Authors: Jon E. Lewis
The man with the wound in his side moaned at intervals, and fixed his field bandage and held his hands to it as if to hold the very life in him. His groans, coming during the briefest lulls in the shelling, were unnerving us all. We crouched at the bottom of the trench, abject and trembling. I passed the rum bottle round and took a long swig myself.
Rum numbs you at times like these. It gives you Dutch courage and a lurching contempt for danger. You die more or less decently; neither whining nor squealing – which is as it should be. A moment later the machine gun to the right of us went up in the air and its team of men went up with it: a direct hit. The shells were dropping practically on the very brink of the trench.
Now the worst had come. We were face down in the slime, with boot and finger and knee clutching and scraping for the veriest inch of cover; hiding our eyes, as we did once from childish terrors; now whimpering, now cursing, with bowels turned to water and every facility at agonized tension.
…Who shall say where Providence came in?
Death grinned at us and yet not a shell hit full on our dozen yards of entrenchment. Still leaping forward, the barrage blundered over us and beyond us. It left us stunned and deaf and prostrate. The dying man mercifully breathed his last in the midst of it. Still we cowered in the mud and the slime. At nine o’clock in the morning the barrage started. It ceased as suddenly as it had begun, at exactly 11.30 a.m., It might have been a year of time.
The deadly stillness came on again but I ran among the others kicking right and left in a frenzy because I knew the attack was coming. The man would follow the machine. Looking over the top I saw the long grey lines sweeping along four hundred yards away. They were marching slowly, shoulder to shoulder, heavily weighted with picks, ammunition, and rations.
We scrambled to the fire-step. We fired madly and recklessly. The Lewis gun rattled and the two magazine fillers worked with feverish haste. It should have been horrid slaughter at the distance, for the Germans seemed to huddle together like sheep as they lurched over No Man’s Land. But there were thousands of them and our aim was hurried and bad. We fired in abandonment rather than by design.
Still the grey hordes advanced.
A hoarse voice shouted at the back of us. It was Sergeant Winnford: God knows how he got through to us; and he yelled ‘Retreat back to support line: you, corporal, see them all out.’ He made for a gap in the trench. The survivors followed him. As he reached the open a stray shot, or splinter, splattered his brains out and he fell without a sound.
Stupefied, the others crept through and got clear, and raced across the open land with the enemy in full cry behind. Barker was the last to crawl out. I howled at him to hurry, but he was tall and lanky and dead beat. I raced at his side. ‘Slip off your pack,’ I shouted, as I got out of my own trappings. He did so, but he was ashen and panting.
I felt a smart above my elbow and found there was blood trickling from the tips of my fingers. ‘Barker, Barker!’ I screamed. ‘Hurry up, chum, for God’s sake!’ I might have saved my breath. As I turned my head to him, and as he made a supreme effort to hasten, I saw the bullet hit the back of his tin helmet and spurt out at the front. He curled over in a heap. He was past aid.
I ran a dozen steps further. Something hit my other elbow, searing hot and smashing through, and I spun round like a top and lay once more in the slime.
I thought my arm had gone. If it was death I was numb, careless and content. I sank into a dull stupor and the hordes of grey uniforms trampled over me, round me and by me, and forgot me in their own terror.‘
They swept on and on to meet another wall of steel and flame.
How many of them would see another dawn?
Presently I came fully to myself and found that my arm was still there but was bleeding profusely. Laboriously, I got my field dressing somewhere near where the blood was flowing, and I got to my knees, then to my feet in a half-blind endeavour to get somewhere, to someone… I staggered to meet the second wave of the advancing Germans. Would they shoot me again as they passed me? An officer, with revolver in hand, waved me through the ranks.
They parted to make a road for me. At every other step I fell with weakness and the spikes of the ground wire stabbed into my hands, my limbs, my very face, as I fell. I remember weeping like a child because I could not help falling and suffering this torture.
I cannot say how far I walked. I passed a first-aid post in an old trench, but they waved me off despairingly. They had too many to see to. Stretcher bearers passed me, carrying a pole, with a blanket slung to it, and inside an agonized bundle of broken humanity – blood trickling and dripping from the pendulous blanket.
