• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1787 0

we lose an enormous lot of men in doing it and those who do get there are promptly blown up by mines left there while the enemy retires to another line of trenches a few yards to the rear from which he makes the hard-won trench untenable. Moreover, the advance, unless successful over a very long section of the line, is no use as it merely creates a dangerous salient liable to enfilade by artillery and machine-guns from the flanks. Such a position has been created just in front of us where we were from the 19th to the 24th December and our own 1st Battalion had a terrible time. The trench they were holding was a very bad one (the water up to the men’s waists in places) and owing to the retiral of some Indian troops on their flank, they were left practically ‘in air’. But they held on for nine days until they were relieved by another Battalion who – I’m sorry to have to say it – after two hours evacuated the trench as utterly untenable!

The hostile trenches are now in many places so close together that the war is almost reverting to continuous hand-to-hand fighting. I was told of an incident the other day when a double company (nominally two hundred men) of the HLI – after a long burst of fire repelling an attack – had only nineteen rifles working at the end of it.

But for the majority of the troops, dodging bullets and exploding shells as they shivered in the mud flats, there was nothing for it but to dig and bail, to bail and dig, slogging through the mud in the dark as they laboured to build defences.

Cpl. A. Letyford.

1.2.15 to 5.2.15 Go up to the trenches each night making continuous breastworks. Have a hundred infantry working with us each night. We lose a few of the working-party killed by snipers. Came unexpectedly on a German listening post last night whilst searching in front of breastworks.

6.2.15 I go with second relief at 9.30 p.m. Continue breastworks and meet no. 4 section, so that now the work is completed from Festubert to Givenchy. We have thus advanced about six hundred yards without fighting.

This achievement was duly noticed and reported triumphantly in the war news columns of the press. It doubtless cheered up the people at home but, to the troops, one muddy position was very much like another and, as the casualties mounted and men sank wounded and dying into the swamp, as the hospitals filled up with men sick with fever and crippled with rotting feet, a six-hundred-yard advance was nothing to write home about or even anything like sufficient compensation for their efforts.

The population of Great Britain, with a century of Empire building behind them, was accustomed to regarding even large-scale wars as distant affairs that could safely be left in the hands of professional soldiers. But now their own boys were in khaki, milling around in camps and training grounds as they prepared to go to the front, and Sir Maurice Hankey was not alone in realising that when the new armies took the field people at home would take a keener and more personal interest in the conduct of the war as they followed the fortunes of their nearest and dearest. This new army, the battering ram that was to smash the German defences, must be properly used. The new recruits were of high calibre, volunteers motivated by a desire to do something positive for their country, unlike most peacetime recruits. Few of the men who joined the ranks of the Regular Army prior to the war were drawn to enlist for love of a uniform or the seductive call of fife and drum, but they were professionals to a man, so highly trained and skilled in the arts of soldiering that they were second to none. They could fire fifteen rounds a minute, and fifteen aimed rounds at that, and six months earlier they had fired their rifles to such effect at Mons that the Germans still genuinely believed that they had been met by machine-guns. But there were precious few Regulars left, and the thinned-out ranks of the old army could never have held out since November had it not been for the Territorials who, strictly speaking, had no business to be there at all.