Authors: Jon E. Lewis
At last in the distance we saw a group of huts, but now also we came under sporadic machine-gun fire. It was not very heavy in our direction, and we got safely into one of the buildings. In a field a little further on British troops were digging themselves in, but the space between them and ourselves was swept by bullets and it would have been suicidal to attempt to reach them.
One of our charges had been hit in the head; his mind now was wandering, and he was babbling and muttering. The other three were in some sort of shape to help themselves, and we decided that when darkness came on ‘Blanco’ should try to get them across to ‘the line,’ and then if possible send someone to help me in getting the fourth over.
The first part of the programme was more successful than we had hoped, ‘Blanco’ and his charges went off on hands and knees, hand and knees, or hands and knee, according to where they had been winged, stumbled on to a sort of dug-out, which they found occupied by our own American medical officer and a number of other casualties, and heard that the diggers-in comprised the other three companies of our own battalion!
I, of course, had no knowledge of what had happened to my companions at the time, and it soon became apparent that there was very little hope of any help reaching me, for the firing again became very heavy, and the hut itself was constantly being hit.
The effects of the whisky had long since worn off. I had had no other food or drink for considerably more than twenty-four hours, during most of which time I had been on the move and heavily encumbered. I could hardly remember when I had last slept. My companion became violent, and I had to sit on him to prevent him rushing out of the hut, which contained other occupants in the shape of two dead men. My vigil seemed interminable.
Towards morning I had practically given up any hope of leaving the hut alive, because it was obvious that sooner or later the enemy infantry would advance, and we were pretty certain to be ‘mopped up.’ I fished a piece of paper out of my pack and wrote a short farewell letter to my wife, in the hope that some decent German, finding it on my body, might manage to get it sent on.
Daylight came at last, and with it a slight lull in the firing. My comrade had sunk into a condition of lethargy, and I determined to risk the journey. We reached the M.O.’s dug-out; I think I carried my companion part of the way and dragged him the remainder. I never knew his name, and have heard nothing of him since – but I hope he got home safely. The M.O. was killed the same day whilst evacuating the wounded.
I joined the rest of the battalion. My first action upon reaching the half-dug trench was to tear up the letter I had written an hour or two earlier and thankfully scatter the pieces to the winds.
For the next week or so (one quite lost count of time) the retreat resolved itself into a test of endurance. The battalion managed to keep more or less together, but there was no pretence at any sort of order. Some had to drop out, either through exhaustion or wounds, sometimes stragglers from other regiments joined us or were overtaken. A few were killed by the enemy’s ubiquitous machine guns. The latter were always more or less at our heels (and as often on our flanks), but, after all, bullets drill a fairly clean hole, and one does not mind them – much. The thought of great gaping wounds caused by jagged bits of shell, to say nothing of the shattering of nerves by concussion, is a different thing. The absence of shell-fire was our one cause for self-congratulation.
In some ways the attackers probably had a worse time than we. To a certain extent we could and did choose our own places and times for halting and showing fight. Our artillery, too, frequently continued to fire over our heads almost until we reached the guns.
The enemy troops, however, probably did get some orations. Our food was such as we could ‘scrounge’ from’ deserted canteens and Y.M.C.A. huts, when anything had been left by those who had preceded us: perhaps a few biscuits, a packet of chocolate, or, as happened on one occasion, a tin of pineapple chunks. We were badly troubled by thirst; there seemed to be no water anywhere except that collected in shell holes, stagnant and impregnated with gas. Eventually we were driven to crawling about in the early mornings and licking the dew off the grass.
But the almost insupportable hardship was the lack of sleep. The longest uninterrupted spell I remember was one of about a couple of hours, wedged with three fellow slumberers between the outstretched fore and hind legs of a dead horse (for shelter from a biting wind), its belly for a pillow and the cobblestones of a village street for a bed. For the rest, we dozed as we walked, or fell asleep, willy-nilly, whilst making some sort of cover, only to be prodded into wakefulness almost immediately in order either to move off again, or to be ready to repel an attack.
