1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [21]
The troops themselves displayed some ingenuity in supplying the deficiency. Dumps were scoured for empty jam tins and the engineers, who had passed most of the night improving the defences in the line, spent hours during the day filling them with old nails, tamped down with gun cotton to make primitive bombs. The bright sparks of the 15th Field Company Royal Engineers of the 24th Brigade even manufactured a trench mortar. It was only a length of drainpipe soldered up at one end with a touch-hole bored above it and was ignited with a match and gunpowder. But it fired the jam-tin bombs a good distance towards the Germans and, despite a few unfortunate accidents in the course of its erratic performance, it cheered the troops wonderfully.
A battalion of the Cambridgeshires in Plugstreet Wood* acquired an even more primitive weapon – a replica of an ancient catapult, designed by a professor of history at Cambridge University. He was an acquaintance of their Commanding Officer to whom he eagerly canvassed the merits of the catapult in screeds of sketches and instructions. It could throw bombs or even boulders at a push, and it could throw them a long distance. The Romans, he added, had used an identical weapon with satisfactory results to batter down the wooden gates of rebellious cities, and he was convinced that it could be used with equal success against the German trenches. It seemed worth a try. Working parties were organised, first to scrounge suitable timber, then to construct the catapult itself. It took several days and two more nights of strenuous work to build an emplacement and dig the monster in. It was more than seven feet long, and being constructed of hefty beams filched from shell-torn buildings, it weighed several hundredweight. But the Tommies were less practised than the Romans in the art of catapulting, and any missiles they managed to fire as often as not fell harmlessly to the ground or, worse, back on their own heads. The experiment was abandoned, the Colonel tore up the design in disgust and the Tommies chopped up the Roman weapon for firewood.
But although it was impractical, the idea of the catapult as a weapon of siege warfare was not entirely inappropriate, but many months would pass and many men would die before people would understand that siege warfare was exactly what the Army was engaged in. Their faith was still vested in the cavalry, now dismounted and valiantly, if not uncomplainingly, suffering the indignities of working-parties as they waited for the breakthrough that would send them charging through the German lines, scattering all before them as they rode non-stop to Berlin.
But not everyone shared such sanguine expectations. Lloyd George had been disquieted by his recent visit to France where he had observed the effects of the impasse at first hand in both British and French sectors, and a meeting with General Joffre had given him food for thought. Joffre had been adamant that the Germans would never succeed in breaking his lines, not even if they outnumbered the French by two or even three to one, and he reminded Lloyd George that even the thinly held line round Ypres had not given way in the face of the German onslaught of recent weeks. Lloyd George took the point but, although he kept his opinion to himself, he reflected soberly that the opposite was equally true and that the allies had just as little chance of breaching the line held by the Germans.
Lt. C. Tennant.
The war in the western area has reached a pretty disgusting phase. The opposing trenches are very close to each other – in some cases not more than twenty yards apart and there we sit facing each other and killing each other by every possible means. Attacks on each other’s trenches are as often as not absolutely useless. If we rush a German trench