1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [53]
The line of fire was the next question. What to do? Well, what we did was to ask another battery not far away. We could only see about two hundred yards on account of trees, but we could see the spire of Neuve Chapelle Church. The officer on this job was told to get a line on the church, hit it, and then register this as his line of fire and switch from it to other targets. He set up a plane table with a map of the area, put a pin on the church and another in the centre of the battery position. Then, with a director marked in a 180 degrees left and right, he took a zero line from the pins and then gave individual angles to all the guns, which brought them into parallel lines with the line of his director. One gun fired and hit the church and the others took parallel lines to it. But, needless to say, it didn’t fire that afternoon, and it was doubtful if we could even be ready to fire a shot in the bombardment next day.
The Colonel of the Brigade came along about this time and spoke to the Major to tell him about the battle tomorrow. They stood at the plane table and the Colonel pointed to the map. I heard him say, ‘One division will go in and swing left, the next one will go in and swing right, and then the cavalry will go through.’ The Major looked at him and said, ‘Like Hell they will!’ I heard him say it.
The Major had good reason to be despondent. The Colonel had spared no pains to stress the importance of the role his Howitzers were expected to play, and the Battery-Commander well knew that it would be a near-impossibility to achieve it. Despite the gargantuan efforts of his men, he would be lucky if his guns were able to fire a shot in the next twenty-four hours, let alone hit the target, and on this occasion the enemy would not be so obliging as to fire puffs of signal smoke to help them. But, in the late afternoon, as the troops were assembling for the move to the line, there was hardly another man from Sir John French himself to the most newly arrived Territorial who was not full of optimism and confident of success.
L/cpl. W. L. Andrews.
We felt honoured to think we’d been chosen to serve in the battle. We were eager to fight, smarting to avenge the things that had been said about the Territorials. We might be raw – we’d only been out a couple of months – but we were keen men, intelligent men, and every one a volunteer. We meant to do our best and we were convinced that this was the battle that might end the war! In those days we thought we only had to break through the German front and the enemy would crumple up and we would be done with trenches because, once we had thrust through the trench system the line would be rolled up. That was a favourite phrase then, rolled up!
Later on, battles were more mysterious and the ordinary soldier never knew what was happening except in his own bit of battlefield. You could get stuck in a reeking shell pit for a whole day and night and not know whether it was friend or foe in the trench fifty yards away. Of course battle plans were not revealed to a humble lance-corporal like myself, but at Neuve Chapelle we had a good idea what we were after. We had a very fair idea of the ground to be covered and in our stints in the line we studied it as much as we could. The ground slowly rose towards the village of Aubers and we knew that about nine miles beyond was the city of Lille. We were hopeful and innocent enough to believe that there would be cosy billets for us in Lille on the night of the battle.
The men from Dundee knew that they were not to take part in the opening stages of the battle. Their job was to wait until Neuve Chapelle had been captured, only then would they move forward to hold the first captured trenches while the victors swept ahead. Every man knew what he had to do. Alex Letyford had spent most of the day making the scaling-ladders that would take the troops across the enemy’s sandbags, but he would be in the thick of it when the