There was no lack of ammunition, for cartridge-belts, haversacks, and other equipment, even rifles and smashed Lewis guns, were lying about in the wake of the retreating troops, whose physical exhaustion was such that an extra pound or two in weight might mean the difference between capture and liberty.
Sometimes we were in open country, sometimes we took to the roads, but night and day we tramped on. I found somewhere a rake-handle, and but for this third leg probably could not have stayed the course. I walked the soles off the two pairs of socks I was wearing, and raised blisters on my feet which gave me hell until they burst.
We passed over the old Somme battlefield, a desolate stretch of overgrown and fallen-in trenches, with rusty barbed wire, old tins, and other ‘junk’ scattered about.
We crossed the river – the Aisne, I suppose – near Albert, and halted on a grassy plateau on the far side of the town.
One of the historians of the War says: ‘At eleven on that date [March 27th] an inspiriting order was sent along the line that the retreat was over, and that the Army must fight out the issue where it stood. It is the decisive call which the British soldier loves, and never fails to obey.’
Our old colonel didn’t put it quite as nicely as that, but he was a sportsman, we liked him, and we appreciated his way of delivering the message. Strictly expurgated, it was, as near as I can remember, as follows:
‘Now, you men, that’s Albert, and this is as far as we go. When the Boche tries to come through the town, as he will, we attack. There’s to be no more retreat, and no surrendering. What the hell are you going to sleep for?’
He walked in front of our ragged line as we advanced to the attack, and gave the signals by a wave of his cane. We had no cover, and advanced in open order under a terrific machine-gun and rifle-fire – a few paces forward, then flat on the ground, then on for a few yards again.
I had a foolish notion that if I had an umbrella I should feel safer.
I have not yet read an account of troops attacking whilst asleep, but this was true of many of our men. The man on my left was fast asleep immediately on throwing himself prone, and on each upward wave of the colonel’s cane I had to prod him awake with the butt of my rifle.
My ‘tin hat’ was hit twice. A bullet pierced the exact centre of the top of the helmet of the man on my right as he walked forward with head down. He spun round as he fell, and with a stream of blood spurting out of the circular hole in the top of his head, scrambled back on hands and knees for perhaps 10 yards, and rolled over.
A short, white-haired lad rushed screaming right along our line, with an eye shot away.
As we threw ourselves over the edge of the plateau to the ploughed land below, another near neighbour was hit in a most painful part of the body, and lay in the ditch at the foot of the slope, screaming.
Very few of us reached what shelter the ditch afforded, and it was impossible to advance further. Our casualties already were very heavy. Eventually, with four others I reached a shell hole which provided some sort of reasonable cover, and from there, and a few other similar posts of vantage, those of us who were left managed to check any further advance of the enemy. One of us had a penny stick of chocolate, which he divided into five pieces, and which formed our sole nourishment for many hours.
If Alf’s magic button had suddenly come into my possession, I should have thus addressed the attendant genie:
‘Send up immediately large reinforcements of fresh troops – not ragged scarecrows like ourselves; mind, but real live soldiers, and
let them be Colonials.’
No magic button was needed. Up they came, rank – after rank, clean, shaved, in spick and span uniforms, properly armed. The awed exclamation of one of my shell-hole companions seemed to sum up our feelings to a nicety.
‘New Zealanders! Well, Gawd help Jerry!’
Private R. G. Bultitude joined the 1st Battalion Artists Rifles in 1917, and served on the Western Front until May 1918, when he was severely wounded whilst occupying an outpost in Aveluy Wood. The stretcher bearer referred to in the narrative as ‘Blanco’ came over, in broad daylight, bandaged his wounds, and carried him to safety in circumstances involving the risk of almost certain death
.
It was near the end of the great German bid for victory in April 1918. We left Beuvry and passed the hamlet of Le Fresnoy and crossed the bridge over the La Bassée Canal into the village of Gorre. There we struck a route past the famous Brewery to make for the open fields and the front-line trenches. We knew our destination was ‘somewhere between Festubert and Givenchy’ – a new sector to us – and, as we marched, we sang softly a popular ditty of those days. It went to the tune of a sentimental song then going strong in Blighty, about a Tulip and a Red, Red Rose. Our own exclusive lyric had pointed reference to certain gentlemen at home and ended in averring that:
You stole our wenches
While we were in the trenches
Facing the angry foe;
You were a-slacking
While we were attacking
The Huns on Givenchy Road.
