THE ATTACK ON HILL 35,
SEPTEMBER, 1917.
Iberian, Hill 35, and Gallipoli.--The Battalion ordered to make the
seventh attempt against Hill 35.--The task.--A and D Companies
selected.--The assembly position.--Gassed by our own side.--
Waiting for zero.--The attack.--Considerations governing its
failure.--The Battalion quits the Ypres battlefield.
'At 4 p.m.' said the 61st Divisional Summary for the twenty-four hours
ending 12 noon, September 11, 1917, 'we attacked the Battery Position
on Hill 35. This attack was not successful.' A grim epitaph. The terse
formula, as though wasted words must not follow wasted lives, was the
official record of the seventh attempt to storm Hill 35.
Against the concrete gunpits which crowned this insignificant ridge
the waves of our advance on July 31 had lapped in vain. Minor attacks
designed to take Gallipoli, a German stronghold set behind the ridge,
and against the sister position of Iberian on its flank, proved
throughout August some of the most costly failures in the 5th Army
operations. The defence of the three strongholds, Iberian, Hill 35,
and Gallipoli provided a striking example of German stubbornness
and skill, but added an object-lesson in the squandering of our
efforts in attack. Operations upon a general scale having failed to
capture all three, it was fantastically hoped that each could be
reduced separately. Iberian, Hill 35, and Gallipoli supported one
another, nor was it feasible to hold any without holding all. Yet to
take Hill 35 on September 9 the 2/4th Oxfords were specially selected.
The spirit of A and D Companies, chosen by Colonel Wetherall for the
attack, was excellent. We confidently believed that we could succeed
where others failed. Optimism, so vital an ingredient in morale, was a
powerful assistant to the English Army. It was fostered, perhaps
unconsciously, throughout the war by the cheerful attitude preserved
by our Generals and staff, but its foundation lay in our great system
of supply. The A.S.C., which helped to win our victories, helped, too,
to temper our defeats.
[Illustration: THE ATTACK ON HILL 35 SEPTEMBER 10 1917]
On September 7 Brown and myself went up through Ypres to view the
scene of the attack. At Wieltje, where Colonel Wetherall and B and C
Companies already were, we descended to a deep, wet dug-out and that
night listened to a narrative brought by an officer who had
participated in the last attempt to take the hill. He dispensed the
most depressing information about the gunpits, the machine-guns, the
barrages, and last, but not least terrible (if believed), the new
incendiary Verey lights used by the Germans to cremate their assailants.
The description of a piece of trench, which we were to capture and
block, particularly flattered our prospects. 'Wide, shallow trench,
enfiladed from Gallipoli, filled with --th Division dead,' it ran. The
tale of horror becoming ludicrous, we soon afterwards clambered on to
the wire bunks and slept, dripped on, till the early morning.
The next day was misty. Our 15-inch howitzers on whose ability to
smash the enemy's concrete strongholds reliance was staked, could not
fire. The attack was postponed until September 10, but that decision
came too late to stop our companies quitting the camp according to
previous orders and marching up through Ypres. They could have stayed
at Wieltje for the night, but the men's fear that by so doing they
would miss their hot tea, decided their vote in favour of a return to
Goldfish Château. Tea is among the greatest bribes that can be offered
to the British soldier.
Accordingly the march through Ypres, or rather, round it (for no
troops chose to pass its market place) was repeated on the morrow. The
tracks towards the line were shelled on our way up, but we came safely
through. Dusk was awaited in a much war-worn trench in front of
Wieltje.
As daylight fades we file away, each man with his own thoughts. Whose
turn is it to be this journey?
Along the tortuous track of tipsy duckboards we go for a mile, until
acrid fumes tell that the German barrage line is being passed. This is
a moment to press on! To get the Company safely across this hundred
yards is worth many a fall.
... Presently the shattered pollards of the Steenbeek are left behind
and flickering Verey lights cast into weird relief the rugged surface
of the earth. At Pommern Castle our front trenches, in which figures
of men loom indistinctly, are reached. At one corner, where the trench
is littered with fragments, we are cautioned by a sentry, whose voice
is a little shaken, not to linger; the entrance to a pill-box (which
faced the enemy) was hit a short time ago. From the trench we proceed
further into No-Man's-Land, where the Bucks are said to have linked up
shell-holes since nightfall. (Those will be our 'assembly position'
for the attack to-morrow afternoon).
