1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [50]
There was the material to be carried up to dumps close to the line – large quantities of food and water, boxes of small arms ammunition for the rifles, shells for the guns, spades and pickaxes, bales of barbed wire, iron pickets, and the hundred and one items that the army would need to dig itself in as it advanced. None of the preparations could be carried out by day and, in the ten nights before the battle, the groans and curses of a thousand working parties might have been heard in Berlin.
L/cpl. W. L. Andrews, 1/4 Bn., Black Watch (Royal Highlanders) (TF), Bareilly Brig., Meerut Div.
We knew, of course, that we’d have to fight our way across fields so sodden with the winter rain that they were like morasses. Before the battle we had to throw bridges across drains and watercourses running through our own front so that the troops could concentrate quickly. We dragged our way up with ammunition, bombs, rations, sandbags, barbed wire, spare bridges, planks, hurdles and iron pickets, and stored them at dumps in the fields. We were carrying all through the hours of darkness night after night. It took a tremendous time to do this but it never occurred to us to wonder what to expect when we crossed to the fields the Germans were holding where we wouldn’t have hundreds of bridges to help us over the watery parts, and we would still have all our fighting material to carry forward.
Soldiers? We were more like sweating coolies. How we came to loathe the sodden tracks, with wire overhead, wire underfoot, every few yards! And we still had to carry our rifles and ammunition with us. That was the military way, although there was no danger of our being suddenly attacked and we’d have been a lot more useful as coolies without them!
The gunners, too, had been hard at it, labouring with whatever material was available – planks and bricks and hurdles – to build platforms strong enough to anchor the guns to the muddy earth. Every gun that could be begged or borrowed had been sited behind the front, and the combined field artillery of the IV and Indian Corps, augmented by light thirteen-pounders borrowed from the cavalry, was positioned in a deep horseshoe mostly in front of Neuve Chapelle. For days now they had been ranging on the enemy’s line, taking care not to arouse his suspicion and taking care also to expend as little as possible of the precious ammunition. At the start of the offensive they would fire the hurricane bombardment that would smash the German wire and blow open a path for the infantry to advance. Behind them were the heavy guns that would pulverise the trenches and destroy strong-points in the line – but there were not nearly enough of them. Of the two mammoth 15-inch Howitzers on which Sir John French had depended only one had arrived. It had brought little ammunition, and what it had was faulty.
As the days passed the Commander-in-Chief fumed and fretted. Two batteries of heavy guns were still missing and their eight 6-inch Howitzers would constitute a third of all the siege guns that had been faithfully promised weeks earlier. Far from being in position where they ought to be, they had not even embarked for France. They were the 59th and 81st Siege Batteries, but their high numbers gave a false impression for they did not indicate the number of siege guns at the disposal of the British Army. They were Indian numbers and although the gunners were not ready to embark they had arrived from India three months earlier.
Bdr. W. Kemp, A sub-section, 59 Siege Bty., RGA.
We were at Roorkee when the war broke out. At first it didn’t upset the routine in our battery at all, and that really annoyed us because we’d expected to be away to France on the next boat. But we didn’t get away until the middle of November and we landed in Devonport about Christmas and marched to Portsmouth barracks. What a reception we got from the crowd! We were heroes already, in their opinion. All we were thinking about was