In The Trenches 1914-1918. Glenn Ph.D. Iriam
sent one day to interview the old couple. They told him they were terrified by the shell fire, and that they had been burning incense, offering up prayers for their safety and this accounted for the smoke. They succeeded in convincing Knobel that they were quite innocent and a harmless old couple he so stated.
There had been some men of our unit sniped and shot at behind our front lines. An officer of one of our units took it on himself to watch the old man one day as he was working up and down the east side of a thorn hedge with the old horse and a harrow. From concealment he saw the old man snatch a rifle from under a coat or blanket on top of the harrow and shot at somebody on the road winding away westward between the hedges. The officer shot the old man without further parley.
Then there was hustling around to find more evidence of the sniping business. I was one of the search party and climbed up to the garret loft of a barn that stood length wise of the road and had a round ventilator hole in the peak of the west gable. Standing on the attic floor behind this ventilator hole was a tall round topped stool such as you see in a restaurant at home at the quick lunch counters. On the floor at the bottom of this stool was a heap of empty rifle cartridge cases, some dozens in all. This sniping business must have been going on intermittently over quite a long period. The very unlikelihood of the thing was its screen that had enabled it to go on so long. I suppose the casualties were put down to stray bullets.
Death Valley
In the early part of April we were moved from this sector, heading north eventually arriving at Poperinge, about eight miles south-west of the City of Ypres. From here we were sent north again marching through Ypres when it was still full of civilians carrying on the life of a city. Men, women and children crowded out to cheer us on as we marched through. Some of the finer buildings were still standing including the Cloth Hall. Part of it had been shelled badly however, I can remember a large roofless room with elaborate frescoes or wall decorations.
Fritz had been dropping some heavy howitzer shells into the town in the neighborhood of the square. Here I saw a shell hole that included in its diameter the whole width of a main street and a row of houses. I was told that this hole was made by one of the big berthas or 17 inch skoda howitzers. While we were passing through he was shelling the city with 11 inch howitzers. These shells made a terrific roar during their high arc through the sky sounding like death itself made vocal when they started on their downward plunge toward you from out of the skies. Something like a heavy express train passing at speed through a tunnel. The ground literally rocked from the force of their bursting.
When we came next through this town it was a crumpled ruin, void of all civilian life, and a charnel house of riddled corpses, and heaped up brick and stone. We still tramped away to the north getting out in the dismal flat swampy country to the east of Passchendaele. Here we were to take over a section of line from the French. We began to meet the Frenchmen coming out long before we got near our objective. I had a trip into the front line sector on some message and immediately on returning I was nailed to act as guide to two companies back over the same ground. I must have been exhausted from all the hiking to and fro under full equipment, for that trip seems very hazy in my memory and more like a nightmare than a reality. I had not gathered much knowledge of the lay of the land the first trip up and was really hazy as to my location now, for the night had shut down as black as ink and there was a deadly monotony or sameness about all the crossroads with a total absence of anything in the way of landmarks. In addition to this I was being heckled by some upstart of a junior officer. You’re a scout aren’t you? Why don’t you know this and why don’t you know that, Blankety, Blank-Blank etc–and so on. It came to a clash of opinions at last. He wanting to go his way and I determined to go mine. Another officer by the name of Lieut. Durant struck his spoon into the soup and agreed to follow me. Eventually we got into country with no roads, and only slippery foot paths meandering over flat low grass land. I was staking all on a sort of Indian instinct of direction and location by this time for all other guidance was useless. As far as the map and compass were concerned I was going from no- place to no- where and had nothing to start from. I landed eventually among some dilapidated trenches filled with water. The earth thrown out of these formed a zigzag slippery ridge which we used in the pitch dark as a foot path. I eventually recognized a trench junction I had seen earlier in the evening and heaved a great sigh of relief for I had been right from the start. This French outfit was supposed to have guides posted to meet and guide us into our proper sections of the line. They did not furnish any and we had to locate ourselves as best we could, straightening things out the next morning.
This was a hard looking piece of front line when we were able to see around a bit in the morning. The trench was in a very filthy and unsanitary condition. There were no provisions what ever for sanitation and in addition to this the dead had been left all over the place. Their legs sticking through the parapet. Dead were in the bottom of the trench with only a very thin sprinkling of earth over them. Out in front you could see them lying all over the place, both French and German. Phil McDonald was put on sentry duty in the front trench as soon as we got in. All night at his post he smelled a powerful smell. Daylight showed that he was leaning against the soles of a big pair of German boots built into the parapet. The owner of the boots was built in too. Paddy Reill crawled into a small dugout shelter to snatch a bit of sleep during the night and woke up to find he was using a corpse for a bedmate and pillow.
Lieut. Durand, a fine big fellow, in command of one of our platoons had a little sawed-off batman of cockney vintage. Durand was big and strong but several times on the long and hard march up here he had hitched and shifted his pack finding it heavy. Lo! and behold the Wee Batman had stuffed it full of his own belongings, including some choice souvenirs such as shell noses etc. Durand had lugged it all the way.
These Frenchmen must have been a lazy lot for the breast’work along here was very low, only one bag thick and patched up in the most slipshod manner imaginable. A 22 caliber rifle could have put a ball through it any place. The ground was too wet to dig down lower, and at any rate it was so full of filth digging it would have been almost impossible. There were no support trenches in the rear and God knows what would have happened in case of an attack. This place was known as Death Valley, it appeared to be well-named judging by the number of dead lying in it. It was a big wide depression in the plain with higher ground all around gently sloping into the bottom.
Directly on our front and stretching away for a couple of miles to the west was a long bare treeless ridge with its highest point about two and one half miles away and half mile on the left quarter. We were to get a closer acquaintance with the bare ridge off to the left a couple of years later. It was the Hill of Passchendaele. Our front line was at the bottom and following the base of some slightly rising ground along the south side of the valley. The bottom of the valley was flat, quite low, and wet in places. Opposite our right flank and at the far side of the flat was a straggling wood lot or bush. The German front line showed along the front of this, but was not occupied in full strength on account of it being too low and wet. Their main line followed the base of the hill further back and somewhat behind the woods. There was a re-entrant in their line about opposite to our centre, and here the lines must have been upward of 600 yards apart for some distance.
There were flares shot up from the German trench at night where it passed along the front of the wood lot, but studying it through the day we were of the opinion that these flares were only a bluff to give the impression that it was held in strength. To make sure of this we made a patrol at night, went over to this trench traveling along it for about eight bays without encountering any Germans. It was evidently only occupied at night in spots by patrols that shot up the flares we had seen. In the course of this patrol we came upon what had been a French outpost of eight men placed out in front of our right flank and facing the woods. This patrol or outpost had gone to sleep on duty one night. A German patrol came along and heard them snoring, crept up and bayoneted the lot. We had heard a rumor of this from the French and sure enough there they were, just as they had been left. Further to the left and in an open piece of ground we came on three Frenchmen in three separate shallow holes that they had tried to scoop out. They were about 15 feet apart and all facing the German lines. They looked so life like when we came upon them that we were startled and thought for a moment that it was an enemy patrol playing possum. They had evidently been caught in the open and tried to dig