ammunition, and, best of all, two machine-guns. And they also brought hope and fresh heart to the hard-pressed Patricias, for it was not enough merely to save their line – already it was clear that it was up to them to save the day.

  Hamilton Gault, wounded for the second time in two hours, and this time seriously, was forced to send a message to Captain Adamson instructing him to take command of the Patricias in the line. He hardly needed to add that he must hold on ‘at all costs’. But the situation was worsening by the minute. Adamson himself was wounded and as he crawled along the line, supervising the setting-up of the machine-guns, and handing out rifle ammunition, he was well aware that there was a huge gap in the line on their left. Cautiously raising his head to scan the Frezenberg Ridge, even through clouds of swirling smoke he could see British troops of the 28th Division streaming back to the rear. It could be only a matter of time before the Germans followed to take up the lost ground. When they did the Patricias would be out-flanked.

  It was the line of the 83rd Brigade that had given way – only a small part of it, but enough to allow the enemy first to penetrate the gap then to widen it by creeping to the rear of the troops on either side. From the rear, through the smoke and confusion of the fighting, it was hard for Brigade Staff to make sense of the situation, but the sight of retiring troops told its own story and it was clear to the anxious Staff Officers that reinforcements attempting to cross the open slopes of the Frezenberg Ridge would either be mown down or entrapped in their turn. All that could be done was to pray that the flanks would hold, to stiffen the GHQ line, and to hope against hope that the small bodies of men still holding out would be able to contain the enemy until his assault ran out of steam and they could rally the men to counter-attack.

  Much closer to the crumbling front, where Harry Crask crouched with the remnants of the signallers in the ruins of his Battalion HQ dug-outs, the position was no clearer.

  Pte. H. J. Crask.

  Not one of us knew what was happening in front but we more or less knew what to expect. Young Fre
nch eventually turned up from the front line about 11 a.m., slightly wounded in the head, and stopped with us since the shelling was getting wild again. He reported that our fellows were still holding out in the trenches, but we could see men retiring on our right.

  A few minutes afterwards Germans appeared to the right of us, so we had to get out of the trench or we would have been enfiladed. We went back, or rather we struggled back on our chests to the dug-out dragging Game, but all the nine of us were in a helpless condition. There was the Colonel, Sergeant Crabb, Brown, French, Manton, Hayward, Humphreys, Lance-Corporal Game wounded, and myself – and we had not a weapon amongst us.

  If Colonel Wallace could not go down fighting, he intended at least to go down with dignity. He had a box of fine Havana cigars in his pocket and he was equally determined to give no German the chance of filching them. He handed the box round and forced a smile to reassure his bedraggled men. ‘Smoke, lads? Might as well make the best of things.’ The cigars were large and opulent. It took a little while to set them well alight and the men had hardly begun to puff before the Germans were upon them.

  They loomed up and circled the shell-hole shouting ‘Hände hohe’ and even if the words were incomprehensible the message was clear enough for they stood with rifles and fixed bayonets aimed at the entrance to the battered dug-out. One by one the men clambered out wreathed in clouds of cigar smoke and raised their hands. The air sang with bullets and they had hardly cleared the dug-out when French was shot through the heart and collapsed at Crask’s feet. ‘The direction of the shot,’ Crask noted sadly, ‘was from Burnt Farm.’ Burnt Farm was, or had been, behind the British line, but the line was so chaotic and the Germans were advancing so fast that it was hard to tell if it had been fired by friend or foe. Crask had his suspicions and so perhaps had the Germans, for one German soldier bent down to pick up French’s cap and placed it gently over the dead man’s face to hide the staring eyes.*

  Pte. H. J. Crask, MM.

  They immediately pulled the remaining lot of us down amongst them and we had to lay there roughly two hours in their front line (we were captured about 11.45 a.m.). During that time a party of King’s Own tried to retire about eighty or a hundred yards away, but they were simply mad! They were mowed down like so much corn by rifle and machine-gun fire. A few that were left put their hands up, and the Germans in our line ceased fire immediately. They were good fellows all round that captured us. They were 77th Hanoverian Regiment and they kept us from fire as much as possible by making a parapet in front of us as well as for themselves. They also gave us meat and bread and coffee, and did their best for our wounded. At 1.30 p.m. we were all put in a dug-out. Two guards stayed with us and their line then began to advance towards Ypres. We all had the same opinion – that they were simply making a walk of it to Ypres, then on to Calais, and that they’d finally reach London. The Germans hardly seemed to know as much as I did. They undoubtedly thought that we were all that was left of the Contemptible Little Army.

  But it was not quite all – although, after three weeks’ fighting in the salient, such reserve battalions as there were were so pitifully low in numbers that they were battalions in name only, and a third of the men in the ranks of the 1st Yorks and Lancs – the only battalion that was anywhere near full strength – had arrived just three days earlier as a draft of inexperienced reinforcements. The 1st Welch, like the Territorials of the 12th London Rangers, were barely the strength of a single company. The 2nd East Yorks and the King’s Own could muster fewer than six hundred men between them and the 1st East Lancs were only three hundred and fifty strong. The reserves could not achieve much, but they had to try. Far out in front some ragged remnants were fighting on but they were isolated and would soon be surrounded and a great gap yawned across two miles of open ground between the Patricias at Bellewaerde and the Northumberland Fusiliers at Mouse Trap Farm.

