1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [287]
Gas was an unknown quantity. The waiting troops had worn their masks rolled up and pulled the hoods down as ordered ten minutes before zero. Already it was hard to breathe. When the gas cloud rolled back to engulf the first line of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers it was not surprising that they faltered and hung back. Piper Laidlaw had saved the situation. Tearing off his own mask, leaping on the parapet, he played the pipes for all he was worth. He hardly knew what he was playing but the skirl of the pipes had done the trick. One by one, in a trickle and then in a flood, the men pulled themselves together, clambered over the parapet and began to run across towards the German wire. Machine-guns opened up and sprayed across their lines as they loomed out of the smoke.*
But across most of the 15th Division front the wind had been favourable, the Germans were demoralised, and the Scots battered and bayoneted their way across the first of their lines and swept on into the valley. By nine o’clock they had covered a quarter of a mile and were fighting in the village of Loos.
On their right, where the 47th Division were to seize the Double Crassier and extend to capture the southern outskirts of Loos, the London Territorials were well on the way to success. By the time Frank Moylan jumped off in the second wave, they had already captured the German front line.
Cpl. F. Moylan.
A and Β Companies took the front line. C and D were to go through them and take the second one. I was in C. We had the furthest to go. Now, war is peculiar. C Company had the fewest casualties and went the furthest distance. Β Company lost every officer – the whole lot on the right, a hell of a lot, got killed. We were lucky. We’d found gaps in the wire. It was all a matter of luck. There’s a tremendous amount of luck in war, you know.
We went up the night before this attack. We were pretty tight in the trench and we sat down on the floor of it. I’d got somebody in between my legs and somebody else behind me had got me in between his legs. There was a fellow named Brockhurst behind me and a man named Emersfield in front of me and Emersfield got cramp and it meant we both had to get up and we changed positions. I was in front then and Emersfield was in the middle. We had ladders in the trench to go up, and when it came to the time we went over and we hadn’t got very far when this chap Emersfield flopped down. Must have been a machine-gun bullet. Of course, he was where I would have been if we hadn’t changed places! I remember thinking that as I saw him go down.
In an attack the whole thing seems a bit like a dream. It doesn’t take as long as you think. Crossing No Man’s Land, you imagine beforehand what a hell of a journey that’s going to be – but it’s not, and either the Germans are dead or there’s no one there. There were a lot of our dead in No Man’s Land as we crossed and more at the places where they’d arrived at the wire and it wasn’t cut. Then they were just sitting ducks. We just went through gaps in the wire, but we weren’t in the first wave luckily.
We got to the German front line and they were mopping it up – there were prisoners there being mustered, and there were dead lying about. Then we got to the second line and they’d gone from there. Where we were the gas blew over the Germans and that may have driven them out of that second line. There were some dug-outs there and we went down one of them – deep, long, steep it was, very well made –