1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [166]
You didn’t have much chance. I was hit with a shell splinter and I was just laying there in the trench, what there was of it, and Lieutenant Papeneau came along. He was a wonderful man from Quebec. He came from one of the oldest French-Canadian families, so he came along, and he had his automatic in his hand ready for the Germans to come on, but he stopped and knelt down beside me. One of my buddies had already ripped my puttees off and slit my pants down because I was hit in the leg and my leg had started to swell. Lieutenant Papeneau looked at it and he shoved a cigarette in my mouth and lit it, and he said, ‘Don’t worry, Vaughan, we’ll get you out just as fast as we can.’ I said, ‘That’s fine, sir.’ But I lay there for six hours. That’s as fast as they could get me out. Six hours! I was lucky to get out at all. One fellow had just been leaning over talking to me and he stood up and the next minute he got it, and he fell down dead nearly on top of me. That really upset me because he was one of the married men. In fact that’s when I began to get scared. It was all hell let loose, and laying there at the foot of that trench you didn’t know what was going on – except that it was bad!
Now that the Patricias’ front line had been withdrawn the support line was literally the line of last resort – and things were bad. But they were not so bad as they might have been. The 4th Rifle Brigade, in reserve in the lee of the Bellewaerde Ridge, took advantage of a brief pause in the shelling and managed to send forward a company to help out. They walked upright, for they were heavy laden, and the Patricias cheered them on as they came. ‘I don’t know if there were angels at Mons,’ remarked one soldier later, ‘but we saw angels that day at Bellewaerde, and they had RB on their shoulders.’ They brought boxes of ammunition, and, best of all, two machine-guns. And they also brought hope and fresh heart to the hard-pressed Patricias, for it was not enough merely to save their line – already it was clear that it was up to them to save the day.
Hamilton Gault, wounded for the second time in two hours, and this time seriously, was forced to send a message to Captain Adamson instructing him to take command of the Patricias in the line. He hardly needed to add that he must hold on ‘at all costs’. But the situation was worsening by the minute. Adamson himself was wounded and as he crawled along the line, supervising the setting-up of the machine-guns, and handing out rifle ammunition, he was well aware that there was a huge gap in the line on their left. Cautiously raising his head to scan the Frezenberg Ridge, even through clouds of swirling smoke he could see British troops of the 28th Division streaming back to the rear. It could be only a matter of time before the Germans followed to take up the lost ground. When they did the Patricias would be out-flanked.
It was the line of the 83rd Brigade that had given way – only a small part of it, but enough to allow the enemy first to penetrate the gap then to widen it by creeping to the rear of the troops on either side. From the rear, through the smoke and confusion of the fighting, it was hard for Brigade Staff to make sense of the situation, but the sight of retiring troops told its own story and it was clear to the anxious Staff Officers that reinforcements attempting to cross the open slopes of the Frezenberg Ridge would either be mown down or entrapped in their turn. All that could be done was to pray that the flanks would hold, to stiffen the GHQ line, and to hope against hope that the small bodies of men still holding out would be able to contain the enemy until his assault ran out of steam and they could rally the men to counter-attack.
Much closer to the crumbling front, where Harry Crask crouched with the remnants of the signallers in the ruins of his Battalion HQ dug-outs, the position was no clearer.
Pte. H. J. Crask.
Not one of us knew what was happening