1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [305]
The difficulties were just as bad on the main Béthune to Lens road, the vital highway to the line at Loos. It was still being shelled; its surface was so broken and cratered, so littered with dead and the debris of shattered wagons, so choked with streams of wounded, that it had taken hours of sweat and labour to get even a few guns forward and it was almost impossible to get ammunition through. There would not be nearly enough of either to support the new attack on Hill 70. The bombardment was due to begin at eight o’clock in the morning. An hour later the infantry would go into the attack.
At First Army Headquarters at Hinges it was difficult to appreciate the shifting circumstances that prevailed at the battle-front, for they were beyond description. It would have required hours of study to analyse and weigh up the dispatches of seven separate divisions, which had themselves been compiled from the reports of twenty-one brigades, summing up the position – so far as they could judge it – of eighty-four confused and disorganised battalions. Only time, patience, and the exercise of considerable leaps of imagination and intuition, might have resulted in an omniscient grasp of how matters stood. On the maps on which staff officers had so scrupulously drawn the advanced line, battalions stood neatly ranged in their supposed positions as lead soldiers might be ranged for a set-piece battle. Naturally, they were aware that there had been casualties, and Major General McCracken had made it clear in his report from 15th Divisional Headquarters that his division was in no fit state to renew the assault in the morning, but his objections had been overcome. The 62nd Brigade would be detached from the 21st Division to assist him. The advance must be pressed, and before it could go forward, Hill 70 must be retrieved. With that he had to be satisfied.
Tower Bridge had caught it badly during the night. Its battered twin towers were hidden in the mist. But loose iron girders creaked and clanked in the morning breeze above the Northumberland Fusiliers shivering in rough and ready trenches in a field not far away. They had been waiting and shivering for two tedious hours before orders reached them not long before the bombardment began at eight o’clock. Colonel Harry Warwick summoned the company officers to the shack that served as Battalion Headquarters. Two battalions, their sister battalion the 13th Northumberland Fusiliers and the 8th East Yorks, were to follow in immediate support of the 45th Brigade of the 15th Division. Their own role was to follow two hundred yards behind, attacking on either side of the track that led to Hill 70 redoubt. No track was marked on their maps, the ground was unfamiliar, and the Colonel could only point out the general direction and wish them luck. David Graham-Pole returned to C Company to pass on the orders and warn his men to stand by. Harry Fellowes was not ready. His Lewis gun which had been loaded on to the transport had not yet reached the line.
Pte. H. Fellowes, 12th Bn., Northumberland Fusiliers, 62 Brig., 21 Div.
Our platoon officer got hold of me, and of course he knew that the transport hadn’t come up. There were two of us, so he told us to double back and go as quickly as we could and find the transport and bring back the Lewis gun, because we were going into action. So we set off. It took us a long time to work our way back past the road where the cemetery was and on to the main road we’d come down the night before. That main road – well I can’t describe it! It was just a mass of holes, and debris and dead men and horses lying everywhere. We worked our way back and eventually we came to where our transport should have been. Of course, it wasn’t there. It had never even got there! We went a bit further and it was only then that we found out that it