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By Root 1693 0

there for four days. Our left section of two guns did some experimental firing on barbed wire entanglements there. We heard that it was an exact replica of the German front line immediately in front of us in our old position. Dozens of Generals and Staff Officers came to watch us firing and after we’d finished they went to inspect the result. We practised and practised, and moved back to our old position on 2 May and on the night of 8 May we went into action right on the front-line parapet. Plenty of excitement. We are to cut the German barbed wire with our shrapnel shells the same as we experimented with at Merville in front of the Generals. We get the guns into position all right and cover them as best we can. I bet we will cop it hot here – there’s only about a hundred yards distance between ours and the enemy front line. All our gunners are eager for the fray. The 7th Battalion Middlesex Regiment are in the trenches behind us – they belong to the 8th Division and this is their first attack. We are to attack in the morning.

Not since the Battle of Omdurman had guns been deliberately positioned in the front line with the infantry, but desperate measures were called for if the battle was to be won. Guns were scarce. Ammunition was scarcer still and three weeks of fighting at Ypres had depleted reserve stocks to an alarming level. There were not enough guns and there were certainly not enough shells to cut the wire and batter the German line across the length of the battle-front, so a full-scale frontal attack was out of the question. It was useless, in the circumstances, to attempt to repeat the tactics employed across the same ground in the Battle of Neuve Chapelle two months earlier, and Sir Douglas Haig and his staff had come up with a new plan. The guns would be concentrated in two groups and, firing as fast and as hard as they could, would attempt to cut the wire and pierce the line in two places, on the left in front of Fromelles and on the right to the south of Neuve Chapelle and the Bois du Biez. Then the troops would dash through the gaps, fight their way beyond and sweep round across the Aubers Ridge in a pincer movement that would trap the Germans behind them. The troops had also been placed with care – the Meerut Division, well blooded and experienced, on the right, and the 8th Division two miles to the north. When the battle began every gun would be trained on the German line in front of them. The gunners would drive the breaches, but it was up to the hardened and experienced infantry to follow through and exploit the gains.

Between these two vital sectors the troops holding the front line that looped round Neuve Chapelle and ran north in front of Fauquissart to meet the 8th divisional sector were neither hardened nor experienced. The West Riding Territorials had been in France for exactly three weeks and two days but they had already had one casualty.

Cpl. A. Wilson, 1/5 Bn. (TF), West Yorkshire Regt.

We went more or less straight into the trenches in front of Aubers Ridge, about ten days before the battle. Of course it was all quiet then compared to what came later, with just the odd bit of shelling and sniping, and we went in in batches to get us accustomed to it. The very first night we were there my Company Commander, Captain Lansdale, was shot in the neck. He hadn’t been in the trenches half an hour and out he went! He wasn’t killed, or even very badly wounded, though I remember we were horrified seeing him streaming with blood. I wasn’t far away when it happened, but it could only have been a flesh wound. Anyway, out he went, and that was our first casualty. Strangely enough he came back several months later, again as our Company Commander, and he hadn’t been in the trenches another night when he was shot in the shoulder! We could hardly believe it! His total service in the trenches didn’t even amount to a day and he ended up with two wound stripes. We thought it was a great joke the second time it happened – of course we were a bit blasé by then – but the first time he never got anywhere near the