By now all shells are passing over our heads; we are level with where
Verey lights are falling, and the sweep of bullets through the air
shows that the enemy is not far off. Figures appear as if by magic.
All at once there is a crowd of men, rattling equipment and talking in
suppressed voices. A few commands, and the relief is complete. We are
in No-Man's-Land, strung in a line of shell-holes, from which in
sixteen hours' time the attack is to start.
* * * * *
Soon after 3 a.m. I set out to visit all the scattered groups of men
to give my last instructions, for from dawn onwards no movement would
be possible. It was an eerie situation. The night was filled with
multifarious noise--peculiar 'poops,' the distant crash of bombs, and
all the mingled echoes of a battlefield. At one time German howitzers,
firing at longest range, chimed a faint chorus high above our heads;
anon a hissing swoop would plant a shell close to our whereabouts.
Lights rose and sank, flickering. Red and green rockets, as if to
ornament the tragedy of war, were dancing in the sky. Occasionally a
gust of foul wind, striking the face, could make one fancy that
Death's Spectre marched abroad, claiming her children....
Our guns fired incessantly. Their shells came plunging down with an
arriving whistle that made each one as it came seem that it must drop
short--and many did. Mist drifted fitfully around and hid, now and
again, two derelict tanks, at which a forward post of my company was
stationed. This post I was on my way to visit, when, suddenly, what
seemed trench-mortar bombs began to fall. About twenty fell in a
minute, the last ones very close to where I stood.
They were gas. It was a sickening moment; surprise, disaster, and the
possibility that here was some new German devilry fired at us from
behind, joined with the fumes to numb the mind and powers. Half-gassed
I gave the gas-alarm. By telephone I managed to report what had
happened. The Colonel seemed to understand at once; 'I've stopped
them,' conveyed everything of which it was immediately necessary to
make certain.
[Illustration: HILL 35, from an aeroplane photograph taken a week
before the attack of Sept 10. Note the four derelict Tanks]
For it was an attack by our own gas. Some detachment, without
notifying our Brigade staff or selecting a target which sanity could
have recommended, had done a 'shoot' against my company's position
under the mistake that the enemy was in it. Two casualties, which I
believe proved fatal, resulted. Many men vomited. I was prostrated for
two hours. The effect on the morale of some of my men was as pitiable
as it was amply justifiable.
For this dastardly outrage I fancy that no person was ever brought to
book. Infantry loyally condoned the so-called 'short shooting' by our
guns. Out of thousands of shells fired at the enemy some must and did
fall in our lines. But from such condonation is specifically to be
excepted this instance of a gas projection carried out with criminal
negligence upon my comrades. For or by its perpetrator no excuse was
offered; and yet the facts were never in dispute.
Proverbially the worst part of an attack was waiting for it. On
September 10, from dawn till 4 p.m., A and D Companies lay cramped in
shell holes on the slopes of Hill 35. In my own hole, so close that
our knees touched, sat Sergeant Palmer, Rowbotham, my signalling
lance-corporal, Baxter, another signaller, Davies, my runner, and
myself. With us we had a telephone and a basket of carrier pigeons.
At 8 a.m., while some of us were sleeping heavily, there came a crash
and a jar, which shook every fibre in the body. An English shell had
burst a yard or two from the hole wherein we lay. Voices from
neighbouring shell-holes hailed us--'Are you all right?': and we
replied 'We are.' We had no other shell as close as that, but all day
long there were two English guns whose shells, aimed at the Germans on
the ridge in front, fell so near to where we lay that we became
half-used to being spattered with their earth. As the air warmed the
error of these guns decreased, but we counted the hours anxiously
until the attack should liberate us from such cruel jeopardy.[8]
[Footnote 8: At this stage in the war the barrels
of many of our guns and howitzers in use on the
Western Front were very worn. That fact alone and
not any want of care or devotion on the part of our
Artillery or staff would have accounted for the
'short shooting' which I record. To locate a worn
barrel, when scores of batteries were bombarding
together according to a complicated programme, was
naturally impossible. Infantry recognised this.]
