1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [241]
I remember having a strong presentiment as I plodded up to the line that night that I should never come back from it alive. (In the event I was the only officer in my company to survive the next twenty-four hours.) We had two or three miles to cover before we reached the line, with the delays inevitable to troops moving over strange ground in the dark, and the difficulty of getting into the broken-down trenches while the 7th Battalion was getting out of them was even greater. I remember feeling certain that the tramp of feet and the clatter of rifles must have given the show away. I need not have worried – we knew afterwards that the Boche learned from more reliable sources when a relief was to take place! There was very little shelling on the way up – for which we were duly thankful! – but the absence of snipers’ bullets as we filed up the communication trench from Zouave Wood was more surprising, and the silence after we got into the line became uncanny.
About an hour after we were settled in and the last of the 7th Battalion had disappeared into the darkness I decided that a bomb or two lobbed over into the Boche trench running close to my own near the crater might disturb him if he were up to mischief. So I got one of the bombers to throw over a hand grenade which looked as if it carried about the right length. It exploded well. We waited. No reply. He sent over two more. ‘This ought to rouse them,’ we said. But again, no reply. There was something sinister about this. It was now about half an hour before dawn and the order for the usual morning ‘stand-to’ came through from the Company Commander. I started on the extreme right of my bit of the line to ensure that all my men were lining the trench with their swords fixed. Working down gradually I decided to go on along the stretch of trench which bent back from the German line almost in the form of a communication trench. There were servants and some odd men from my platoon in so-called ‘shelters’ along there, and I wanted to make sure that these people who are apt to be forgotten at ‘stand-to’ were all on the alert. Just as I was getting to the last of these there was a sudden hissing sound, and a bright crimson glare over the crater turned the whole scene red. As I looked I saw three or four distinct jets of flame, like a line of powerful fire-hoses spraying fire instead of water, shoot across my fire-trench. For some moments I was utterly unable to think. Then there was a terrific explosion and almost immediately afterwards one of my men with blood running down his face stumbled into me coming from the direction of the crater. Then every noise under Heaven broke out! There were trench mortars and bombs in our front trench, machine-guns firing, shrapnel falling over the communication trenches and over the open ground between us and the support line in Zouave Wood and high explosive shells all round the wood itself.
It was impossible to get up the trench towards the crater, so I got out of the trench to try to get a better idea of the situation. The first thing I saw was men jumping over the edge of the crater in C Company’s trench and, deciding that they must be Boches, I told the few survivors of my platoon to open fire on them, which they promptly did. But by this time the Boches were in my bit of trench as well, and we saw that my handful of men couldn’t possibly get back into it, and it was a death-trap to stay where we were under a shrapnel barrage. MacAfee, our Company Commander, had rushed up for a hasty consultation, and he reluctantly gave the order for me to get the remnant of my platoon back to the support line. About a dozen men of 2 Platoon were all that I could find, and we started back over the open. (Those who had faced the flame attack were never seen again.)
A retirement is a miserable business, but I have nothing but praise for the men in this one. There was nothing approaching a run, and every few yards they lay down and fired at any Boches we could see coming over into our line. There was a matter of four hundred yards of open ground to cover