MOQUET FARM
The name of Moquet Farm flashes vividly to my memory a night of the
bitterest, bloodiest fighting I ever went through. It certainly was the
hell of war in its most intensive degree. There were twenty-two hours
of continuous fighting with never a minute’s let-up in the gales of
deadly missiles.
We were holding Orvilles in preparation for the great battle of the
Somme and our immediate objective was Thiepval. This Moquet Farm, with
its powerful batteries, presented a particular obstacle, for it was
directly in our path on the road to Thiepval. It had to be obliterated.
But before we might move on Moquet we must dispose of a sky-line trench
just ahead. The Farm lay three miles to the right of this sky-line
trench as we faced it.
If we could battle through those lines to Moquet Farm and capture or
put into retreat the batteries that had been constantly and effectively
in use against us, it would mean that we would make the whole German
position untenable and place ourselves in a position of great advantage
in preparation for the great Somme drive.
[Illustration: Waiting to “go over”]
We went over the top at ten o’clock one night from our own elaborately
constructed trenches. My regiment, the Oxfords and Bucks, had been
living in “Fifth Avenue.” I had the hardest time keeping my own two
platoons in leash. From eight o’clock that night they had known
they were going over the top, and after the usual ceremonies of
letter-writing to the dear ones at home, they got so restive I could
hardly hold them in the trenches. They hadn’t been in action for nearly
a month and this hadn’t pleased them. The very mildest-dispositioned
of my men were actually blood-thirsty for a crack at the Germans. The
recollection of the barbarities that had been visited on their comrades
killed and injured in Flanders, their realization that the Germans
had abandoned themselves to absolute mercilessness and brutality in
warfare, had the opposite effect the German policy of “terrorism” hoped
to achieve--that is, to break down the morale of our men. It made our
men all the hotter and eager to meet the enemy and it nerved men who
had an inherent abhorrence of man-killing not only to go through with
the nasty work, but to go to it furiously. Finally the call came for
the men to file before the sergeants and get their “tot” of rum and
everyone, of course, knew what this solemn little ceremony of the
trenches meant.
Armed with a revolver, a couple of bombs and my short-armed bayonet,
I led my men over and we had a front position in the advance. Ahead
of us our big guns poured a powerful barrage fire. But the enemy was
sending back a tremendous reply. We had seven hundred yards or more to
traverse to get to Hans and his guns swept us destructively every step
of the way. The knowledge of our advance got to them quickly enough and
the night fairly went aburst with light in a flood of star-shells. In
their high, ghastly glare I saw scores in the ranks of our advancing
men scattered and sent reeling by the bursting of the shells; I saw
whole regiments caught by the accuracy of the German fire and battered
frightfully. But there never was a pause in the advance. The lines
would get together again, the advance would consolidate anew and we
would “carry on.”
My own little group got along splendidly. There was but a single
tragedy among us. It was sufficiently terrible, but almost miraculously
it cost the life of only one man. He was a bomb-bearer. He was carrying
a box of the explosives for use at close range when we actually came
upon the German trenches. A piece of shrapnel struck the box. There was
immediately a deafening roar which struck through the grand noise of
the battle and the poor fellow was blown utterly to pieces. Fragments
of his body were whipped into the faces of his comrades. The whole
platoon halted and were shaken for an instant, but at a yell from me
got their nerves back with admirable promptitude and threw themselves
along in the advance.
Then our front lines walked into a drive of rifle-bullets and bombs
and we made our first rush for the Germans. The star-shells suddenly
disappeared. Out of the glare in which we had been advancing, in an
instant we found ourselves fighting in inky darkness. Hans had no
intention of illuminating his barbed-wire barriers to aid us in the
irksome task of cutting them down and clearing them away. But our
barrage fire, we were soon to know, had done some very good work in
this direction. Most of the barbed-wire barricades had been obliterated
by the rush of our heavy shells.
The work of routing the Boche out of that sky-line trench was very
swiftly done. We gave them bombs a plenty and then smashed right down
into the trench and its traverses after them with knife and pistol
and more bombs. We cornered group after group of them in the “bays.”
These all whined to us “Kamerad!” They had better fought. I knew too
much of them after Flanders, the dirty deceptions they were capable of
practicing. The murderous pretenses of surrender. My heart was rankling
too bitterly in the memory of the ghastly cruelties I had known them
to practice on the men of our commands who fell into their ruthless,
barbarous hands. If the orders I gave in answer to these calls are to
be regarded as merciless, the dishonorable Huns have only themselves
to blame. Our answers to their calls of “Kamerad!” were bombs in their
faces.
As I climbed across one of the trench parapets I nearly fell over a
man’s leg. I leaned down to feel for a supposed enemy, grasped the leg,
seeking to pull the man forward. To my horror I stood with a severed
leg clutched in my hand.
And a tremulous voice came up, the tone indicating a mere boy:
“Norfolk, sir,” he said, “I’m terribly wounded. For God’s sake don’t
leave me.”
Three days before the Norfolks had made an attempt to take this trench
and had been all but entirely wiped out.
