At Ypres with Best-Dunkley

by Thomas Hope Floyd

"On May 26th, the Battalion moved back to the Prison. Lieutenant-Colonel B. Best-Dunkley went on leave the same day, leaving Major Brighten in command.

"Then began a very memorable 17 days—Ypres was shelled heavily every day, particular attention being paid to the Prison.

"By night the Battalion was occupied in digging a new communication trench, Pagoda Trench. The digging was finished in two nights, but there was all the riveting to do as well. Every night the working parties have to pass through a barrage. Our casualties during this period totalled 60 or 70. The moral of the men was very high all the time. The continual shelling, paradoxical as it must seem, hardened and prepared them as much as anything for the great day which every one knew was not far off.

"We had our first serious gas attack on June 3rd. It was preceded by a heavy bombardment of Ypres, after which some 25,000 gas shells were put over, lasting from 10 p.m. to 4 p.m. We were fortunate in having very few casualties."

That was the position of the Battalion when I set off to join it in the Prison cells on the morning of June 5, 1917.

I rose at 10 a.m. It was a rowdy morning. The guns were still unusually lively. While we were having breakfast shells were bursting three or four hundred yards away from our hut, and we could hear occasional H.E. dropping as far back as Poperinghe behind us.

The following letter which I wrote home from my cell (which I shared with three other second-lieutenants, Gilbert Verity, Bernard Priestley and H. A. Barker) in the Prison, dated June 6, 1917, describes my journey to Ypres:

"At 11 a.m. I set off up the road with another officer to the city where my unit is stationed. We got a lift in a motor as far as a town half-way. This town (Vlamertinghe) was almost entirely in ruins. There has been an ancient church there, but only the front of the tower and all the crucifixes remain. Shells were bursting all about. We sat down on a fence and waited for another lift. It was most exciting. I have not got the 'wind up' yet; I am more interested than anything else. I contemplated a famous hill on my right. Then we got on another motor. This ride was most exciting, the excitement consisting in whether we could reach the city without being blown to pieces by the shells which were exploding to front of us, to right of us, to rear of us, and to left of us! The road was cut up by shells which had exploded on it, and trees were felled across it. We jogged a good deal riding over this debris. We saw one of our batteries on the left of the road which had been smashed by a German shell. A good many of the transport horses had been killed on the road last night, but the bodies had been removed by now. We got out of the car just outside the city and walked into it. What struggles have taken place here! One could hardly realize that in pre-war days this had been a great and flourishing city. Just a few buildings remain standing, and those all in ruins; debris everywhere, shells constantly exploding everywhere. It is reckoned that the rate of casualties in this city just now is a thousand a week; military, of course—there are no civilians here; it is a battlefield where battles have been fought, where strafing is going on now, and around which a great battle is about to be fought. One battalion in our brigade went over the top on a raid last night. Our guns are even now conducting the preliminary bombardment along the line which precedes a great offensive. And the Germans are giving it us back too! My companion was very anxious that we should reach the Prison without personally encountering any shells. He told me that the corner round which we were passing was a windy one! But we got inside the Prison safe and sound, and here I now am writing this while the shells are flying and our guns stationed in the city are speaking. The top of this building is in ruins as shells are constantly hitting it, but we are down below, and we have wire-netting to catch the falling debris.

"I was received by a young Major and the Adjutant, Lieutenant Andrews. I had lunch with them and the other officers in the (Headquarters) mess-room."

There let us pause for a moment. There are scenes in one's life, pleasant and otherwise, which one can never forget, which ever rest vividly in the eye of the mind. There were many such scenes during my experiences in France and Belgium; but none do I recollect more clearly, and few with more satisfaction, than this my first meal with the 2/5th Lancashire Fusiliers. Never was a subaltern given a more friendly welcome than that which Major Brighten extended to me. I was made at home at once. Padre Newman, who seemed little more than a young undergraduate with a gay and affable countenance, but with that unselfish and utterly unostentatious heroism depicted in every feature—a typical example of the kind of hero which our public schools, with all their failings, have sent forth in hundreds and thousands during the last five years—was placing jolly records on a gramophone when I entered the little cell; and the mess-waiters were preparing lunch on a table which had been erected for the purpose.