Eventually I simply fell into another portion of trench and there a sad-eyed, black-bearded man whispered ‘Armes kind’ – meaning little child – and stripped off my tunic, leather jerkin, and cardigan, and took his own field dressing and patched up the mess of my arm. A prisoner indeed; receiving succour from a man whose countrymen I had blazed at in hate but a while ago, and from whom I had suffered this shot in my elbow.
Truly the quality of mercy is not strained. I had none of his tongue, nor he of mine, but he gave me a drink of warm coffee from a flask, and his hands were as tender as a woman’s as he bandaged me. If ever I had felt hate for the German I was cured of it now. I had had my job to do and he his. The responsibility was not ours and our fate was none of our choosing. I to-day; perhaps he to-morrow. But I could not stay here.
The English barrage had now started; tearing and rip-snorting along all the roads and communications. It was intended to hold up the reinforcements for the German attack.
For me there was the sickening necessity of walking through the menace of our own barrage; to risk death from our own shells; to get to some place of refuge.
Three others joined me. They also had staggered from the shambles of No Man’s Land, and we bled from various wounds all along that pitiless road to the rear.
How we escaped the shelling I know not. German transport wagons lumbered past us at intervals, the drivers whipping the horses to a mad gallop. Here and there dead or dying horses lay among the splintered ruins of shafts and wheels. The very road was greasy with blood. Yet even as the horses fell the poor brutes were dragged to the side of the road and the matter-of-fact Germans whipped out knives and cut long strips of flesh from the steaming flanks. Heaps of intestines lay in the ditches.
At last a German unter-offizier dashed out from behind a ruined house and took charge of our little band. He took us a further short walk till we came to a large church with the Red Cross flag flying from the tower. We were placed in a queue of men all waiting for attention to wounds. Gradually we got inside the church. May I never again see such a sight.
All along the nave improvised stretchers lay side by side and reached to the step leading to choir and chancel.
Up there a dozen surgeons in ghastly stained white overalls performed operation after operation. Amputation after amputation.
The smell of chloroform and ether pervaded everything. The horrible rasping sound of the silver saws grated on the ear.
Attendants carried limbs away in tall baskets. Men died before aid could get to them. Each had inexorably to wait his turn and the surgeons, with white and drawn faces, sweated and toiled silently: no time for consultations.
I was attended to in my turn, and left that charnel house for the near-by prisoners’ cage, where I was questioned and had my papers examined and my letters from home confiscated.
It was now nightfall. I was in a small town – La Bassée, maybe, though I had no means of knowing.
Twenty-four hours previously I had ‘stood to’ on the fire-step and awaited the coming of the attack. Now it was all over. There is enduring stuff in youth, and I was young and craved for life with every fibre of my being. I was not done for yet. So I staggered among the ranks of a draft of prisoners to be entrained for the rear hospitals. We marched in columns of four to the station, and we held one another up and marched as if in a dream. They placed us in open trucks; Black Watch, South Wales Borderers, and others, and we clanked through a pitch-black night of hail, rain, and storm, through Lille and on to Tournai. I was half delirious by then: the numbness had given place to agony, and with all of us the bitter night did its worst to finish off the work that even the shells had failed to do.
So we ended up away in high Germany, and the Army Lists posted me as ‘missing.’
Lance-Corporal Thomas A, Owen. Attested November 1916: called up February 1917. Service in France and Belgium, chiefly on sections of the Ypres Salient, 1st Battalion South Wales Borderers, 1st Division. Wounded and taken prisoner near Festubert, April 18th, 1918. Thence to Schleswig. In hospital for 6 months, then discharged for labour at Munster Prisoner of War Camp, till Armistice. Repatriated December 2nd, 1918
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On April 23rd, 1918, three tanks covered with their green camouflage nets were lying hidden in the gas-drenched wood of Bois-l’Abbe, near Villers-Bretonneux, awaiting the impending German attack. The crews had worn masks for the greater part of the day and their eyes were sore, their throats dry.
Darkness came, but with it two enemy planes flying low, over the tree tops. They dropped Verey lights that fell right in our midst, showing up the bulky outlines of the tanks in vivid relief.
