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By Root 1695 0

of the morning Major Petrie himself had come to the observation post with the Observing Officer, anxious to see the bombardment and the battle for himself. The OP was crowded. The atmosphere was tense, but it was the tension of excitement for every man in the battery from the major downwards was thrilled at the prospect of taking part in the real war at last. From their post on the main road Tennant and Vallender had watched the build-up to the battle as the fighting troops trudged past towards the trenches. They were behind the Indians and their guns were to help to pave the way for the assault of the Meerut Division. In the last few days the fields and orchards round the village had been transformed into a panorama of the East that would not have been out of place on an Indian cantonment and from the tall bearded Sikhs to the cheerful little Gurkhas the Indians were a source of endless and colourful interest. They were troops of the Garhwal Brigade waiting in reserve for the coming battle.

Gnr. N. Tennant.

I can remember how excited I was that night. We all were. Of course, in the run-up to the bombardment – our first bombardment – there was no question of going to sleep. We couldn’t have slept anyway! You had the feeling that something tremendous was going to happen. Of course we had no idea what it was and we’d been told nothing. I hadn’t the faintest inkling that they were going for Aubers Ridge. I’d never heard of Aubers Ridge and I didn’t hear it mentioned for a long time afterwards. All we knew was that we were going to take part in the big breakthrough and we were going to push right through to Lille. That’s all we were told. I didn’t even know that the French were attacking too. We were raw and inexperienced, but we were wildly enthusiastic and we had no doubt that we were well on the way to winning the war!

Not all the gunners were so sanguine as the enthusiastic new arrivals.

Bdr. W. Kemp.

When the ammunition came up it was sealed in strong heavy boxes which could only be opened by hefty men with pickaxes, and it took some time. There were not many rounds. Next week the Battery was turned out one night to unload ammunition. There was one wagon and when it was all unloaded there were ten rounds – and they were all armour-piercing shells from the coast defence batteries. That’s all they could give us. We didn’t find it reassuring. We thought it was a disgrace.

The heavy guns were intended to fire on specific targets where strongpoints had been spotted in the German line. The task of the massed field-guns was to batter the line itself, to cut the coiled barbed wire that protected it and to carve a passage for the infantry. The bombardment was timed to last for thirty minutes rising for the last ten to a crescendo of concentrated fire. It had worked initially at Neuve Chapelle, and although reports had indicated that the Germans had now improved their line Sir Douglas Haig had little doubt that it would work again.

The full extent of the ‘improvements’ was not visible from the air. Pilots, and even observers on the flat ground opposite, could see that the belts of wire were thicker than before but they could hardly guess that beyond them lay another obstacle. The breastwork parapets of the trenches had been built up and widened – they were seven feet high and as much as fifteen, even twenty feet across. It had all taken a prodigious amount of labour and throughout March and April hundreds of working parties from troops supposedly at rest, helped by squads of recruits brought from depots as far away as Lille, had shifted incalculable tons of earth to fill the sandbags that made up the new defences. Between the parapets and the visible belt of wire the excavations they had left behind were filled with sunken barbed wire, close-coiled and lethal. Even if the outlying belts of wire were blown away these man-traps lay beyond. They were invisible. And they were almost indestructible.

The trench-defences were constructed with equal skill and forethought. Every few yards in both parapet and parados large wooden