1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [162]
In peacetime this small stretch of high ground, this circle of low ridges that swelled up like an amphitheatre from the flat Flanders Plain, had been a desirable place to live – and there were half a dozen chateaux arid small country estates, in as many square miles. Their wealthy owners had planted woodlands, hedged off fields, made roads to link up farms, built chapels in the hamlets and laid out water-scapes and pleasure-grounds round their fine country mansions.
All but one of them were now in the hands of the Germans. Previously the allies standing round the salient had invariably had another ridge at their backs and the advantage of dead ground, invisible to the enemy, where supplies could be brought up and troops could move unobserved to and from the line. Bellewaerde was the smallest ridge of all – and it was the last. Beyond it the ground dipped to meet the flat-lands that ran round Ypres and rolled off into the distance to meet the sea.
Across the ridge behind the Patricias’ trenches a finger of woodland curved round the edge of an ornamental lake in the grounds of Hooge Chateau concealing it from view. This was a favourite spot of the Baron de Vinck for it was well stocked with fish and he enjoyed relaxing there on a summer’s evening, drifting in a small boat on its placid surface with the trout rising to his bait. Tame swans sailed on the lake, birds nested in the trees and across the grassy parkland peacocks screeched and strutted on the chateau terrace.
Now beneath the shattered gables and glassless windows the terrace was a mass of mud and debris. The swans and the peacocks had vanished. Down by the lake the boats lay sinking by a half-demolished jetty, and where the margins of the lake had been battered by shell-fire the water was gradually seeping away and trickling down the hill. Nevertheless the lake was a lake still, and lying as it did directly behind the Patricias’ trenches a few hundred yards away it would hamper them severely if they had to fall back in a hurry.
The King’s Royal Rifles who extended the line to the right of the Patricias were better placed and better hidden, for their trenches bent back to run through Chateau Wood, still as thick and lush with springtime green as when the baron or his son Yves had strolled in its leafy glades to bag a rabbit or a bird or two for the pot. The glades and rides were ploughed and trampled now by the passage of many soldiers but, like the rest of the 27th Division line curving south round the salient through well-wooded country, Chateau Wood provided useful cover. Beyond it, on the open ground on the extreme left of the 27th Division line, the Patricias had no cover at all and they were badly in need of it.
In the forty-eight hours they had been out of the line the Shropshires who replaced them had done their best to improve the trenches after their pounding by German guns, but they were still lamentable and in places barely three feet deep, for beneath a shallow layer of topsoil the ground was marsh and without considerable manpower, without time to plan and dig an elaborate drainage system, without pumps to discharge the water, a trench would flood and turn to ditch if they dug deeper. There were parapets of a kind to replace the breastworks destroyed by the first bombardment but sandbags were scarce, and the claggy earth that crumbled and slipped for want of support threatened to turn into mud at the first sign of rain. The tangle of wire stretched in front of the trenches was too thin and too meagre to make up for their deficiencies.
On their left the Patricias’ trenches rested on a country road that meandered gently up the slope past a scatter of isolated ruins to the village of Westhoek on the