1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [222]
A month had wrought many changes. Chateau Wood, the lake, the farm, the ridge itself that Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry had fought so hard to hold, were now part of the German defence system. Their front line now ran along the farther edge of Y Wood to the top of Railway Wood. It was linked by a web of communication trenches to two other fortified trench-lines, one midway up the slope, the other on the crest of the ridge itself. Even Hooge Chateau was in the hands of the Germans – if it could still be called a chateau now that only two walls were left standing. A stone’s throw from it, no more than fifty yards away, the British held on to the chateau stables and to the pulverised brick heaps that were the ruins of Hooge village. But they only just held them, for here the line looped out across the Menin Road and swept back in a deep semi-circle across the fields to Zouave Wood, and round again to Birr Crossroads. It was a nasty kink in the line for, as the British trenches ran back, so the German line ran forward, curving across the lower slopes of the ridge with all the advantage of high ground behind them. The task of the 3rd Division was to straighten the line and capture it. Between and beyond the two small woods that marked the limits of the attack, the slopes were entirely open with little dead ground and no cover. Captain McKinnell had been right in surmising that it would be a difficult job.
But hopes were high. This time a good deal of thought had been given to the possibility of a breakdown in communications, and lines as far back as brigade headquarters had been laid in triplicate. Eight rows of jumping-off trenches were prepared, so that consecutive waves could move speedily into action, but they were dug, unavoidably, in full view of the enemy, and the enemy had conveyed his displeasure by shelling them by day as fast as the working-parties had dug them by night. They were still discernible as shallow tracings on the ground, but they offered little shelter to the assaulting troops as they waited uncomfortably for morning. The attack was timed for dawn.
The barrage started just before three o’clock and, for once, it was a good one with sufficient high-explosive shells to wreak havoc on the German trenches, and the noise of the shells flying close overhead, the boom of explosions not far ahead, was a distinct comfort to the men, crouching tense and sleepless, waiting for the guns to lift, for the first light of dawn above the Bellewaerde Ridge, for the sound of the whistles that would send them over the top. Seasoned soldiers though they were, after four months in France, not a single man of the 3rd Division had gone over the top before. Excitement hung so thick in the air that it might have been cut with a knife.
At zero hour the first wave went over the top and took the German front line with ease.
The bombardment had done its work. The German wire was shattered. The enemy was in disarray. The barrage had lifted from the first German line to start thundering on the next, and the second wave was waiting to go. When the signal came they were to rush forward to follow the first wave, now in the front enemy trench, and to pass through them and over it to attack the next one. When the signal came the 1st Battalion of the Lincolnshire Regiment went forward with the Liverpool Scottish to do the job. Captain Bryden McKinnell led Y Company across the open ground, through the skeleton trees on the edge of Y Wood, and started up the slope past the communication trenches where a few cowering German soldiers had been cut off by the barrage. They should have halted there,