1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [315]
Behind the soldiers plodding wearily westwards the horizon glowed with the flash of the guns and flared into brilliance as Very lights streaked through the sky. A mile or so to the north, where the battle for the slag-heaps near the Hohenzollern redoubt swung back and forth and the position was touch and go, the remaining brigade of the 24th Division was still in the line, and the men were clinging as best they could to trenches along the eastern edge of Fosse 8. There was no relief for them, or if any was planned no word of it had reached George Marrin.
Pte. G. Marrin.
I was ordered to go on a ration party, and four or five of us had to find our way from the front line back to the wagons, or as far as the wagons could get up the line, which would be some long distance really. But you didn’t know where you were going and they just gave you that direction, ‘You keep going that way and you’ll find them because they’re looking for you in any case.’ Which was quite true. We found the ration depot, drew our rations and we had to put them into sandbags, and our duty then was to get this food back to the line. We were so exhausted that I can remember we tied the rations to our feet to drag it along because we couldn’t walk by that time – we were so tired. But of course we never got to the line, because when we got to the line there was no line there! Where we’d been, or where we thought we’d been, it had all gone, the men had all gone and everything had moved, so we didn’t know where we were. And there we were, back in the line again with these ration bags tied to our feet and everybody had gone. They’d either moved back or forward and there was no means of telling where they’d gone, you see? Somebody would come along and say, ‘Oh yes, they’ve moved to so-and-so,’ so you’d try and find out where that was, just wandering. Then, when these other relief regiments came through, we were challenged. ‘Who are you?’ And I said to this officer, ‘I’m 13th Battalion Middlesex.’ He said, ‘They don’t exist, get out of it!’ I can remember him now, standing there on the trench saying, ‘Get out of it, get out the bloody way!’ He was bringing in a new posse of troops that knew more about it than we ever did. They were trained soldiers. We did what we were instructed to do. We found the communication trench and we walked through the communication trench and got out at Vermelles, and from there we had to go back and find the base and find our regiment somehow – or what was left of it.
But that was days later. Meanwhile the unfortunate 73rd Brigade stuck it out in the trenches they were soon to lose. It was the end of the second day of the Battle of Loos, and the beginning of a long, hard and ultimately fruitless grind.
Chapter 36
Harry Fellowes remembered very little of the long trek back. All he retained was a muddled impression of trudging in anonymous clusters of men, dragging along like automatons, stumbling and limping up the dark road, sometimes falling, sometimes dropping out to slump at the roadside, too weary to curse or complain when passing transport forced them into the ditch. Looking back it seemed to him that they had spent more time in the ditch than on the pavé for there was, as ever, a solid stream of limbers, ambulance wagons, staff cars, motor cycles, attempting to reach the front in the hours of darkness, and working-parties toiling to repair the gaping shell-holes that impeded them. Tempers were short. Everyone on the road that night was engaged on urgent business, and the exhausted Tommies making their way piecemeal from the line came low in the list of priorities. Here and there an equally done-up officer took a group of stragglers under his wing and tried to introduce a semblance