1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [359]
*On 5 May, when the 5th Division was finally forced from Hill 60, they had suffered three thousand casualties and won four Victoria Crosses. Hardly a body was recovered, and Hill 60 today, still scarred and cratered by this and later battles, is in effect a mass grave.
*The man was Auguste Jaeger, then a private in the 234 Reserve Infantry Regiment. On 17 December 1932 he was tried at Leipzig on charges of desertion and betraying German plans to the enemy. He was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment.
*It is a moot point whether they would have succeeded, or even tried, for, despite their mighty fire power, the Germans had insufficient reserves to make such a wholesale effort practicable. Their intention had only been to advance by bounds to a succession of limited objectives and to some extent they had been surprised by their own success and the cataclysmic effect of the gas on unprotected troops. But nevertheless, given their formidable fire power, situated as they now were within a stone’s throw of Ypres whose outlying houses were little more than two miles away, the position of the Allies in the salient was already all but untenable.
*There were now only two French Divisions in the line – so few that they were referred to by the French Army merely as the Elverdinghe Detachment – with another two brigades on the coast at Nieuport (the Nieuport Detachment) and, although it would be unfair to say that they were the dregs of the French forces, they were not troops of the highest calibre. Both detachments were under the command of General Putz.
*The German line here lay on a gentle slope which two years later would be one of the bastions in their defence of Passchendaele beyond. After the war it was transformed into what became the largest and best-known of all British war cemeteries – Tynecot.
*General Balck, commanding 23rd German Reserve Corps, later wrote of the fighting of 23 April: ‘Unfortunately the infantry had become enfeebled by trench warfare and had lost its daring and its indifference to heavy losses and the disintegrating influence of increased enemy fire effect. The leaders and the brave-hearted fell, and the bulk of the men, mostly inexperienced reinforcements, became helpless and only too inclined to leave the work to the artillery and trench mortars.’
*Number 3 Canadian Advanced Dressing Station which had been obliged to move from Hampshire Farm to Wieltje on the 22nd, had been forced to evacuate again and re-open at St Jean.
*Hay’s comment was not quite fair. The Canadians had been awarded their first Victoria Cross. It was won in the aftermath of the second gas attack by Fred Hall, brother of Harry and Ed, who was a company sergeant-major in the 8th (Manitoba) Battalion. In the thick of the battle, as the battalion struggled to hold on and machine-guns sprayed the ground, Fred twice crawled out through the hail of fire to drag in wounded men who were calling for help. He made it the first time, and almost made it the second. As he lifted the wounded soldier into the trench Fred’s body was ripped by machine-gun fire. The Victoria Cross was awarded posthumously
*One of its Brigades had not yet arrived.
*According to German records three Howitzer batteries near Langemarck fired between them at least two thousand rounds that afternoon.
*This was effectively the end of General Smith-Dorrien’s distinguished military career. Shortly afterwards he was side-lined to a post in East Africa. He retired from the Army shortly after the end of the war and died, aged seventy-two, in 1930.
*Burnt Farm was later marked on British trench maps as Uhlan Farm.
*Vaughan’s wound finished his army career. After many months in hospital in England he was shipped back to recuperate in Canada where he received his discharge in 1916. Seventy years later, on 8 May 1985, as the guest of Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry,