1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [278]
It was a coalfield rather than a battlefield. In the centre of the sector, on the ridge that rose immediately above the British line, the Germans had constructed two redoubts in their front trench system. The Lens Road redoubt protected the main road that led to the large mining village of Lens, invisible behind rising ground and slag-heaps. The Loos Road redoubt, some few hundred yards to the north, straddled a country track from Vermelles to the smaller village of Loos across the valley. It was a strange landscape. Wide stretches of fields and farmland where the crops, unharvested when the fighting came in 1914, had seeded themselves and poked up tentative shoots round the trench-lines in the spring – soon trampled into the earth by the passage of troops and wagons on their way to the line. Behind Loos the ground rose to another ridge that carried a road from Lens to la Bassée, following the slope as the ridge dropped towards Hulluch and dropping with it to run arrow-straight to Auchy and the canal beyond. But the unmistakable landmarks were the mine workings and the slag-heaps the French called ‘crassiers’ that reared up among the villages behind the German line. From the long black fingers of the Double Crassier, across the front of the 47th London Division, to the dumps of the mines round Auchy four miles to the north, it was plain that they would be formidable obstacles. Even the foreign names were difficult for the British to grasp, but the French had originally drawn the trench maps so the Tommies had to put up with them. Not all the slag-heaps were ‘crassiers’. Some appeared as ‘fosse’ on the maps, and the mines themselves as ‘puits’. The nearest most Tommies could get to that was ‘pits’ – and by chance it was a literal translation.
The overhead workings that rose from a pit at Loos doubtless had another peculiar name, but this did not concern the Tommies. It was the most prominent landmark across the front, high twin pylons each topped with an ironwork turret and linked by a long iron walkway. Rearing up beside Loos village it reminded the Londoners forcibly of home. They christened it Tower Bridge.
The whole panorama was well behind the German lines, dug deep, well defended, and protected by what looked to the waiting troops like veritable forests of barbed wire.
In the wire in front of the British trenches gaps were to be stealthily cut during the night before the battle to make passages for the infantry to advance and to rush across No Man’s Land to the German trenches where, they fervently hoped, the wire entanglements that protected the Germans would have been cut to pieces by the guns. And guns had been brought up as close as possible to the front line to make sure that there would be no mistake. One was placed near the foot of the slope where the old road into Loos village was barred on the crest of the ridge by the formidable Loos Road redoubt.
Bdr. A. Dunbar, A Bty., 236 Brig., Royal Field Artillery.
After a busy time at Festubert and Givenchy my battery came into action not far from Vermelles, near the main road from Béthune to Loos. Preparations were obviously in hand for a big push. From our battery position we could see the towers of the Hulluch mine-workings, part of Hill 70 and the Double Crassier nearby. Beyond this and out of our sight was the town of Loos. We suspected that it would be one of the objectives in the attack. My gun was detached from the battery and was to be used only on the day of the opening attack for cutting the wire of the enemy’s trenches to provide spaces through which our infantry could advance. For this to be effective the gun had to be taken as near to the target as possible so that the trajectory of the shrapnel shell and its bullets would be almost parallel to the ground when the shell burst so as to do the maximum damage to the wire.
Alongside the main road and about a mile in front of the other guns of