We were discovered!
An hour later, when clouds hid the moon, three huge, toad-like forms, grunting and snorting, crept out of the wood to a spot some hundred yards to the rear.
Just before dawn on April 24th a tremendous bombardment deluged the wood. I was aroused in the dark by someone shaking me violently. ‘Gas, sir, gas!’ I struggled up, half awake, inhaled a foul odour and quickly slipped on my mask. My eyes were running, I could not see, my breath came with difficulty. I could hear the trees crashing to the ground near me.
For a moment I was stricken with panic, then, suddenly, a thought sped through my confused mind, ‘If you are going to die, why not die decently?’ I listened to that inner voice and pulled myself together, only to discover that I had omitted to attach my nose clip!
Holding hands with my section commander and the orderly who had aroused us, we groped our way to the open. It was pitch dark, save where, away on the edge of the wood, the rising sun showed blood red.
As we stumbled forward, tree trunks, unseen in that infernal gloom, separated our joined hands and we were tripped up by bushes and brambles. Suddenly a hoarse cry came from the orderly, ‘My mouthpiece is broken, sir!’ ‘Run like hell for the open!’ shouted the section commander. There was a gasp, and then we heard him crashing away through the undergrowth like a hunted beast.
Soon I found my tank covered with its tarpaulin. The small oblong doors were open, but the interior was empty. On the ground, in the wrappings of the tarpaulin, however, I felt something warm and fleshy. It was one of the crew lying full length, wearing his mask, but dazed by gas.
Behind the trenches a battery of artillery was blazing away the gunners in their gas masks feverishly loading and unloading like creatures of a nightmare. Meanwhile, as the shelling grew in intensity, a few wounded men and some stragglers came into sight. Their report was depressing, Villers-Bretonneux had been captured and with it many of our own men. The Boche had almost broken through.
By this time two of my crew had developed nasty gas symptoms, spitting, coughing, and getting purple in the face. They were led away to the rear, one sprawling limply in a wheelbarrow found in the wood. We waited till an infantry brigadier appeared on the scene with two orderlies. He was unaware of the exact position ahead and, accompanied by our section captain and the runners, he went forward to investigate. In ten minutes one of the runners came back, limping badly, hit in the leg. In another ten minutes the second returned, his left arm torn by shrapnel, then, twenty minutes after that, walking, unhurt and serene, through the barrage came the brigadier and our captain. The news was grave. We had suffered heavy losses and lost ground, but some infantry were still holding out in the switch-line between Cachy and Villers-Bretonneux. If this line were overwhelmed the Boche would obtain possession of the high ground dominating Amiens and would, perhaps, force us to evacuate that city and drive a wedge between the French and British armies.
A serious consultation was held and the order came, ‘Proceed to the Cachy switch-line and hold it at all costs.’
We put on our masks once more and plunged, like divers, into the gas-laden wood. As we strove to crank up, one of the three men, turning the huge handle, collapsed. We put him against a tree, gave him some tablets of ammonia to sniff, and then, as he did not seem to be coming round, we left him, for time was pressing. Out of a crew of seven, four men, with red-rimmed, bulging eyes, only remained.
The three tanks, one male, armed with two six-pounder guns and machine guns, and two females, armed with machine guns only, crawled out of the wood and set off over the open ground towards Cachy.
Ahead, the, German barrage stood like a wall of fire in our path. There was no break in it anywhere. It seemed impossible that we could pass through that deadly area unhit. I decided to attempt a zigzag course, as somehow it seemed safer.
Luck was with us; going at top speed, we went safely through, the danger zone and soon reached the Cachy lines, but there was no sign of our infantry.
Suddenly, out of the ground 10 yards away, an infantryman rose, waving his rifle furiously. We stopped. He ran forward and shouted through the flap, ‘Look out! Jerry tanks about!’ and then as swiftly disappeared into the trench again.
I informed the crew, and a great thrill ran through us all. Opening the loophole, I looked out. There, some 300 yards away, a round, squat-looking monster was advancing. Behind it came waves of infantry and further away to left and right crawled two more of these armed tortoises.