CHAPTER XX
A VIVID PICTURE OF WAR
[THE BATTLE OF NEUVE CHAPELLE] — [A SURPRISE PREPARED] — [“HELL BROKE LOOSE”]—[A HORRIBLE THIRTY-FIVE MINUTES] — [TRENCHES FILLED WITH DEAD] — [HOARSE SHOUTS AND THE GROANS OF THE WOUNDED] — [INDESCRIBABLE MASS OF RUINS RUINS] — [“SMEARED WITH DUST AND BLOOD.”]
One of the most vivid word-pictures of what war means in all its horror was told by an eye-witness of the battle of Neuve Chapelle in which the British soldiers dislodged the Germans from an important position. He said:
“The dawn, which broke reluctantly through a veil of clouds on the morning of Wednesday, March 10, 1915, seemed as any other to the Germans behind the white and blue sandbags in their long line of trenches curving in a hemicycle about the battered village of Neuve Chapelle. For five months they had remained undisputed masters of the positions they had here wrested from the British in October. Ensconced in their comfortably-arranged trenches with but a thin outpost in their fire trenches, they had watched day succeed day and night succeed night without the least variation from the monotony of trench warfare, the intermittent bark of the machine guns—rat-tat-tat-tat-tat—and the perpetual rattle of rifle fire, with here and there a bomb, and now and then an exploded mine.
A SURPRISE PREPARED
“For weeks past the German airmen had grown strangely shy. On this Wednesday morning none were aloft to spy out the strange doings which as dawn broke might have been descried on the desolate roads behind the British lines.
“From ten o’clock of the preceding evening endless files of men marched silently down the roads leading towards the German positions through Laventie and Richebourg St. Vaast, poor shattered villages of the dead where months of incessant bombardment have driven away the last inhabitants and left roofless houses and rent roadways. . . .
“Two days before, a quiet room, where Nelson’s Prayer stands on the mantel-shelf, saw the ripening of the plans that sent these sturdy sons of Britain’s four kingdoms marching all through the night. Sir John French met the army corps commanders and unfolded to them his plans for the offensive of the British Army against the German line at Neuve Chapelle.