1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [178]
The stretcher-bearers, as always, had done sterling work and they had rescued most of the wounded, for the men of the second waves and succeeding attempts had been hit as they advanced from the assembly trenches across open ground.
Pte. L. Mitchell 24th Field Ambulance, 8 Div.
I did my share of bringing men off the battle-field but by the time it came to Aubers Ridge I’d been transferred to the nursing Division, working in the main dressing station a little way back from the line. I remember watching the infantry going up for the battle and they were singing ‘We beat the Germans every time, we beat the Germans at Mons. We beat the Germans at Neuve Chapelle and now we’re going to give them hell.’ They weren’t singing the same at the end of the battle. It was a real disaster, that attack was. The Germans smashed the whole thing up.
Our division, the 8th Division, had the heaviest casualties of any of the divisions that took part in the attack and it was an appalling affair. For three days we never stopped dressing the wounded men as they were brought in, and at the end of those three days we still had something like sixty or seventy stretcher cases outside. We just didn’t know what to do with them. The Major I was with dropped on the floor exhausted and I had to give an anaesthetic for the removal of an arm and I had never given an anaesthetic in my life. I didn’t actually see very many die because as soon as you dressed them they were taken out and put in ambulances and lorries and taken away down to the Casualty Clearing Stations. The vehicles were packed jam-full, and sometimes they were coming back full from the Casualty Clearing Stations because they were full up and the ambulance drivers didn’t know where to take the wounded.
I never saw any attack with so many men who had bullet wounds as at Aubers Ridge. The Germans just mowed them down and most of the bullet wounds were through the legs. We had a lot of splinting to do, splinting, splinting, splinting. But one man was brought in with his face covered with a bandage and when the Major came in to look at him and see what was the matter he went out and was violently sick. When he took the bandages off we saw the man had no eyes, no nose, no chin, no mouth – and he was alive! The Sergeant called me and said, ‘The doctor says I’ve got to give him four times the usual dose of morphia.’ And I said, ‘You know what that will do, don’t you?’ And he said, ‘Yes. And I can’t do it. I’m ordering you to do it.’ So I had to go in and give him four times the dose of morphia. I laid a clean bandage on his face and stayed with him until he died. That stayed in my memory for a very long time. It stays in it now.
It isn’t very nice to go and kill a man, is it? And I had to do it again after that. A man was brought to us with a piece of steel, a big chunk of shell, sticking out of his breast-bone and sticking out of his back. He also had an arm smashed up and very severe head wounds – and he was still alive, how I don’t know because the steel was running right through him. Well it was quite impossible to do anything for him, and I was only too glad to put him out of his misery. Of course I didn’t do it off my own bat. The Officer tells you to do it and you do it – but you don’t forget! When I got home after the war I sometimes used to have a nightmare and wake up in the night thinking my arms were covered with blood. It wore off eventually.
For the troops like the West Yorks who remained in the line, the most enduring memory was the sight of the countless rows of dead. The battlefield was one vast charnel house and although many bodies lay where they had been struck down between assembly or support trenches and the British front line, so long as the German machine-gunner ruled the battlefield it was risky work to attempt to bring them in for decent burial.
It was a beautiful