Now, in reality, we were to know what it was like on Givenchy Road, and it was said that there was plenty of ‘dirt’ up in ‘the doings.’
The ‘Pork and Beans’ had broken in disorder on the left, and it was rumoured that the Germans had captured the Portuguese commissariat and were even raiding and reconnoitring in Portuguese uniforms. The 55th Division had made a stand and held up a veritable horde of the enemy with great slaughter. Now, utterly weary, they were to be relieved, and we of the 1st Division were to hold the renewed attack of the enemy.
A part of my own company relieved a detachment of the Liverpool Scottish, and we occupied a section of the trenches almost square-shaped in form, with three sides facing a miniature salient of German troops, who surrounded us more or less in the form of a horseshoe. Our post was evidently a key position in the line. Dead men lay about here and there; the communication trench to Headquarters – a small pillbox in the centre of the square had partly collapsed at the sides and was sickeningly yielding underfoot with the bodies of buried men. Here and there a leg or an arm protruded from the trench side. The wire was cut in places and the gaps in the trenches, caused by trench mortar attacks, were staringly open and dangerous.
We arrived in the dark of the evening, before the moon had risen. Silently we filed into the trench at a corner of the square. A line of bare trees, tall and ghostly, marked another boundary of the line. The Scotties trailed out, with whispered greetings, and we settled down to the eternal vigil. The silence was of the dead. Not a gun fired. Not even a Verey light flared. The bloated trench rats squeaked now and again and only intensified the silence.
There was nothing to do but overhaul equipment: place Mills bombs at strategic points, with slack pins ready for throwing; play cards; smoke interminable cigarettes. During the night we examined the wire and sent reconnoitring patrols into No Man’s Land. They met nothing, heard nothing, saw no one, and came back scared and craving rum. Above all we must not remain still to brood on things. For two days the silence continued, unnatural and nerve-racking. Old soldiers talked with bated breath of the horrors that were surely coming. On the evening of the third day, as we shook our limbs and set guards and patrols moving, a whispered word went round that at ‘Stand to’ at dusk the Germans might attack in force. We lined up along the trench, and gulped our rum ration and literally ached for something to happen. But the sun went down and the gloom came on, and not a sound broke the solitude. Well, it would be at ‘Stand to’ at about six o’clock in the morning – a bloodchilling time.
Morning ‘Stand to’ came in due course, and once more the rum went round and the whispered word of warning. A watery sun peeped through the mist and still no enemy appeared. No lark rose to greet the dawn. Not a gun hurled its load of venom.
I sat down with my section of eight men and I looked at our ration of bread, bacon, and cheese. It was small enough, and God knew if we should ever get another. ‘Shall we cook the whole issue?’ I asked, and a nodding chorus signified assent. We lit the ‘Tommy’ cooker, and made a good job of the cooking, and ate a great bellyfull and smoked a Woodbine at the end.
Suddenly a gun barked and a heavy explosion shook the trenches. The frantic rats squeaked and scuttled past us: men shuddered, and clattered their arms and sprang to attention. The barrage had started. I heaved a sigh and was almost glad the suspense was over. The barrage was pitched about 40 yards short of our line of trench. Evidently it would creep to us after first smashing the wire.
I placed five men on the fire-step and fixed one man with a Lewis gun and two men to fill containers for it. We waited with livid faces. The barrage crept nearer. Now it was 30 yards, now 20 yards. We were in a hell of din and slaughter. The trench was crumbling slowly to pieces. One of my men suddenly sank to his knees. A piece of a shell had torn at his middle and he sat down quietly to die a slow death. I shook with stark fear, but I held to my rifle and kept my place on the crumbling fire-step.
The barrage lifted again and moved nearer.