THE RAID
_France, July 9th._
During the first week of the battle of the Somme the Anzac troops far to
the north, near Armentières, raided the German trenches about a dozen
times. Here is a sample of these raids.
We were late. For some reason we had decided to watch this one from the
firing-line. We had stayed too long at Brigade Headquarters getting the
details of the night's plan. Just as we hurried out of the end of the
communication trench into the dark jumble of the low sandbag
constructions which formed this part of the firing-line, there came two
bangs from the southward as if someone had hit an iron ship's tank with
a big drumstick. It was our preparatory bombardment which had begun.
A light showed dimly from one or two crevices in our trenches. We peeped
into one. It was very small, and someone was busy in there. The
bombardment was not half a minute old, but it was now continuous along
the whole horizon behind us. The noise was that of a large orchestra of
street boys each heartily banging his kerosene-tin drum. Our shells
streamed overhead with an almost continuous swish.
I do not know why, but some curious sense made one keep low in ducking
round to a bay of the front trench. The enemy's reply was not due for
some minutes yet. There was a sudden lurid red glare with a heavy crash
over the parapet to our right--perhaps 150 yards away. "That's not one
of their 5.9's, surely?" exclaims a friend.
"One of our trench mortars, I think," says another. As we sit in the
narrow trench, with our knees tucked up to our chins, there is no doubt
whatever of the advent of a new sheaf of missiles through the air above
our heads. We can hear the swish of our own shells, perhaps 100 feet up,
and the occasional rustle of some missile passing overhead a good deal
higher than that. One knows that this must be one of our howitzer shells
making his slow path, perhaps 200 or 300 feet above us, on his way to
fall on some German communication trench, and blow it in. I do not know,
but I rather suspect his duty is so to jumble up the walls and banks of
that trench as to prevent German supports from reaching their front line
without clambering into the open fields where our shrapnel is falling
like hail.
But under those two streams of overhead traffic is a third quite easily
distinguishable. It comes with short, descending screams--sheafs of them
together.
At the end of each there is a momentary glare over the sandbags, and the
bang as of an exploding rocket.
That is German shrapnel, bursting in the air and projecting its pellets
in a cone like a shot-gun. A little to the south of us there is a much
more formidable crash, always recurring several times in the minute. We
always know when that crash is coming by a certain fierce orange glare
which lights up the tops of our sandbags immediately before we hear the
sound. Three or four times the crash and the glare came together, and a
big cloud of stuffy-smelling white smoke drifted low overhead, and bits
of mud and earth cascaded down upon us from the sky above; and just for
two minutes the sheaf of four shells from some particular field battery,
which sent them passing as regularly as a clock about five times a
minute overhead, seemed to lower and burst just above us; and one or
two odd high-explosive bursts--4.2, I should say--crept in close upon us
from the rear, while the parapet gave several ponderous jumps towards us
from the other direction. One would swear that it had shifted inwards a
good inch, though I do not suppose it had. The dazzling orange flashes
and crashes close around us were rather like a bad dream. One could not
resist the reflection that often comes over a man when he begins his
holiday with a rough sea crossing, "How on earth did I ever imagine that
there was advantage to be obtained out of this?"
That was the moment which was chosen by one of the party to go along and
see that the men were all right. There was a sentry in the next bay of
the trench. All by himself, but "right as rain," as he puts it. Shrapnel
was breaking in showers on the parapet, swishing overhead like driven
hail. While the enemy is bursting shell on your parapet he cannot come
there himself. Provided that your sentry's nerves are all right, and
that a "crump" does not drop right into his little section of trench,
there is not much that can go wrong. And there is nothing much wanting
in the nerves of this infantry.
However, something had clearly gone wrong with this attack. It was
quite obvious that the enemy somehow or another knew that it was coming
off, and where; for he had begun to shoot back within a very few minutes
of our opening shot, and he was shooting very hard. Clearly he had
noticed some point in our preparations, and he too had prepared. "I will
teach these people a lesson this time," he thought, as he laid his guns
on the likely section.
