The Ypres Salient
The whole terrain through which the Division passed on its three miles’ journey to the trenches was stiff with guns. The 18-pounders had been brought close behind the infantry, and they stood in mud and shell-holes almost wheel to wheel. They appeared to be innumerable, and it was something of a shock to the Lancashire gunners to find so many guns within a radius of one hundred yards. The 4·5-inch howitzers were in groups, also close to the front; further back were the 6-inch howitzers, the 60-pounders, and the guns of heavier calibre, though there was a battery of 9·2-inch howitzers only twenty yards behind one of our R.F.A. batteries. The huge naval and 15-inch guns were well to the rear of Ypres, but though they could not be seen their tremendous power appealed to the imagination of the infantryman, who regarded them somewhat in the light of influential friends or patrons who, if occasion should arise, would see that he had fair play and would keep the ring. The enemy had also concentrated a similarly vast array of artillery in this sector, which he too regarded as the most important and most to be dreaded of all. Day and night the guns of both sides barked and thundered, and the strain on the gunners would have been considered unbearable before the Great War had taught the lesson that the limit of man’s endurance cannot be calculated. British and Germans lost more guns and gunners here in a week than an army would have lost in a year’s campaigning in any previous war. At night, high above the flashes of our 18-pounders, the beautiful coloured stars and golden rain of the German signal-rockets recalled memories of Belle Vue nights. In the daytime the swans calmly paddled in the moat round the eastern ramparts of Ypres, though the 60-pounders blazed away within a few yards of the water’s edge.
YPRES. THE CLOTH HALL.
YPRES. RAILWAY WOOD DUG-OUTS.
POTIJZE ROAD. THE A.D.S. AT THE WHITE CHÂTEAU.
POTIJZE ROAD. BAVARIA HOUSE, AN R.A.M.C. COLLECTING POST.