1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [130]
The previous day when they had been brought up towards the line, the raw inexperienced troops of the 50th Northumbrian Division had only been intended to act as reserves. Now that every man of the reserves was needed, raw or not, they were pushed up into the salient and ordered to press on through the shelling to the front line.
L/cpl. J. Dorgan.
We suffered many casualties on the road up, many, many casualties. I remember a shell dropping when we were lying behind a hedge, and two men had both their legs taken off. One lived a few minutes, the other lived about half an hour. One was called Jackie Oliver and the other was Bob Young. Bob Young was the first to go. When he was hit he said, ‘Will you take my wife’s photograph out of my pocket?’ He was sensible to the last and jokingly, as I thought, he kept saying to me, he says, Tut my legs straight.’ Well, he’d no legs to put straight, and I just made a movement, touched the lower part of his body. What could I do? He died with his wife’s photograph in his hand.
Jackie Oliver had a brother in our Battalion and I shouted to our fellows who had to leave me with these two wounded men, Tell Weedy Oliver his brother’s wounded.’ He never recovered consciousness but eventually, some time later, Weedy Oliver came back and was with his brother when he died. No doctors available. No first aid available. I don’t know where they were, because our Battalion was still advancing towards the front line. I just had to leave them. I don’t know where they were buried. I never saw them or heard of them again. I had to go as fast as I could to catch up with our Battalion.
We went on and on and, as we went up the Canadians and the Highlanders were retreating from the front line because they had been under gas. There was no gas-masks, nothing for gas casualties, and all they had on was their bandage out of their first aid kit which every soldier carried in a pocket in his tunic, and they had these bandages on their eyes and there they went staggering back. Gas never affected me and there was fellows dropping behind all the time – I must have been one of the lucky ones. We came to the reserve trenches, but we didn’t recognise them as trenches, nobody in them, they were all retired. So we just jumped over, but we never reached the front line. The gas was too dense and then we had to retire. We never reached St Julien. I think we only got as far as St Jean but, wherever it was, we had to retire from there. We didn’t come out of the line for four days.
The Canadians had finally ‘budged’ – but only some of them, only in the last resort, and only because the odds against them were not humanly possible to overcome. But, on either side of the gap in the line they had left, others like Jim Keddie were fighting on, manning the parapets with rifles, blazing machine-gun fire to break up the German ranks as they closed in ahead of them, swinging round to pour crossfire on the enemy soldiers as they attempted to advance to ‘Locality C’. As soon as the situation was known in the scattered batteries every available gun joined in the fight to beat them off. The Germans took heavy punishment, but they had twenty-four Battalions against the Canadians’ eight to envelop the angle of the line that ran in front of Gravenstafel and swung back in front of St Julien to Kitchener’s Wood, with a dangerous gap in the eastern face where the Royal Highlanders of Canada had been forced to retire and part of the 3rd Battalion had been overrun in the first onslaught.
L/cpl. J. W. Finnimore, 3rd Bn., 1st Canadian Brig., 1st Canadian Div.
I’d only been four years in Canada when the war started. Before that I was an apprentice at Woolwich Arsenal, but times were slack and I knew perfectly well that as soon as my time was out and I reached twenty-one I would be sacked. It didn’t seem worth waiting around