Anyway, they found a good home in the stew-pot, and we were looking forward to a most cosy meal. As a sort of change from shelling by batteries in the ordinary way, we were being shelled from an armoured train, but were taking little notice of it, being busy with the tea and chickens.

The Germans were close enough to fling hand-bombs at us. They gave us lots of these little attentions, so that when I suddenly found myself blinded, and felt a sharp pain in my left hand, I thought they had made a lucky shot, or that something had exploded in the fire in the biscuit-tin.

For some time I did not know what had happened; then I was able to see, and on looking at my hand, I found it to be in a sorry mess, half the thumb and half a finger having been carried away.

I stayed and had some tea from the dixie, and my chums badly wanted me to wait for my share of the chickens; but I had no appetite for fowls just then. I made the best of things till darkness came, and under cover of it a couple of stretcher-bearers took me to the nearest dressing-station.

I suffered intensely, and lockjaw set in, but the splendid medical staff and the nursing saved me, and I was put into a horse ambulance and packed off home. And here I am.

CHAPTER XXIV
THE BRITISH VICTORY AT NEUVE CHAPELLE

[On the road from Béthune to Armentières, four miles to the north of La Bassée, is the little straggling frontier village of Neuve Chapelle, which first came into notice in October during the British advance to the north of La Bassée. At that time the village was held by the Germans, but on October 16th they were driven out by the British. As a result of the tremendous efforts of the Germans in trying to reach Calais we were not able to hold the village, which again was held by the enemy at the beginning of November. The British were driven back a short distance and for more than four months they remained near Neuve Chapelle; then, on March 10th they began an attack which ended in the village being retaken by us and held. The German Westphalian Army Corps in October and November had forced the British out of Neuve Chapelle, but in March these troops were routed and severely punished by part of Sir John French’s “contemptible little army.” What the battle meant and how it was fought is told by Sergeant Gilliam, 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards.]

The battle of Neuve Chapelle began at half-past seven o’clock on the morning of March 10th, and ended at about half-past nine on the night of the 12th. Earlier on the morning of that famous day our battalion was ordered to stand to, as supports of the 1st Brigade. We were told to be ready to turn out at ten minutes’ notice; and we were ready, for we were longing to have a settlement with the Germans, who had dug themselves in at Neuve Chapelle, and made themselves very comfortable and thought that no power on earth could drive them out. But we had a big surprise in store for them, and we sprung it on them like a thunderbolt when our massed guns roared soon after sunrise on that early day in March. Whatever advantages the Germans might have had at the beginning of the war we had been getting the better of them, and we were certain that we were now much superior to the enemy in every way. We knew that the British Army was becoming too much for them, and we were anxious to prove it that morning, when the biggest bombardment the world has ever known began, and along a tremendous front there came into action hundreds of the largest and the smallest guns that we had out in France.

I am sure that every man who was in at the beginning of this war, from Mons to the Marne and the Aisne, as I was, till I was invalided home wounded, will agree with me that there had been nothing like the British artillery fire at Neuve Chapelle. It was truly fearful. Something like five miles away, nearly five hundred British guns were bombarding the village, the batteries being on a front four or five miles in extent, so that there was only a few yards space between each gun. The result was that an immense wall of fire was seen where the artillery was in position, while the village itself was a target on which shells rained and made havoc. Nothing could withstand that awful cannonading—houses and buildings of every sort were shattered, and often enough a single shell was sufficient to destroy an entire house. When we got into the place at the end of the battle it looked as if some tremendous earthquake had upheaved it and thrown it down in a mass of wreckage. It was almost impossible to tell where the streets had been, and so enormous was the power of some of the shells that were fired and burst in the ground, that the very dead had been blown up from their resting-places in the churchyard, only to be re-buried by the falling walls around. The bombardment was bad enough for those who were out of it; for those who were in it the effect of the shell fire was paralysing. The Germans had had nothing like it, and more than one prisoner declared that it was not war, it was murder. We didn’t quite see how they made that out; but it was near enough for the Germans, and we told them that we were only getting a bit of our own back for Mons. “And,” we said, “this is only a taste of what’s in store for you. It’s nothing to what’s coming!”

The roar of these massed guns was so deafening, and the noise of the exploding shells was so incessant, that we could not hear one another speak. The air was all of a quiver and you could see the heat in the atmosphere just as you see it when looking at the horizon in a tropical country, and as I saw it many times when we were in Egypt. The heat from the shells made the day for all the world like a hot summer day, and the fumes and flashes caused a strange mist that looked like rain, though the sun was shining.