The winter of 1915-16 passed with its misery, and spring came again to
France and Flanders with its promise of life, fulfilled in the beauty of
wild flowers and the green of leaves where the earth was not made barren
by the fire of war and all trees killed.
For men there was no promise of life, but only new preparations for
death, and continued killing.
The battle of Verdun was still going on, and France had saved herself
from a mortal blow at the heart by a desperate, heroic resistance which
cost her five hundred and fifty thousand in dead and wounded. On the
British front there were still no great battles, but those trench raids,
artillery duels, mine fighting, and small massacres which filled the
casualty clearing stations with the average amount of human wreckage.
The British armies were being held in leash for a great offensive in the
summer. New divisions were learning the lessons of the old divisions,
and here and there generals were doing a little fancy work to keep
things merry and bright.
So it was when some mines were exploded under the German earthworks on
the lower slopes of the Vimy Ridge, where the enemy had already blown
several mines and taken possession of their craters. It was to gain
those craters, and new ones to be made by our mine charges, that the
74th Brigade of the 25th Division, a body of Lancashire men, the 9th
Loyal North Lancashires and the 11th Royal Fusiliers, with a company of
Royal Engineers and some Welsh pioneers, were detailed for the perilous
adventure of driving in the mine shafts, putting tremendous charges of
high explosives in the sapheads, and rushing the German positions.
It was on the evening of May 15th, after two days of wet and cloudy
weather preventing the enemy's observation, that our heavy artillery
fired a short number of rounds to send the Germans into their dugouts. A
few minutes later the right group of mines exploded with a terrific roar
and blew in two of the five old German craters. After the long rumble
of heaving earth had been stilled there was just time enough to hear
the staccato of a German machine-gun. Then there was a second roar and a
wild upheaval of soil when the left group of mines destroyed two more of
the German craters and knocked out the machine-gun.
The moment for the infantry attack had come, and the men were ready.
The first to get away were two lieutenants of the 9th Loyal North
Lancashires, who rushed forward with their assaulting-parties to the
remaining crater on the extreme left, which had not been blown up.
With little opposition from dazed and terror-stricken Germans, bayoneted
as they scrambled out of the chaotic earth, our men flung
themselves into those smoking pits and were followed immediately by
working-parties, who built up bombing posts with earth and sand-bags on
the crater lip and began to dig out communication trenches leading to
them. The assaulting-parties of the Lancashire Fusiliers were away at
the first signal, and were attacking the other groups of craters under
heavy fire.
The Germans were shaken with terror because the explosion of the mines
had killed and wounded a large number of them, and through the darkness
there rang out the cheers of masses of men who were out for blood.
Through the darkness there now glowed a scarlet light, flooding all that
turmoil of earth and men with a vivid, red illumination, as flare after
flare rose high into the sky from several points of the German line.
Later the red lights died down, and then other rockets were fired,
giving a green light to this scene of war.
The German gunners were now at work in answer to those beacons of
distress, and with every caliber of gun from howitzers to minenwerfers
they shelled our front-lines for two hours and killed for vengeance.
They were too late to stop the advance of the assaulting troops, who
were fighting in the craters against groups of German bombers who tried
to force their way up to the rescue of a position already lost. One of
our officers leading the assault on one of the craters on the right was
killed very quickly, but his men were not checked, and with individual
resolution and initiative, and the grit of the Lancashire man in a tight
place, fought on grimly, and won their purpose.
A young lieutenant fell dead from a bullet wound after he had directed
his men to their posts from the lip of a new mine-crater, as coolly as
though he were a master of ceremonies in a Lancashire ballroom.
Another, a champion bomb-thrower, with a range of forty yards, flung
his hand-grenades at the enemy with untiring skill and with a fierce
contempt of death, until he was killed by an answering shot. The
N.C.O.'s took up the command and the men “carried on” until they held
all the chain of craters, crouching and panting above mangled men.
They were hours of anguish for many Germans, who lay wounded and
half buried, or quite buried, in the chaos, of earth made by those
mine-craters now doubly upheaved. Their screams and moans sounding above
the guns, the frantic cries of men maddened under tons of earth, which
kept them prisoners in deep pits below the crater lips, and awful
inarticulate noises of human pain coming out of that lower darkness
beyond the light of the rockets, made up a chorus of agony more than our
men could endure, even in the heat of battle. They shouted across to the
German grenadiers:
“We will cease fire if you will, and let you get in your wounded...
Cease fire for the wounded!”
The shout was repeated, and our bombers held their hands, still waiting
for an answer. But the answer was a new storm of bombs, and the fighting
went on, and the moaning of the men who were helpless and unhelped.
Working-parties followed up the assault to “consolidate” the position.
They did amazing things, toiling in the darkness under abominable
shell-fire, and by daylight had built communication trenches with
head-cover from the crater lips to our front-line trenches.
But now it was the enemy's turn--the turn of his guns, which poured
explosive fire into those pits, churning up the earth again, mixing it
with new flesh and blood, and carving up his own dead; and it was the
turn of his bombers, who followed this fire in strong assaults upon the
Lancashire lads, who, lying among their killed and wounded, had to repel
those fierce attacks.
On May 17th I went to see General Doran of the 25th Division, an
optimistic old gentleman who took a bright view of things, and Colonel
Crosby, who was acting--brigadier of the 74th Brigade, which had made
the attack. He, too, was enthusiastic about the situation, though his
brigade had suffered eight hundred casualties in a month of routine
warfare.
In my simple way I asked him a direct question:
“Do you think your men can hold on to the craters, sir?”
Colonel Crosby stared at me sternly.
“Certainly. The position cannot be retaken overground. We hold it
strongly.”
As he spoke an orderly came into his billet (a small farmhouse),
saluted, and handed him a pink slip, which was a telephone message. I
watched him read it, and saw the sudden pallor of his face, and noticed
how the room shook with the constant reverberation of distant gun-fire.
A big bombardment was in progress over Vimy way.
“Excuse me,” said the colonel; “things seem to be happening. I must go
at once.”
He went through the window, leaping the sill, and a look of bad tidings
went with him.
His men had been blown out of the craters.
A staff officer sat in the brigade office, and when the acting-brigadier
had gone raised his head and looked across to me.
“I am a critic of these affairs,” he said. “They seem to me too
expensive. But I'm here to do what I am told.”
We did not regain the Vimy craters until a year afterward, when the
Canadians and Scottish captured all the Vimy Ridge in a great assault.