Emery Walker Ltd. del. et sc.
THE YPRES SALIENT
Second Battalion Actions
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY EMERY WALKER LTD., LONDON
The impression on the new hands, that is, the majority of men and officers, struck in and stayed for years after. Some compared their stealthy entry to tip-toeing into the very Cathedral of Death itself; and declared that heads bowed a little and shoulders hunched, as in expectation of some stroke upon the instant. Also that, mingled with this emotion, was intense curiosity to know what the place might look like by day. (“And God knows Ypres was no treat to behold, then or after—day or night. The way most of us took it, was we felt ’twas The Fear itself—the same as meeting up with the Devil. I do not remember if ’twas moonlight or dark when we came in that first time. Dark it must have been though, or we felt it was, and there was a lot of doings going on in that darkness, such as Military Police, and men whispering where we was to go, and stretchers, and parties carrying things in the dark, in and out where the houses had fallen by lumps. And there was little blue lights showing here and there and around, and the whole stink of the Salient, blowing back and forth upon us, the way we’d get it up our noses for ever. Yes—and there was transport on the pavé, wheels going dam’ quick and trying, at the same time, not to make a noise, if ye understand.
“And I remember, too, voices out of holes low down betwixt the rubbish-heaps. They would be the troops in cellars over against the Cloth Hall, I expect. And ye could hear our men breathing at the halts, and the kit squeaking on their backs, and we marching the way we was striving not to break eggs. I know I was.”)
At the time no one seemed to have noticed the peculiarity of the Salient, which, like Verdun, appears at night surrounded by a ring of searchlights and artillery; so that on going forward one feels as though one were altogether cut off from the rest of the front, a target open to every fire.
They were welcomed on the morning of the 27th March by three shells well and truly placed, one after the other, in the courtyard of the Convent where Battalion H.Q. stood. Six N.C.O.’s and men were wounded, of whom Sergeant McGuinn died a few hours later. This was the prelude to a night-long bombardment from a battery evidently told off for the job, which opening at eleven kept it up till ten of the morning of the 28th, when it ceased, and the remainder of the day was quiet. One must remember that the enemy used Ypres through the years as their gunnery school officers’ training-ground.
The 29th March was also a quiet day for the Battalion. There was, naturally, no walking about, or any distraction from the wonder where the next blast of fire would choose to fall, a sensation of helplessness which is not good for the nerves. They were the right Reserve Battalion of the Right Brigade, which, elsewhere, would have been equivalent to being in the front line, but Ypres had its own scale of sufferings. They worked quietly on repairs from dusk till the first light of dawn in their trenches beyond the Canal. From daylight to dusk again they lay up in dug-outs for the most part, and all fires that showed smoke were forbidden. But a race accustomed to peat can miraculously make hot tea over a few fragments of ammunition-boxes or a fistful of stolen coke, even in the inner bowels of a sealed dug-out. Any signs of life were punished by visits from observation-planes or a shelling from one flank or the other; for the enemy commanded practically all their trenches, and this implied a constant building and repair of traverses and blindages. It took them three hours to relieve the 1st Coldstream in the front line on the night of the 30th March, and during relief the reserve trench which was being taken over by No. 4 Company under Captain Eric Greer (he had reverted to Company Officer on Major Chichester’s arrival as Second in Command) was shelled and badly knocked about. There were only eight men wounded, however, and the company was “perfectly cool throughout.” (“When you know ye may be for it every minute, you can not be more frightened than frightened. The same as getting drunk, I think. After a while—dead-drunk ye get, and dead-drunk ye stay. Ah, but they was genteel trenches and pleasant-spoken Jerries down at Laventie where we’d come from, in front of Red House and all!”)
The last day of March brought them for one breathless half-hour the heaviest shelling they had yet undergone; but it ended, as so many such outbursts did, in nothing but a few slight wounds, and a searching of the Menin road by night with big stuff that roared and rattled on what remained of the tortured stones. One could always know when Ypres city had been shelled afresh, by the pools of blood on the pavé in the raw morning or some yet undisposed-of horse which told that the night-hawking processions of the transport had caught it once again. Their daily lives in the front and reserve line were dark, confined, and unsavoury. One officer was ill-advised enough to pry into the vitals of his dug-out. (“When I arrived, it did not look so bad, as the floor was covered with sand-bags as usual.”) A strong-stomached orderly turned in to remove a few. He found no less than six layers of them, progressively decaying; then floor-boards of a fabulous antiquity, and last the original slime of ’14’s corruption. It was neglectful, but men who may be blown out of this life any hour of the twenty-four do not devote themselves to the continuities of house-cleaning.
In Ypres city that spring not one single building was habitable, though many of them still retained the shapes of human dwellings. The Battalion messes were all underground in cellars, a couple of which, with a hole knocked through the dividing walls, make a good anteroom; but their sole light came from a small window which also gave passage to the stove-pipe. A tired man could doze down there, in gross fuggy warmth and a brooding stillness broken only by the footsteps of small parties moving without ostentation till the triple whistle of the aeroplane-watchers sent feet scurrying loudly to cover.