I found both the lad’s legs had been carried off by a shell. But he had
torn his shirt to strips and saved his life by making tourniquets for
his severed limbs. But he had lost his water bottle and his emergency
rations, and had been suffering horribly in his place of concealment
in the parapet. How he had remained undiscovered there by the Germans
for three days is a marvel, save that, of course, he was concealed from
sight in the parapet and it had been his good fortune that no German
had been sent to take station in that particular parapet.
It would have been more fortunate for the poor lad if he had died at
once. For after all his agony, he was to die on the stretcher that was
bearing him back to the field hospital on our first line.
We did take eight prisoners whom we found huddled in a bay. But
these were wounded men. They were Bavarians. They told me there had
been great dissatisfaction among them against the merciless rigors
of discipline and cruelty practiced by their officers, that several
times outbreaks had been imminent, but a stern order had been posted
threatening instant death to one out of every twenty of them to be
picked indiscriminately for slaughter at the first signs of revolt.
We had no time to consolidate the trench and its traverses, and
hold against a counter attack for the Germans were back at us with
reinforcements, the worst feature of which was a preponderance of
machine guns. We had no chance of standing out successfully against it,
so I ordered my men out and into No Man’s Land. For a while it looked
as if they were going to smash us all the way back to our own lines.
They sent up their star-shells only fitfully, and as we crawled and
stumbled back into No Man’s Land, I thought for a moment all was over
with us indeed, thought we had been cut off and surrounded. For out of
the darkness came the rush of scores of men. They almost carried us off
our feet.
“Who’s there?” I demanded, but not expecting anything but a bomb for my
trouble.
To my great relief, though, the response came:
“Anzacs!”
“Oxfords and Bucks!” I yelled back joyfully. “Who’s commanding?”
“Lieutenant Foster. For God’s sake, is that you, Dave Fallon?”
“Foster of Sydney!” I cried earnestly. For Foster had been one of my
pupils at the Royal Military School of New South Wales--a splendid
young chap and one of my most intimate friends.
We groped our way to each other in the darkness and fairly hugged each
other.
“Fancy!” said Foster, “meeting in this hell-hole!”
The sweep of fire was growing more intense, more deadly. A dozen of our
men were dropped. We decided to hold on together. Had we attempted to
dig in against that storm we would have been wiped out.
We had recourse to a ghastly necessity. We set our men to piling the
dead to make protective barriers for ourselves. We used our own men and
Germans to make this fortress of human flesh, building the walls about
six bodies to the width and ten high, throwing layers of mud between
for cementing. It was revolting business, but it had to be done. The
German fire was ceaseless, the shells forever showering, the “minnie”
bullets cutting straight over our heads with a concert of noise that
nearly arose to a scream. Our own artillery roared and thundered its
reply, but we had no way of observing its results.
Time and again our improvised fortress of the dead was ripped asunder
and we had to scour No Man’s Land for other bodies with which to fill
in the gaps.
Of course, in the case of the bodies of our own men we were careful to
remove the identification discs and all papers to be found. Foster and
I shared the responsibility of taking these things into keeping, not
forgetting to issue instructions to our N. C. O.’s to be sure to rescue
them were we ourselves struck down.
I hate to remember the awful pulp the German heavy five-point nines and
their field pieces made of our fortress of dead, the repeated, shocking
necessity of piling up more bodies.
Why the Germans didn’t realize their advantage and sweep over No
Man’s Land and annihilate us, I don’t know. I’m only too grateful
they apparently didn’t think of it or, thinking of it, misjudged
our strength. I know Foster and I expected every minute they would
come rushing out after us. And in this predicament came a new source
of worry. It was now past four o’clock in the morning. My men had
experienced no sleep for many hours and the work of keeping up the
grisly barricade had driven both them and the Anzacs to the point of
absolute exhaustion. With every sort of explosion smashing and crashing
around us, danger and death on every side, yet the men would throw
themselves prone on the ground and drop off into sleep as if a bullet
had brought them the deeper sleep of death itself. Foster and I and our
N. C. O.’s nearly dropped ourselves at the exhaustion of the task of
keeping them on their feet. Besides, we had constantly to give aid to
our wounded. My best orderly, Price, had uttered a cry behind me and I
turned to find him with his right leg blown off. I applied a tourniquet
and Price is now somewhere safe in Blighty. Twenty of my men were
killed outright during the night. As many Anzacs, if not more, died.
At intervals in the night I had sent back messages to our lines
describing how imperative reinforcements were, but for hours no reply
came to us and I could not but think that in bullet-and-shrapnel-swept
No Man’s Land every one of these messengers had fallen. As a matter
of fact, two were killed. But two others made our base, and one of
these came staggering back to me before dawn, his forehead gashed
by shrapnel, but with cheering words that help was soon to come. I
bandaged the plucky man’s wound, thanked him warmly for his good
service and then--my turn came.
Right over us a shell burst. I was whirled around, thrown, staggered to
my feet, only to be helplessly tossed again to the ground. This time I
got up more slowly, crawled to my knees and stood swaying when two of
my men gave me quick support.
