1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [235]
But Major Cowan stifled his qualms and Cassels set to work. In the afternoon of 19 July, with less than five hours to go before zero, he reported that the job was finished and the mine was ready to blow. Cowan immediately left for the line to see the show.
Major S. H. Cowan.
At 2.30 p.m. Hart and I set out. We motored to Ypres and left the car close to the old Lille gate. Then up by a road I’m seriously beginning to dislike. Luckily there was no shrapnel, but even before we got to the village (Zillebeke) we got into the belt of country where all the German bullets which come over the top of our parapets generally settle down – hence their name ‘overs’. It’s a funny sound, an ‘over’, a high-pitched whining buzz followed by a ‘whit’ into the earth or a louder noise against a tree or a wall. Shrapnel is my pet abomination when in the open. They are quite pretty to watch when their noise increases and then diminishes, but if it keeps on increasing most people prefer the view of a ditch dry or wet.
At Hooge I found everything all right, but everyone very excited. I tested our firing leads – they were OK – and gave my final orders to Cassels, then went back for a thousand yards to join the Brigadier whose men were to do the attack.
The charge was due to blow at seven o’clock just as the sun was sinking. The last few days had been showery but although it was a fine evening, Lieutenant Cassels was in no position to admire the sunset. Counting the minutes to zero as he crouched in a dug-out not far from the front line, he was waiting to fire the charge, when, with minutes to go, the worst happened. A German shell bursting close by ruptured the electrical leads that ran from the dug-out, down the shaft and along the tunnel to fire the mine. With trembling hands Cassels tested the leads. They tested negative.
It was the signaller-corporal scrabbling frantically round the edge of the smoking shell-crater who found the break, and it was providential that the leads were cut clean and were speedily mended. There was a minute to go now. Watching anxiously from Brigade Headquarters Major Cowan was sweating.
Major S. H. Cowan.
A shell arrived near the work, and for two centuries my hair stood on end. But in eight actual seconds there was a cloud of smoke and dirt five hundred feet high, and an explosion and a real shake, even under our very feet. Then Hell was let loose and for twenty minutes every gun we had made a curtain of fire just beyond our objective.
If the ground shook a thousand yards from the line it positively rocked beneath Cassels’s dug-out. He was stunned. The explosion was far greater than anything he had imagined. Tons of earth, bricks, stones, rose into the air. Uprooted trees whirled like matchsticks in the smoke. Bricks, timber, iron bars, whole slabs of concrete were tossed sky-high in a shower of splintered rifles and fragments of flesh and bones, and even the guns that immediately opened up could not muffle the crash and rumble of debris falling back round the colossal crater.
It was an awesome sight.
Chapter 28
The crater was a hundred and twenty feet wide; it was twenty feet deep and the lip on the circumference was more than twice the height of an extremely tall man. The main redoubt was blown out of existence and the second was damaged and buried, just as Cassels had hoped. Unfortunately, the fountain of debris had also buried a dozen men of the 4th Middlesex waiting to dash forward to capture the crater, and waiting a little too far ahead.