1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [113]
My company was in the reserve trenches and it was on the afternoon of my birthday that we noticed volumes of dense yellow smoke rising up and coming towards the British trenches. We did not get the full effect of it, but what we did was enough for me. It makes the eyes smart and run. I became violently sick, but this passed off fairly soon. By this time the din was something awful – we were under a crossfire of rifles and shells, and had to lie flat in the trenches. The next thing I noticed was a horde of Turcos (French colonial soldiers) making for our trenches behind the firing line; some were armed, some unarmed. The poor devils were absolutely paralysed with fear. They were holding a trench next to a section of the 48th, so the 48th had to move in to hold it also until some of their officers came and made the Turcos go back.
Here on the fringe of the attack the ‘Turcos’, as Keddie was pleased to call them, had not been badly affected. It was natural terror and fear of the unknown that had made them run and, when the temporary effects of the gas had worn off, it was natural discipline that sent them back. But they were the lucky ones, there were not many of them, and the plight of their comrades on their left was pitiable. In the front-line trenches where the gas was thicker they had no time to run, and not many survived. Rolling over the trenches the gas clouds overwhelmed them so swiftly that men collapsed at once. Lying retching, choking, gasping for breath at the foot of the deep ditch where the heavy gas settled and clung thickest of all, they suffocated to death in minutes. From the support lines fifty yards behind, the troops watched in horror and as the wall of smoke rolled forward to engulf them in their turn, as the wind brought the first wisps of the fumes that clutched the throat and stung the eyes, they panicked and ran.
Along four miles of its length, between Poelcapelle and Steen-straat, the line was empty. Fifteen minutes after the gas was first released the German infantry was ordered to don gas-masks and advance. They were prepared for a fight, but there was no one left to fight with. As their guns thundered ahead of them, the German soldiers simply walked forward through the allied line, over the bodies of the dead, lying sprawled out, faces discoloured and contorted in grimaces of agony. Within an hour the Germans had advanced more than a mile and they had hardly needed to fire a shot.
By nightfall the enemy had driven a deep wedge into the allied lines. Flushed with victory they started to dig in.
Chapter 14
Far above the lingering gas, the tornado of explosions and all the horrors below, long trailing clouds turned luminous pink as the sun set in the western sky.
Major McDougall and his signaller had long ago slithered down from their rooftop look-out, for there was nothing to be made of the chaos in front and observation was useless if information could not be sent back. In the first minutes of the attack the telephone lines that linked them to the guns were shattered. It was pointless to brave the inferno to try to repair them for the Germans had already penetrated beyond their position and a machine-gun trained on the back wall of the farmhouse opened up at the slightest movement. There was nothing for it but to try to get back to the guns. They crawled out through a ditch half full of rank, stagnant water but it was shelter of a kind from the ferocious shell-fire. Their hands and arms were plastered with mud, their clothing sodden and stinking, but at length they emerged near the Battery on the outskirts of St Julien, and made a dash for it.
Sgnr. J. E. Sutton, 9th Bty., Canadian Field Artillery.
The major told me that he had heard more shell-fire in one hour than he heard in the whole of the Boer War. When we reached the battery we found that our guns had swung considerably to the left. Gunner Budagier had been wounded and I took his place as number two gunner on number four gun. They were so close together that number three gun was