1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [129]
The Germans had made the most of the twenty-four hours’ breathing space, and they were thinking on their feet, because the gas attack had been a tactical experiment and had not figured in their overall strategy as the preliminary to a full-scale planned campaign. But the opportunity presented by such remarkable success was too tantalising to resist. Their misfortune was that no reserves had been on hand to exploit it to the full. Even now there were few reserves to call on for their own casualties had not been small and the counter-attacks had taken them by surprise and even demoralised their troops.*
The best that could be done in the short term was to depend on heavy artillery fire to soften the British front and create havoc in Ypres, to fight on at Steenstraat and Lizerne, and to warn the tired troops facing the British defensive flank to dig in and stand fast. Even though these troops were in the best position to make a successful assault they were in no fit state to undertake it. But there was still the gas, and with gas they could repeat their success. On 23 April, all during the hours of daylight, through the dusk and on into the dark, while their big guns fired incessantly, the Germans moved up field guns and trench mortars to support their captured front and dug in fresh gas cylinders in front of the Canadians in their unbroken original line still facing them to the east. This time the Germans were determined to make no mistake and to give themselves ample time to press home their advantage.
The wind was steady and blowing in the right direction. Long before dawn they began to bombard the Canadians’ vulnerable line. An hour later the gas cylinders were opened and the gas was released across the centre of their front. It was four o’clock in the morning and the moon behind the flashes of the guns had barely begun to wane in the night sky when the first fumes drifted across. Drifting ghostly and lurid in the dim light in a bank fifteen feet high, it rolled across the wire and engulfed the Canadians in the makeshift trenches inherited from the French. They had nothing to protect them from the gas – only handkerchiefs, towels, even cotton bandoliers, hastily clapped across mouth and nose, and soon there was no time even for that, for the enemy was advancing in the wake of the fumes and the men who had not immediately collapsed had to mount the parapets to meet them. Only where the gas was thickest in front of part of Jim Keddie’s 48th Highlanders did the line give way after a bitter fight.
L/cpl. J. D. Keddie.
Just before 4 a.m. on the 24th we managed to get a mouthful of rum each. We had no sooner got it down than the enemy started an attack, beginning with gas. They then began to shell the reserve trenches, and they did it to some tune. You could hardly get breath for the concussion! They also had the range, and the loss of life was awful, and oh, the horrors, the sights were dreadful. One poor beggar came along crying for someone to tie up his arm. Nobody seemed to care for the job, so I got hold of him and did my best. The arm was completely off up to the elbow – a fearful sight. While I was attending to him, I got a flesh wound on the head, and, Lord, did it bleed! But it wasn’t sore. I’d fired about a hundred and fifty rounds by this time, and I’d sent two men to get more ammunition. I saw them coming back and they only had about thirty yards to go when one of them was shot right through the head. Well, I knew the other couldn’t carry it himself, so I crawled out to give him a lift, and on my way I got it through the sole of my right foot. It wasn’t very painful at the time. We got the box of ammunition to the trench somehow, then I looked for the quickest way to a First Aid Station