There was a stinging and burning sensation in my right shoulder, with
every second or two swift pangs of pain. My coat had been half ripped
off my back. I sat down, leaning against three dead men, while Foster
of the Anzacs and a sergeant bared my wounds and examined them under
electric trench torches. Partly imbedded in the torn flesh they found
a shoulder buckle of my coat and removed it. And then and there also
they managed to extract the largest of the pieces of shrapnel that had
struck me--the nose of an explosive shell cap and a slug of steel that
was found, on subsequent examination, to be one and a half inches long
and a quarter of an inch in diameter. This had scraped my shoulder
blade and was protruding from the fleshy portion of the arm. Afterward
five smaller pieces of shrapnel were to be removed from the wound.
But Foster and the sergeant made a wonderful job of treating the wound
with iodine and binding it so that within fifteen minutes such weakness
as had seized me passed away, and although the wound hurt and my arm
hung numb and useless at my side, I could continue my duties and was
able to hang on for many hours more, able to carry the fight back to
the sky-line trench when reinforcements came and have the satisfaction
of knowing that we were firmly established there and that an
expedition of considerable strength was on its way to give battle to
the Moquet Farm position. It was a week later while I was in a hospital
I got news that the Farm was in our hands.
A sharp, overwhelming attack had been delivered in which a battery of
French seventy-fives, brought up and concealed in a quarry, aided the
infantry with a big band of English and French aviators as well, who
swooped right down over the Germans, delivering tornados of machine-gun
fire and scared them into complete flight and to the desertion of some
of their heaviest guns.
But that’s getting somewhat ahead of my story. At five o’clock that
morning reinforcements came to Foster’s Anzacs and my thinned-out
platoons in the form of the Huntingdon Cyclists regiment and two
companies of engineers. You may be sure the Huntingdons weren’t riding
their bicycles over No Man’s Land, but had been impressed as infantry
for this affair. The German fire never let up, but the engineers
blasted temporary trenches for us in No Man’s Land and the Huntingdons
had brought with them an extra number of machine guns. A steadily
moving train of bearers was arriving with sandbags which we were
relieved to substitute for the bodies of our comrades we had used to
shelter us.
Thus with the coming of dawn we faced the German trench not more than
one hundred yards away on something like even terms. And soon we were
topside in advantage, for our shells began to find the German dug-outs
and smash down the barbed-wire defenses the enemy had renewed in the
night. By noon we were back in the German trench from which we had been
driven. And reports from other battalions all along the line began to
tell of similar successes in the attack. By noon the entire German
position had been taken. There were two fierce counter attacks and a
weak one. Then with the arrival of further reinforcements we started in
pursuit of Hans and he fled in panic to the Moquet Farm protection.
I did not want to leave the fight and stuck several hours after Col.
Reynolds, my commandant, had sent me word that I was to return and
that Captain Reed of A Company would be along to relieve my battered
platoons.
By eight o’clock that night, however, my shoulder wounds became angry
with pain and I was weak and chilled. I received word through a
messenger that Captain Reed was within ten minutes of arrival. So I
dropped exhausted into the seat of a field ambulance beside its driver,
the body of the car being crowded with more dangerously wounded men. At
Orvilles I switched to another ambulance and was able again to sit with
the driver. In this I was whisked to a field hospital located in the
captured “Hohenzollern Redoubt,” now well behind our foremost lines.
There the other pieces of shrapnel were removed from my shoulder, the
wound thoroughly cleansed and professionally bandaged.
All this time I never really thought of myself as being out of the
fight and had full intention to return, but the doctors ordered me to
Wimereaux (a charming seashore resort it had been in peace days), and I
remember meeting a professor of English in an Egyptian college whom I
had met while we were training for Gallipoli, who waved to me as I sat
beside the ambulance driver with my arm in fresh white bandages and a
sling. I learned afterward he had arrived in France only the day before
and had been immediately ordered into action.
“Lucky beggar, you Fallon,” he shouted laughingly to me, and indicated
my arm. “What wouldn’t I give for that Blighty!”
He was killed in the Moquet action the very next day and of the five
officers of the companies which relieved mine, four were killed. I had
been indeed a very lucky man.
Via Gazincourt and Bologne I made my way to Wimereaux, where I was
assigned to the Hotel Splendid, which had been transformed into a great
hospital. For a month I had a perfect rest, rambling the sea cliffs,
reading, catching up with my correspondence with old friends, playing
with the pretty little French kiddies in the sands, and staring out on
the restful sea, where, however, as a reminder of war, there was an
island on which Napoleon in the long ago had constructed a fort and
naval base in his contemplated invasion of England.
My wound gave me little or no trouble, healing nicely from the start,
and in a month I was ready to return to service.
While I was at the Splendid, Capt. P. A. Hall, M. C., sent me the
information that I had been officially recommended to headquarters for
“capturing sky-line trench, consolidating and holding it during heavy,
continuous shell-fire and rendering first aid to the injured until hit
and relieved.”