Twenty-five yards ahead there was a trench-juncture, at which a lad was sitting with his legs wide apart and a scarlet hole bored through the centre of his forehead. No one had gone to his help; he merely sat there in the sunlight with a puzzled expression, watching the blood splash slowly on his hands. When I made to cross the trench-juncture, one of the men pulled me back. “A Hun sniper,” he panted with an eloquent economy of words; “he gets everyone who goes there.”
“But what’s the matter with you chaps?” I asked. “It’s the booby-traps, sir,” he said; “they’ve blown a lot of us up. We daren’t stir.”
Then I saw what he meant. Across the trench, beyond where the wounded man was sitting, cobwebs of wires had been strung a few inches above the ground, attached to pegs. They looked innocent enough, but were just at the right height to catch the feet of men advancing in single file. Should anyone trip against them, the jerk on the pegs would explode a series of mines.
I turned to the man. “Are you the furthest up of the attack?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you know what’s on ahead?”
“The railroad, sir, with a lot of freight-cars standing on the tracks. The Huns are hiding behind them and taking pot-shots at us.”
Just then the Company Commander hove in sight, crouching low to avoid the sharp-shooters and stepping warily between the wires of the traps. While I spoke to him. Suzette was dragging the wounded lad back from the trench-juncture and binding up his head.
“A pretty rotten mess. I call it,” the Company Commander growled pantingly, wiping the perspiration from his eyes. “We ought to have had tanks and aeroplanes to do this job and twice as many men. It’s sheer murder. My men haven’t a one per cent chance of coming out of the show alive; out of a hundred and forty I have twenty-six left. The enemy gets us from in front and from both flanks, while his machine-guns in Fransart are potting at our backs. And what the devil is our own artillery doing laying down a barrage behind us?”
The truth was the infantry had advanced too quickly, without first ascertaining that their gunners had been notified of their progress. They had also failed to “mop up” the enemy strongholds before pressing further forward. The consequence was that they had left pockets of resistance on every hand and that their own artillery was cutting them off from help. Their situation was desperate. There was only one remedy; to find out the exact locations of the machine-gun nests and to send the information back to the guns, that they might knock them out with high explosive; to send back orders to our artillery that the barrage should be raised; and to withdraw our troops from Fransart and subject the village to a fresh bombardment. But to what place could we safely withdraw our infantry while the bombardment was in progress—that was the question. To answer this question the Company Commander and I decided that a further reconnaissance was necessary. We did not know what lay on ahead or how near to us the Huns were; at all events, it could not be much more dangerous further forward.