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Page 4
"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.
"The onslaught was to be a surprise. That was its essence. The
Germans were to be battered with artillery, then rushed before they
recovered their wits. We had thirty-six clear hours before us. Thus
long, it was reckoned (with complete accuracy as afterwards
appeared), must elapse before the Germans, whose line before us had
been weakened, could rush up reinforcements. To ensure the enemy's
being pinned down right and left of the 'great push,' an attack was
to be delivered north and south of the main thrust simultaneously
with the assault on Neuve Chapelle."
After describing the impatience of the British soldiers as they awaited
the signal to open the attack, and the actual beginning of the
engagement, the narrator continues:
"Then hell broke loose. With a mighty, hideous, screeching burst of
noise, hundreds of guns spoke. The men in the front trenches were
deafened by the sharp reports of the field-guns spitting out their
shells at close range to cut through the Germans' barbed wire
entanglements. In some cases the trajectory of these vicious
missiles was so flat that they passed only a few feet above the
British trenches.
"The din was continuous. An officer who had the curious idea of
putting his ear to the ground said it was as though the earth were
being smitten great blows with a Titan's hammer. After the first
few shells had plunged screaming amid clouds of earth and dust into
the German trenches, a dense pall of smoke hung over the German
lines. The sickening fumes of lyddite blew back into the British
trenches. In some places the troops were smothered in earth and
dust or even spattered with blood from the hideous fragments of
human bodies that went hurtling through the air. At one point the
upper half of a German officer, his cap crammed on his head, was
blown into one of our trenches.
"Words will never convey any adequate idea of the horror of those
five and thirty minutes. When the hands of officers' watches
pointed to five minutes past eight, whistles resounded along the
British lines. At the same moment the shells began to burst farther
ahead, for, by previous arrangement, the gunners, lengthening their
fuses, were 'lifting' on to the village of Neuve Chapelle so as to
leave the road open for our infantry to rush in and finish what the
guns had begun.
"The shells were now falling thick among the houses of Neuve
Chapelle, a confused mass of buildings seen reddish through the
pillars of smoke and flying earth and dust. At the sound of the
whistle--alas for the bugle, once the herald of victory, now
banished from the fray!--our men scrambled out of the trenches and
hurried higgledy-piggledy into the open. Their officers were in
front. Many, wearing overcoats and carrying rifles with fixed
bayonets, closely resembled their men.
[Illustration: BRITISH INDIAN TROOPS CHARGING THE GERMAN TRENCHES AT
NEUVE CHAPELLE
Germany counted on a revolution in India, but the Indian troops proved
to be among the most loyal and brilliant fighters in the Imperial
forces.]
"It was from the center of our attacking line that the assault was
pressed home soonest. The guns had done their work well. The
trenches were blown to irrecognizable pits dotted with dead. The
barbed wire had been cut like so much twine. Starting from the
Rue Tilleloy the Lincolns and the Berkshires were off the mark
first, with orders to swerve to right and left respectively as soon
as they had captured the first line of trenches, in order to let
the Royal Irish Rifles and the Rifle Brigade through to the
village. The Germans left alive in the trenches, half demented with
fright, surrounded by a welter of dead and dying men, mostly
surrendered. The Berkshires were opposed with the utmost gallantry
by two German officers who had remained alone in a trench serving a
machine gun. But the lads from Berkshire made their way into that
trench and bayoneted the Germans where they stood, fighting to the
last. The Lincolns, against desperate resistance, eventually
occupied their section of the trench and then waited for the
Irishmen and the Rifle Brigade to come and take the village ahead
of them. Meanwhile the second Thirty-ninth Garhwalis on the right
had taken their trenches with a rush and were away towards the
village and the Biez Wood.
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