1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [145]
Under cover of the bombardment the infantry moved forward to jumping-off positions. At two o’clock precisely to the minute they began to advance. It was the only movement of the afternoon that went according to plan.
Major F. A. Robertson.
The idea had got about that the German trenches were two hundred yards away. When our front line went over the top they found that there was anything from twelve to fifteen hundred yards to go. Our artillery preparation had not at all shaken the nerves of the Germans, and the two British and four Indian regiments who led the way were absolutely mown down by rifles, machine-guns, and artillery of every calibre. The slaughter was cruel. It was men against every machine that frightfulness could devise. My bombers never even got to grips! It was a miracle that any men did manage to cross that wide shallow valley exposed to a torrent of fire from the German line on the rising ground beyond. Even the men who had started from behind the Hilltop Ridge were mown down in rows as they cleared the skyline. Heavy German Howitzers now had the range and whole platoons were being knocked out by a single massive shell. All across the shallow valley the dead and the dying were tossed into the air and dropped in mangled heaps.* But survivors of the leading waves pressed on until they were little more than a stone’s throw from the German wire a hundred yards beyond. A little to their left, where the French were attacking, luck was on the side of the Germans, for gas cylinders had been placed in front of it in preparation for an attack of their own. Like the Canadians four days earlier, the soldiers could see gas clouds passing across French troops, but this time, just as the gas enveloped their leading line, the wind shifted direction and slowly rolled the gas from west to east suffusing the ground where British and Indian soldiers were crouched on the slope beneath Mauser Ridge. All along the line the advance broke up.
Sgt. F. G. Udall, MM (2 Bars).
The Connaught Rangers went over first and we were waiting for the word to go forward, but within a few minutes we saw the Connaught Rangers leaving the line and coming back gassed. They were in no sort of order, and there was greenish colour about their clothing and they were coughing and staggering and some of them were dropping down on the way. I remember hearing an NCO shouting at them, ‘Don’t let the Territorials beat you!’ And many of the Connaught Rangers actually turned round and went back again to their line. Then it came to our turn to advance, so over we went and for the first time we used the entrenching tools for what they were made for and we dug ourselves in within a few hundred yards of Jerry with our entrenching tools. This was at Buffs Road, Hilltop Farm. But the attack seemed to have withered out and we were withdrawn after that. In the evening they came round for burial parties and I volunteered. We buried nine or ten who’d been hit the previous day while we were getting into position. And we’d left plenty more than that behind us in the line!
But the handful of survivors of the Manchesters and Connaughts, Sikhs and Pathans, still clung to the ground they had reached close up to the German wire. The slightest movement brought a fresh tornado of fire from machine-guns on the ridge. But they tended their wounded as best they could. At night guides were sent out to bring the survivors back. More than fifteen hundred casualties were left behind – and most of them were dead. The Colonels of three battalions had been killed and two other Commanding Officers wounded. The Connaught Rangers had lost all their officers. So had the Pathans. But, once again, the Germans