  Although by mid-afternoon the Germans had paused in their advance there was no possibility of a counter-attack because the fight had been taken up by their artillery and the British reserves could not hope to penetrate the curtain of deadly fire, but even in the teeth of the bombardment the five hundred men of the East Yorks and the King’s Own managed to advance as much as a thousand yards in an attempt to fill the gap. They were just half-way to the old broken line, but they could go no further. The advance had cost them dear, and still they were nowhere near the Germans. Behind their curtain of exploding shells the Germans were entrenching across the gap but mercifully on either side of it the flanks held. They did more than hold. East of Mousetrap Farm the Northumberland Fusiliers clung on, decimated by shelling, beating off attacks in front and on their open flank far into the evening. It was the Germans who gave up first.

  Two miles away, the Patricias had every available man in the line – every signaller, every batman, every pioneer, every cook and every orderly. Earlier, with the help of the 4th Rifle Brigade, the left-hand company swung round at right-angles to their front, spread out in a thin line facing the gap, and attacked the enemy troops as they appeared. For the moment at least it seemed they had scared them off, and now help had arrived to extend the flank line further and to form a line of reserves at the Patricias’ backs. Even so, it was still touch and go and a determined attempt by the Germans to widen the gap further and ‘roll up the line’ would have been hard to withstand. But the Germans were still short of men and the one heartening piece of intelligence in an otherwise catastrophic day came from the Royal Flying Corps. Pilots, vigilantly patrolling the skies beyond the salient, could see no large-scale troop movements, no unusual number of trains rushing towards the German railhead and no fresh divisions making for the front. After their initial triumph the Germans seemed content to depend for the moment on the protection of their artillery while they dug in, re-grouped, and used the breathing space to bring up local reserves, to evacuate their casualties, and to marshal prisoners and send them tramping to the rear in long despondent columns.

  Pte. H. J. Crask, MM.

  We started back just before dusk and our own artillery gave us a parting shell or two which caused more than a little wind amongst us – at least Sergeant Hart of the Cheshires put in a certain amount of gymnastics after the style of the ostrich dance! I could not at all estimate the strength of the Germans. Zonnebeke was simply crammed with them and our own artillery seemed to be lost.

  They made any amount of sarcastic cowardly remarks as we passed, calling us swines, etc. One sneering idiot called us ‘cousins from over the Channel’, telling us also that we were prisoners – we hardly knew that I suppose! – finishing up with a sneer and also spitting at us. We were halted again on the other side of Zonnebeke by some dirty little officer and made to carry the German guards’ packs. We had to leave behind our two badly wounded men, Corporal Pugh and Lance-Corporal Game, in two separate dug-outs – apparently dying and left entirely on their own, but with no stretchers they had to be left.

  We halted several times before finally reaching our first night’s quarters and were questioned by any amount of officers trying to pump us. If they had not asked so many questions they would not have had so many untruths told to them! They thought we were all Kitchener’s men. We told them that they were still in England – and didn’t they look shocked! They had the impudence to tell us that our own Regular Army was absolutely wiped out during the latter part of 1914 and they were more surprised than ever when some of us showed them our pay books and told them that there were lots more Regulars to come from India. Then we were taken charge of by Uhlans and settled down about 10 p.m. at a place called Beclaeare and were put in the church which they had made something like a pigsty. But I was only too glad to get down after such a day and then a march of four miles.

  For most of the day Jimmy Vaughan had been lying wounded and helpless in the Patricias’ line through the clamour and tumult of the battle, but at last he too was out of it.

  Pte. J. W. Vaughan.

  Do you know how they got me
out? It was the roughest, readiest thing you ever saw, but they had no other way to do it. There was no parados at the back of the trench – well, there practically wasn’t a trench by that time! But normally you build up the front to fire at the enemy and it helps to shelter you, and you also should build up the back of the trench a certain amount, what they call the parados, but we had no parados, none at all, and with nothing to conceal you the stretcher-bearers couldn’t get up, couldn’t carry you back anyway for that matter. So what they did was this. When the first-aid men got to me a couple of fellows said, ‘Now, Jimmy, there’s an artillery dug-out just fifty yards straight ahead. Now, you’ve got to crawl over there, crawl to that dug-out and get down in there.’ And do you know how they did it? One took hold of my shoulders, the other took hold of my legs – and one leg was wounded, remember! – and they threw me over the back of the trench. That’s the only way they could get me out. When I got my breath back and got myself together, I crawled along and crawled along, and it felt like fifty miles not fifty yards. Well, I made it to the dug-out and when I did get in it was full of wounded men, packed with wounded men, and the moans and groans all over were something terrible. I squeezed in and lay down where I could and waited there for the dark, for the stretcher-bearers to come up.

  Well, eventually it did get dark and I remember the stretcher-bearers picking me up and getting me out of the dug-out and they carried me to the field dressing station which was about three-quarters of a mile away from the front line.There was a Red Cross ambulance truck there and the doctor happened to come out, and whether the dressing station was full up or not I don’t know, but he looked at me and he said, Tut him in the ambulance and when she’s loaded, take him to Vlamertinghe.’ So they took us through Ypres to Vlamertinghe and when we got there, the whole street as far as your eye could see was nothing but stretchers and blankets and walking wounded with blankets over their shoulders, and there must have been half a dozen doctors or more working flat out.*