Right in the midst of all this uproar we heard one of his machine-guns
cracking overhead. Then another joined in--we could hear them traversing
from flank to front and round to flank again. "Of course, the raiders
cannot have got in," one thought. "Perhaps he has seen them crossing No
Man's Land, and those machine-guns are on to them in the open. Poor
beggars! Not much chance for them now"--and one shivered at the thought
of them out there, open and defenceless to that hail. As the minutes
slipped on towards the hour, and our bombardment slackened, but the
enemy's did not, and no one stirred at all in the trenches, one felt
quite sure of it--of course, we had failed this time--well, we ought to
expect such failures; we cannot always hope to jump into German trenches
exactly whenever we please.
Just then a dark figure crept round the traverse of the buttress of the
trench. "Room in here?" he asked.
Two others came after him, bending, and then a fourth. We squeezed along
to make room.
"Was you hit?" asked the second man of the first.
"Only a bang on the scalp, and I wouldn't have got that if it hadn't
been for the prisoner--waiting to get him over."
"Keep your head down, Mac, you'll only get hit," said a third. "Where's
Mr. Franks--you all right, sir?--Mr. Little was hit, wasn't he?"
So these were the raiders, and they had come through it after all. They
were rather distracted. The man next me wiped his forehead, and took a
cigarette. He looked disinterestedly up at the shell-bursts, but he
talked very little. He looked on the raid as a bit of a failure,
clearly.
An hour later we heard all about it. The racket had quietened down. The
enemy was contenting himself with throwing a few shrapnel shells far
back over communication trenches. We were in a room lighted with
candles. In the midst of an interested crowd of half a dozen young
officers was a youngster in grey cloth, with a mud be-spattered coat, a
swollen face, and two bandaged hands. On the table were a coffee-pot,
some cups, and biscuits, and a small heap of loot--gas masks and
bayonets, and such stuff from German dug-outs. Most of the crowd was
interestedly fingering a grey steel helmet with a heavy steel shield or
visor in front of the forehead, evidently meant to be bullet-proof when
the wearer looked over the parapet. The prisoner was murmuring something
like "Durchgeschossen," "Durchgeschossen."
"He says he's shot through," said someone, who understood a little
German.
"Oh, nonsense," broke in a youth; "you were shot through the hand, old
man, but you were not shot there." The prisoner was pointing to his
ribs.
"Oh, you've got a rat," said the youngster, as the man went on pointing
to the same place. But he tore the man's shirt open quickly. "Yes, you
have, sure enough," he exclaimed, showing the small, neat entry hole of
a bullet in the side. "Here, sit down, old man, and take this," he added
tenderly, giving the man a cup of warm coffee, and pressing him to a
chair. The whole attitude had changed to one of solicitude.
It was while the prisoner sat there that we heard about the raid. They
clearly considered it something of a failure. They had to get through a
ditch full of water to their necks, then some trip-wire, then a
knee-deep entanglement, then a ditch full of rusty wire, then some
"French" coils of barbed wire, then more wire knee-deep, with trip-wire
after that. Moreover, the enemy's artillery fire was heavy. They simply
went on over the parapet into the enemy's trench for a few minutes and
killed with their bombs about a dozen Germans, and brought in as
prisoners those who were left wounded. Every man of their own who was
wounded they carried carefully back through the tempest in No Man's
Land. The Germans had spent at least as much artillery ammunition as we
had, and in spite of all the noise they had done wonderfully little
damage. We put a dozen of them out of action till the end of the war--a
dozen that our men saw and know of; and they may have put out of action
five of ours.
As we took a tired prisoner to the hospital through the grey light of
morning, I thought I would give, for a change, an account of a
"failure."
[It was almost immediately after this that the Australians were brought
down to the Somme battle. From this time on they left the neighbourhood
of green fields and farmhouses and plunged into the brown, ploughed-up
nightmare battlefield where the rain of shells has practically never
since ceased. They came into the battle in its second stage, exactly
three weeks after the British.]