The intolerable duration of that day baffles description. The sun,
which had displaced a morning mist, struck down with unrelenting rays
till shrapnel helmets grew hot as oven-doors. Bluebottles (for had not
six attempts failed to take the hill?) buzzed busily. The heat, our
salt rations, the mud below, the brazen sky above, and the suspense of
waiting for the particular minute of attack, vied for supremacy in the
emotions. The drone of howitzers continued all the day. Only at 2.30
p.m., when a demonstration was made against Iberian, did any variety
even occur. There was no choice nor respite. Not by one minute could
the attack be either anticipated or postponed.
Of the attack itself the short outline is soon given. Promptly at 4
p.m. the creeping barrage started. In a dazed way or lighting
cigarettes the men, who had lost during the long wait all sense of
their whereabouts, began to stumble forward up the hill. Our shrapnel
barrage was not good. One of the earliest shells burst just behind
the hole from which I stepped. It wounded Rowbotham and Baxter (my two
signallers) and destroyed the basket of carrier pigeons. Of other
English shells I saw the brown splash amongst our men. Prolonged
bombardment had ploughed the ground into a welter of crumbling earth
and mud. Our progress at only a few dozen yards a minute gave the
Germans in their pill-boxes ample time to get their machine-guns
going, while correspondingly the barrage passed away from our advance
in its successive lifts. Heavy firing from Iberian commenced to
enfilade our ranks. Long before the objective was approached our
enemies, who in some cases left the pill-boxes and manned positions
outside, were masters of the situation. The seventh attempt had failed
to struggle up the slopes of Hill 35.
Despite the disappointment of this immediate failure of the
enterprise, I realised at once the impossibility of its success. Yet
on this occasion less was done by the men than the conduct of their
leaders deserved. Almost as soon as bullets had begun to bang through
the air some men had gone to shelter. Those who stood still were mown
down. A handful of D Company, led by the company commander, by short
rushes reached a ruined tank, close to the enemy, but the remainder
disappeared into shell-holes, whence encouragement was powerless to
move them. Only in A Company was any fire opened.
No sense of anti-climax could be demanded of the English soldier,
whose daily shilling was paid him whether he was in rest-billets,
on working-party, or sent into the attack.[9]
[Footnote 9: Nowhere is this truth better expressed
than in the words of 'Tommy's' own song, the
refrain of which ends:--
'But you get your "bob" a day, never mind!']
On the part also of the Artillery less was done than the scheme
promised or our attacking Infantry had counted on. By shell-fire the
issue of Hill 35 was to have been placed beyond doubt. When the
artillery machine broke down, achievement of success demanded more
initiative on the part of the Infantry than if no artillery had been
used. In a sense our loss of a hundred guns at Cambrai a few weeks
later became a blessing in disguise, for it restored the scales in
favour of the Infantryman as the decisive agent on the field of
battle.
So ended the attack on Hill 35. Upon its slopes were added our dead to
the dead of many regiments. But our casualties were few considering
that the attack had been brought to a standstill by machine-gun fire.
Of D Company officers Guest was wounded (he had behaved with gallantry
in the attack) and Copinger missing. Viggers, a very brave sergeant,
was killed. Three lance-corporals, Wise, Rowbotham, and Goodman, had
been wounded. The total casualties to the Battalion, including several
in B Company Headquarters from a single shell and others in passing
afterwards through Ypres, were, happily, under fifty.
A few days after its attack on Hill 35 the Battalion marched away from
Ypres, never to return. What credit had been earned there by the
61st Division was principally associated with the work of the 184th
Infantry Brigade and of the 2/4th Oxfords. Improvement in morale
flowed from the test of this great battle. The losses of the Battalion
had been heavy; fourteen officers and 260 men were its casualties. The
final winning of the war could not be unconnected with such a
sacrifice. Like others before and others after it, the Battalion at
Ypres gave its pledge to posterity.