While I was with the Canadians, all attacks, or rather advances, were launched in four waves, the waves being thirty to fifty yards apart. A wave, I might explain, is a line of men in extended order, or about three paces apart. Our officers were instructed to maintain their places in the line and to wear no distinguishing marks which might enable sharpshooters to pick them off. Invariably, however, they led the men out of our trenches. “Come on, boys, let’s go,” they would say, climbing out in advance. It was bred in them to do that.
Experience had taught us that it took the German barrage about a minute and a half to get going after ours started, and that they always opened up on our front line trench. We had a plan to take advantage of this knowledge. We usually dug an “assembly trench” some distance in advance of our front line, and started from it. Thus we were able to line up between two fires, our shells bursting ahead of us, and the Germans’ behind us. All four waves started from the assembly trench at once, the men of the second, third and fourth waves falling back to their proper distances as the advance proceeded. The first wave worked up to within thirty to fifty yards of our own barrage and then the men lay down. At this stage, our barrage was playing on the enemy front line trench. After a certain interval, carefully timed, the gunners, away back of our lines, elevated their guns enough to carry our barrage a certain distance back of the enemy front trench and then our men went in at the charge, to occupy the enemy trench before the Germans in the dug-outs could come out and organize a defense. Unless serious opposition was met the first wave went straight through the first trench, leaving only a few men to guard the dug-out entrances pending the arrival of the second wave. The second wave, only a few seconds behind the first one, proceeded to do the “mopping up.” Then this wave, in turn, went forward, leaving only a few men behind to garrison the captured trench.
The third and fourth waves went straight on unless assistance was needed, and rushed up to the support of the new front line. The men in these waves were ammunition carriers, stretcher-bearers and general reenforcements. Some of them were set to work at once digging a communication trench to connect our original front line with our new support and front lines. When we established a new front line we never used the German trench. We had found that the German artillery always had the range of that trench down, literally speaking, to an inch. We always dug a new trench either in advance of the German trench or in the rear of it. Our manner of digging a trench under these circumstances was very simple and pretty sure to succeed except in an extremely heavy fire. Each man simply got as flat to the ground as possible, seeking whatever cover he might avail himself of, and began digging toward the man nearest him. Sand bags were filled with the first dirt and placed to afford additional cover. The above system of attack, which is now well known to the Germans, was, at the time when I left France, the accepted plan when two lines of enemy trenches were to be taken. It has been considerably changed, now, I am told. If the intention was to take three, four, five or six lines, the system was changed only in detail. When four or more lines were to be taken, two or more battalions were assembled to operate on the same frontage. The first battalion took two lines, the second passed through the first and took two more lines, and so on. The Russians had been known to launch an attack in thirty waves.
It is interesting to note how every attack, nowadays, is worked out in advance in the smallest detail, and how everything is done on a time schedule. Aerial photographs of the position they are expected to capture are furnished to each battalion, and the men are given the fullest opportunity to study them. All bombing pits, dug-outs, trench mortar and machine-gun emplacements are marked on these photographs. Every man is given certain work to do and is instructed and re-instructed until there can be no doubt that he has a clear knowledge of his orders. But, besides that, he is made to understand the scope and purpose and plan of the whole operation, so that he will know what to do if he finds himself with no officer to command. This is one of the great changes brought about by this war, and it signalizes the disappearance, probably forever, of a long-established tradition. It is something which I think should be well impressed upon the officers of our new army, about to enter this great struggle. The day has passed when the man in the ranks is supposed merely to obey. He must know what to do and how to do it. He must think for himself and “carry on” with the general plan, if his officers and N. C. O.’s all become casualties. Sir Douglas Haig said: “For soldiers in this war, give me business men with business sense, who are used to taking initiative.”
While I was at the front I had opportunity to observe three distinct types of barrage fire, the “box,” the “jumping,” and the “creeping.” The “box,” I have already described to you, as it is used in a raid. The “jumping” plays on a certain line for a certain interval and then jumps to another line. The officers in command of the advance know the intervals of time and space and keep their lines close up to the barrage, moving with it on the very second. The “creeping” barrage opens on a certain line and then creeps ahead at a certain fixed rate of speed, covering every inch of the ground to be taken. The men of the advance simply walk with it, keeping within about thirty yards of the line on which the shells are falling. Eight-inch shrapnel, and high-explosive shells were used exclusively by the British when I was with them in maintaining barrage fire. The French used their “seventy-fives,” which are approximately of eight-inch calibre. Of late, I believe, the British and French have both added gas shells for this use, when conditions make it possible. The Germans, in establishing a barrage, used their “whiz-bangs,” slightly larger shells than ours, but they never seemed to have quite the same skill and certitude in barrage bombardment that our artillery-men had.
To attempt to picture the scene of two barrage fires, crossing, is quite beyond me. You see two walls of flame in front of you, one where your own barrage is playing, and one where the enemy guns are firing, and you see two more walls of flame behind you, one where the enemy barrage is playing, and one where your own guns are firing. And amid it all you are deafened by titanic explosions which have merged into one roar of thunderous sound, while acrid fumes choke and blind you. To use a fitting, if not original phrase, it’s just “Hell with the lid off.”
That day on the Somme, our artillery had given the Germans such a battering and the curtain fire which our guns dropped just thirty to forty yards ahead of us was so powerful that we lost comparatively few men going over—only those who were knocked down by shells which the Germans landed among us through our barrage. They never caught us with their machine guns sweeping until we neared their trenches. Then a good many of our men began to drop, but we were in their front trench before they could cut us up anywhere near completely. Going over, I was struck by shell fragments on the hand and leg, but the wounds were not severe enough to stop me. In fact, I did not know that I had been wounded until I felt blood running into my shoe. Then I discovered the cut in my leg, but saw that it was quite shallow, and that no artery of importance had been damaged. So I went on.
I had the familiar feeling of nervousness and physical shrinking and nausea at the beginning of this fight, but, by the time we were half way across “No Man’s Land,” I had my nerve back. After I had been hit, I remember feeling relieved that I hadn’t been hurt enough to keep me from going on with the men. I’m not trying to make myself out a hero. I’m just trying to tell you how an ordinary man’s mind works under the stress of fighting and the danger of sudden death. There are some queer things in the psychology of battle. For instance, when we had got into the German trench and were holding it against the most vigorous counter attacks, the thought which was persistently uppermost in my mind was that I had lost the address of a girl in London along with some papers which I had thrown away, just before we started over, and which I should certainly never be able to find again.
The Regina trench had been taken and lost three times by the British. We took it that day and held it. We went into action with fifteen hundred men of all ranks and came out with six hundred. The position, which was the objective of our battalion, was opposite to and only twelve hundred yards distant from the town of Pys, which, if you take the English meaning of the French sound, was a highly inappropriate name for that particular village. During a good many months, for a good many miles ’round about that place, there wasn’t any such thing as “Peace.” From our position, we could see a church steeple in the town of Baupaume until the Germans found that our gunners were using it as a “zero” mark, and blew it down with explosives.
I have said that, because we were on the extreme right of the line, we had the hottest little spot in France to hold for a while. You see, we had to institute a double defensive, as we had the Germans on our front and on our flank, the whole length of the trench to the right of us being still held by the Germans. There we had to form a “block,” massing our bombers behind a barricade which was only fifteen yards from the barricade behind which the Germans were fighting. Our flank and the German flank were in contact as fiery as that of two live wire ends. And, meanwhile, the Fritzes tried to rush us on our front with nine separate counter attacks. Only one of them got up close to us, and we went out and stopped that with the bayonet. Behind our block barricade, there was the nearest approach to an actual fighting Hell that I had seen.