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By Root 1924 0

orders to destroy the strongpoints which had caused the infantry to founder in yesterday’s advance, but it was easier said than done. Peering into the foggy morning from their old observation posts, luckless artillery officers found it almost impossible to pinpoint targets. Firing blind and mostly by guesswork, they were horribly aware of the danger that they might be firing on their own troops – the ragged lines of survivors lying somewhere in front of the redoubts that had brought them to a standstill when they had first advanced. No one knew precisely where they were. And no one had the shadow of an inkling that a new defensive line was concealed in the mist beyond. When the guns lifted and lengthened range to cover the infantry’s advance the redoubts had hardly been touched – and the new trench that ran the length of the battle front had not been touched at all. At seven o’clock when the troops tried to advance they ran into an inferno. The air tingled with bullets streaming from machine-guns and the very earth seemed to explode beneath their feet as the German guns answered the bombardment with a bombardment of their own. It was fierce and it was accurate and the shells pounded the front for three hours. By the time it tailed away some thousands of British soldiers had been killed, Neuve Chapelle was a heap of smoking ruins, every line and wire had been severed in a dozen places and communication, even the sketchiest, was non-existent. The signallers had done their best, frantically repairing wires that were ruptured in another place even as they were mended, but the odds were against them.

Bdr. W. Kemp.

We signallers were still in the straw stack. We’d been there all night trying to keep the lines open to the battery. I’d been issued with wire-cutters – proper wire-cutters, the same as they used for barbed wire. They weighed about one and a half pounds, and I was supposed to use these on the D-3 telephone wire! I soon lost them. We had one pair of pliers for all of us. I don’t really know at this stage how we did manage to cut and mend the phone wire. I do know that the telephone we had was a C-Mk-11 magneto and you had to ring it by hand, but the batteries were six large cells in a wooden box. They had to be excited by adding water and leaving them for a few hours before they were any use. Well, some of them were ready to use when the battle started, but next morning when all hell was let loose it didn’t matter anyway.

The fog was lifting from the battlefield but it still hung thick around Brigade and Divisional Headquarters where the anxious staff were groping for vital information. Messengers were slow in coming and, when they did, the news they brought was mostly out-of-date and often contradictory or untrue. It was not the fault of the troops. The Grenadier Guards, starting off close to the Moated Grange, were brought to a halt at a stream not three hundred yards ahead, and the runner who struggled back through the bombardment reported in all good faith that they had been held up at the Layes Brook. It was the first good news General Capper had received, for here, on the left, the Layes ran well behind the German line and he joyfully ordered up the guns to bombard beyond it to clear the way for the Grenadiers to advance.

The Layes Brook (described ambitiously on local maps as a river) was an artificial drainage ditch, inexpertly dug by local farmers, and it straggled across the fields in front of the Bois du Biez and the Aubers Ridge to join a tributary of the River Lys. On the staff officers’ maps it stood out as an unmistakable feature which could safely be described as an objective on terrain that was singularly short of landmarks, but to a man on the ground itself the Layes could not easily be distinguished from a hundred other ditches that trickled in all directions across the dead and battered marsh. Few of them were narrow enough to leap, even without the weight of extra ammunition and equipment, and they were filled to the brim with filthy brackish water. It was deep enough to lap the chins of all