1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [128]
Knowing, as the Germans must, that the allied line had been broken, guessing, as they surely would, that the scanty reserves had been used up to strengthen the new northern flank, knowing full well the extent of the casualties they had inflicted, Smith-Dorrien reasoned that a German General’s inclination might be to attack the southern face of the salient, to break through and take the northern flank from the rear or, by forcing the British to fight back-to-back on two flanks, to gradually squeeze them in and snuff them out. He was dismally aware that it was only one of several imponderable possibilities but it could not be discounted, and he made haste to send a signal to the troops in the thin denuded lines on the east and south of the salient to be vigilant and alert to the likelihood of attack.
But the line on the eastern face of the salient was more vulnerable than the line facing south, and no one knew better than Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien just how inadequate it was. The British Army had only begun to take over this sector from the French in the early part of April, the defences were woeful and even after a lot of hard work they were not much improved. The sector held by the 27th and 28th Divisions ran from the Menin Road, a mile in front of the village of Gheluvelt, lost to the Germans in the autumn of 1914, crept out to enclose Polygon Wood, swung north past Broodseinde east of Zonnebeke, and jutted east again across a slope to enclose the farms the French called Seine and Marne. Here for a few hundred yards the line ran very close to the Germans, a matter of yards away, and from this point the salient began to tail down on its slow curve to the north-west.*
Beyond the tiny copse they called Berlin Wood the Canadians took over the line that ran across the Ostnieuwkerke road half a mile north of the hamlet of Gravenstafel and on, sloping gently above the Gravenstafel Ridge, to the Poelcapelle Road half a mile in front of that village. It was here that the Canadians had joined hands with the French and it was just beyond the Poelcapelle Road that the French line had been forced in by the gas attack. The Canadians had been in the new line for just over a week and the defences they inherited from the French were lamentable. The front-line trenches were constructed of thin sandbagged parapets, far from bullet-proof, and with no sheltering parados to prevent shots striking from the rear. They were mere outposts grouped together at intervals with nothing to link them but a few shallow ditches, less than three feet deep, running back here and there to flimsy support positions behind. A few tumbledown dug-outs of wood and tarpaulin that were good enough to provide shelter from the rain would give much the same protection as umbrellas against bombardment.
A little way behind the front, on the western edge of the Gravenstafel Ridge, some unfinished trenches straggled across ground that was still littered with the unburied bodies of French and German soldiers killed six months ago in the First Battle of Ypres. The army referred to this sector as ‘Locality C’. Canadian working parties, given the distasteful task of scattering chloride of lime in an effort to smother the stench of corruption, referred to it in less printable terms.
But the one bright spot in this pathetically weak front was the deep belt of barbed wire entanglements that protected it and the French had depended on this, on machine-gun posts behind it, and on their excellent quick-firing .75 guns to defend it. And they had constructed another line, far stronger than the first. It was the line of last resort and it ran not far in front of Ypres, from Hill 60 to the Menin Road, across a gradual slope to pass north of Potijze, to encircle Wieltje and cross the low ridge between Mouse Trap Farm and Kitchener’s Wood. It was so far back that the British, dearly wishing when