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By Root 1677 0

shot, and then another chap would come along and do the same and I’d come back to another place and fire off again. That led his nibs across the road to figure that the trench was still fully occupied. Of course I was scared, but we were all very conscious of the responsibility and that we had to stay in the front line until the officer figured that the main part of the regiment had taken up the line at Frezenberg and Bellewaerde Ridge a few miles away. That was the idea. Eventually he came along and he said, very quietly, ‘All right, boys, I think they’ve had long enough now. We’ll be off, and he went along the line getting the men together. Out we got, into the communication trench and back to the main trench we had in Polygon Wood. Everything was quiet at first and then, after a minute, all hell broke loose because, as soon as they didn’t hear any more firing from the front line, the Germans figured that we were coming over. They thought it was the lull before the storm. Well, that hurried us on our way, all this firing going on behind us and bullets coming right through the wood, knocking twigs off the trees. But we never got a scratch, nobody got hit, and eventually we cleared the wood and started going across country to the new position. It didn’t take us as long as it did the main body of the Regiment because there weren’t so many of us. It took about an hour and we got there about maybe half past three in the morning.

Well, there were trenches, I suppose you could call them that, but they were only about two and a half feet deep because there had been no time to do any more, and the boys that were already there were trying to build up a parapet, filling sandbags and piling them along the trench, so we had to forget any idea we might have had about having a kip, because we had to start in too, digging and such. We didn’t get them very deep either before the next morning. It was a beautiful morning. It’s funny, but the weather we had during all that battle was beautiful, beautiful, beautiful weather. Next morning there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and pretty soon after it got light some German planes came over looking for us, and of course they’d found we’d gone by then but they had no idea before the morning, because all night and when we were going back, we’d heard them bombarding, wasting their shells on these empty trenches, and that gave us some satisfaction, even a laugh. But how they found us was this. When these planes came over and spotted us they dropped smoke bars over the side of the plane, and the German artillery officers would naturally have their glasses trained on the plane, you see, and these smoke bars came down in streaks and they just hung there above our position. No clouds, no wind to blow them away, they just hung there plumb above us – and then it started!

It started with the German infantry. It was the first time the Patricias had seen anything approaching open warfare and it was an impressive spectacle to see long lines of Germans pouring down over the Westhoek Ridge at the double – so impressive that some men incautiously stood up on the parapet to get a better view. As it approached, the great mass of grey-clad soldiers thinned, split, separated, and mounted officers galloped up and down the lines directing the deployment.

The Germans were beyond the range of rifles, and the guns that might have created havoc could not easily find the range from their new positions before the enemy went to ground and began to dig in. They had pushed machine-guns forward to protect them and they were firing at close quarters, raking the half-built parapets with streams of bullets that kept the Patricias’ heads well down. There was nothing they could do but grit their teeth and stick it out. And then the shelling began when the Germans had got the range. The ‘smoke bars’ had done the job well, and they had the range to the inch. The shallow trenches crumbled beneath the onslaught, machine-guns were buried, whole bays disappeared and, by the end of the day, 122 men had been hit.

It was the last and the worst