Right over us a shell burst. I was whirled around, thrown, staggered to my feet, only to be helplessly tossed again to the ground. This time I got up more slowly, crawled to my knees and stood swaying when two of my men gave me quick support.
There was a stinging and burning sensation in my right shoulder, with every second or two swift pangs of pain. My coat had been half ripped off my back. I sat down, leaning against three dead men, while Foster of the Anzacs and a sergeant bared my wounds and examined them under electric trench torches. Partly imbedded in the torn flesh they found a shoulder buckle of my coat and removed it. And then and there also they managed to extract the largest of the pieces of shrapnel that had struck me—the nose of an explosive shell cap and a slug of steel that was found, on subsequent examination, to be one and a half inches long and a quarter of an inch in diameter. This had scraped my shoulder blade and was protruding from the fleshy portion of the arm. Afterward five smaller pieces of shrapnel were to be removed from the wound.
But Foster and the sergeant made a wonderful job of treating the wound with iodine and binding it so that within fifteen minutes such weakness as had seized me passed away, and although the wound hurt and my arm hung numb and useless at my side, I could continue my duties and was able to hang on for many hours more, able to carry the fight back to the sky-line trench when reinforcements came and have the satisfaction of knowing that we were firmly established there and that an expedition of considerable strength was on its way to give battle to the Moquet Farm position. It was a week later while I was in a hospital I got news that the Farm was in our hands.
A sharp, overwhelming attack had been delivered in which a battery of French seventy-fives, brought up and concealed in a quarry, aided the infantry with a big band of English and French aviators as well, who swooped right down over the Germans, delivering tornados of machine-gun fire and scared them into complete flight and to the desertion of some of their heaviest guns.
But that’s getting somewhat ahead of my story. At five o’clock that morning reinforcements came to Foster’s Anzacs and my thinned-out platoons in the form of the Huntingdon Cyclists regiment and two companies of engineers. You may be sure the Huntingdons weren’t riding their bicycles over No Man’s Land, but had been impressed as infantry for this affair. The German fire never let up, but the engineers blasted temporary trenches for us in No Man’s Land and the Huntingdons had brought with them an extra number of machine guns. A steadily moving train of bearers was arriving with sandbags which we were relieved to substitute for the bodies of our comrades we had used to shelter us.
Thus with the coming of dawn we faced the German trench not more than one hundred yards away on something like even terms. And soon we were topside in advantage, for our shells began to find the German dug-outs and smash down the barbed-wire defenses the enemy had renewed in the night. By noon we were back in the German trench from which we had been driven. And reports from other battalions all along the line began to tell of similar successes in the attack. By noon the entire German position had been taken. There were two fierce counter attacks and a weak one. Then with the arrival of further reinforcements we started in pursuit of Hans and he fled in panic to the Moquet Farm protection.
I did not want to leave the fight and stuck several hours after Col. Reynolds, my commandant, had sent me word that I was to return and that Captain Reed of A Company would be along to relieve my battered platoons.
By eight o’clock that night, however, my shoulder wounds became angry with pain and I was weak and chilled. I received word through a messenger that Captain Reed was within ten minutes of arrival. So I dropped exhausted into the seat of a field ambulance beside its driver, the body of the car being crowded with more dangerously wounded men. At Orvilles I switched to another ambulance and was able again to sit with the driver. In this I was whisked to a field hospital located in the captured “Hohenzollern Redoubt,” now well behind our foremost lines. There the other pieces of shrapnel were removed from my shoulder, the wound thoroughly cleansed and professionally bandaged.
All this time I never really thought of myself as being out of the fight and had full intention to return, but the doctors ordered me to Wimereaux (a charming seashore resort it had been in peace days), and I remember meeting a professor of English in an Egyptian college whom I had met while we were training for Gallipoli, who waved to me as I sat beside the ambulance driver with my arm in fresh white bandages and a sling. I learned afterward he had arrived in France only the day before and had been immediately ordered into action.
“Lucky beggar, you Fallon,” he shouted laughingly to me, and indicated my arm. “What wouldn’t I give for that Blighty!”