30th. “The cuckoo is at it and the nightingale, in fact it is Spring, cloudless day, glorious sun, everything as it should be, only one thing wrong, I’m not where I ought to be, in England—Spring in a foreign land is a painful pleasure to an Englishman.” The point of these extracts is that they express what each of us felt at that time—and many other times—an intense longing, carefully smothered, for Home and Peace; few individuals, if any, went abroad, or stayed there, because they liked it.
Until the 6th we remained at HOULLE training; it would serve no useful purpose and would bore the general reader to set down the programme of training carried out; enough to say that it was a fresh and merry column that marched back to ARNEKE on the 6th of May, leaving again by train at 11 45 a.m. for POPERINGHE. Here we were met by the Divisional Band, which played us to L Camp, where we spent the night, returning to POPERINGHE the next morning and up by train to the PRISON billets at YPRES.
During the next five days bathing was carried out, and the usual nightly working parties went up the line. YPRES was distinctly livelier than before, but only one man was wounded during the period.
On the 14th we relieved the 1/4th KING’S OWN in the right sub-sector, POTIJZE. The sectors had been rearranged. D Company had two Platoons in the front line and two in close support; A Company was in reserve and held MILL COTTS, GARDEN OF EDEN, PROWSE TRENCH, and ST. JAMES’ TRENCH. B and C Companies, in Brigade Reserve, were billeted in houses on the POTIJZE ROAD.
On the 18th the enemy was very active with his artillery, the front line Company, D, calling for retaliation five times during the morning; we had one man killed and one wounded. A fighting patrol had gone out the previous night to try to capture an enemy party, and were supported by an artillery barrage—as usual, the enemy had withdrawn.
At 9 15 that evening the enemy placed a shrapnel, trench mortar, and howitzer barrage on our front line first, then on our support line, and an S.O.S. being sent up by the Battalion on our left was repeated by us; as soon as the barrage started our front Company stood to and fired rapid over the parapet. No one in the front line saw the enemy leave his trenches, but two snipers, who had been out in NO MAN’S LAND all day and were waiting for it to get dark to come in, saw the enemy place a machine gun on his parapet, the team of which they proceeded to knock out; they also saw Huns entering the trenches of the Battalion on our left. Our trenches were badly damaged in places, one man was killed, one missing, and Second Lieutenant Francis and four men wounded; B Company relieved D that evening.
“It is curious to notice the different effects intermittent and concentrated shelling have on one—intermittent shelling takes people different ways—on the whole it makes you angry; concentrated shelling, such as a barrage, you rise above altogether by some curious effort of will. I think it is that in the first case one hears each one coming hissing along in a descending scale, and speculates where it will fall, while in the second there is simply a terrific medley of bangs and crashes which you can only accept as a perfect inferno of noise, and leave it at that.”
Aeroplane Photo of Opposing Trench Lines, YPRES.
The following night we hit back; Major Crump, who was in command in the absence of Lieutenant-Colonel Hindle, who was commanding the Brigade, organised a raid, carried out under an artillery barrage by Second Lieutenant Tautz, three N.C.O.’s, and 20 men, who entered the enemy’s lines and bombed dugouts. The party had great difficulty in getting through the wire, and our casualties were two men wounded of the party and one in the trench; three of the raiders were at first reported missing, but Private Metcalfe turned up at dawn, having got entangled in the wire and badly wounded, and in the evening another, Private Cooper, came in, having spent the day in a shell hole.