1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [119]
Pte. W. J. McKenna.
We worked for dear life to get cover before daylight. Fortunately for us it was a little misty in the morning, and that gave us another hour or so to burrow into the earth. It’s hard graft digging with an entrenching tool, especially after an exciting fight and when you’re hungry too, but we managed it at last and we were well out of sight when Fritz dropped a few shells among us next day. Our roll-call while we were in our trench was about three hundred and sixty, which means our battalion alone lost about seven hundred and forty men, all in about ten minutes, and we suffered more casualties before we got away.
Sgt. H. Hall.
But our object had been achieved, and the Germans were demoralised. Our first Brigade appeared on the scene and the line was strengthened, and then the Buffs, the famous English regiment, came up at the double after having marched miles from another part of the line.
So the bluff that we pulled off was entirely successful, and the Germans thought that we had about twenty thousand men attacking them. It never struck their cold-blooded unimaginative minds that two thousand men would have the audacity to attack whole German Divisions without artillery support.
Pte. W. J. McKenna.
To withdraw we had to go along a ditch full of wet muddy slime, and bent double. That’s no easy job at any time, but it’s worse when you’re nearly famished and weary for want of sleep. To get out of the ditch meant a bullet, because snipers were on the look-out. We were under rifle fire for about two miles from our trench, and it was a relief when we found ourselves at last out of range. We thought we were in for a rest, but we were told to fall in and go to relieve a battalion that had been in the trenches and had to retire. However, St Julien, the village we reported at, was suffering severely from shell-fire and several houses were on fire. We hung about for two hours before being told to retire.
Of the strength of two battalions, only ten officers remained to shepherd four hundred survivors away from the battle-line. It had been some consolation to find that the guns abandoned in Kitchener’s Wood had finally been destroyed by the enemy’s own shelling. Even if they had not managed to retrieve them they would at least be of no use to the enemy.
Two nights earlier when they had been relieved from a four-day stint in the trenches the 9th Royal Scots were disappointed to find that they were not to return to their cushy billets in Ypres and had to march on to Vlamertinghe. It was a long, long march and, after four days of inactivity in the trenches, the men were sore and stiff and weary by the time they turned into the field full of black-tarred tarpaulin huts where they were to spend their four days’ rest before going back. It was dawn before the huts were allocated and the weary soldiers of the Dandy Ninth were at last able to turn in. They slept most of the day and they binged most of the next night.
Pte. W. Hay, A Coy., 9th Bn., Royal Scots (Lothian Regt.), 27 Div.
We woke to parcels and letters – the height of bliss! Everybody passed everybody else his cakes or sweets, and the bully beef of our daily ration was stacked in a heap – untouched. What digestions we had! One man, whose only vices were cigarettes and tea, and who was bemoaning the scarcity of fags in the trenches and was hoping all the way down that some would be waiting for him, he sat grinning, opening box after box – seven hundred or so cigarettes. According to our tastes, we were all as happy as he was. Soon the tidy hut was strewn with cardboard boxes, paper, string, and luxuries, and what a mess there was to be cleared up when we got the order to move!
They had hardly recovered from the long march, hardly finished stretching after their long-awaited sleep, and had not nearly finished demolishing the contents of the parcels, when the order came. It was barely forty hours since the