In The Trenches 1914-1918. Glenn Ph.D. Iriam
were some support trenches of a sort close behind. There was a low almost imperceptible ridge on our front, and from our centre to the right, the ground also rose ever so slightly for about 400 yards ahead. There you could see the enemy’s earthworks that appeared to be on slightly drier ground as usual. There was a slight salient there in the German line along this swelling of the ground. This part of their line appeared to be strongly trenched and it was from here that they let loose their first great gas attack on us. It was discharged from reservoirs or cylinders and wafted across on a slow sluggish breeze.
Col. Lipsett was a very energetic sort of commander wanting to be very thoroughly informed about every thing on his part of the front. Sgt. Knobel was a twin brother of his as far as energy went. They certainly kept us scouts on the jump day and night. Every foot of a new frontage had to be gone over, right up and into the enemy’s wire and in some cases into his trench.
We were out practically all night every night here and then on sniping and observation work during the daylight. There was a small cottage still standing on the crest of the low ridge opposite our right flank, close up against the enemy parapet and well inside his wire. Lipsett ordered that we investigate this building. We made a preliminary patrol or two to size things up getting the lay of the land. The nights had turned still and rather cold with a white blanket of mist verging on frost lying in a shroud in all the low sags and along the water courses. About the first night in we stripped off all unnecessary clothing to make crawling easier. We went up a long drainage ditch that angled off straight as an arrow from the close vicinity of the cottage mentioned above. This was touchy work for an enemy could look down the whole length of that ditch and shoot down it very nicely with a machine gun. It had been dug through the wet clay and the sides sloped up at about 45 degrees on both sides. There was a stream in the bottom about three feet wide. We went up this bit by bit flattening into the mud when a flare rose or when a chunk of mud or a rock dislodged and went splashing into the water. Getting up within a few yards of the cottage we saw and heard a great deal of activity going on. There appeared to be scores of men working at something. They were sawing, hammering pounding and digging all the time talking like 300 Quebec Frenchmen.
We gathered one bit of information from watching and listening to the forward part of the gang. They were making movable sally ports to put through their wire entanglements. They were making an arrangement something like a saw horse in form, only much higher and longer, to be strung with a network of barbed wire. Then a zigzag road is cut through the main mass of wire entanglements, and these horses are set in these opening to let their troops pass out through the wire to the attack. They were installed in a zigzag fashion so they would not be readily detected.
On returning from the drainage ditch I was detailed to go on a listening post with another victim for the balance of the night. The post was at the creek at the centre of the 500 yard gap on our right flank. I was unable to go to get any heavier clothing, so I spent a very cold, and exceedingly miserable time trying to shiver myself warm till daylight, watching and listening in the blanket of mist along the water course. It is a penetrating sort of cold in that country on an early spring morning before dawn which gets into the very marrow of your bones in a very different way than the dry crisp cold of Canada.
I could hear railway trains pulling in from the north and east behind the enemy lines all that night. Bands were playing with their drums beating as the troops detrained and marched away. We heard this same thing every night right up to the day of the big attack and reported same to our officers. We were supposed to be in this sector four days and then be relieved by some other unit. The four days came and went with no sign of the relief troops. The enemy shell fire gradually got heavier as the days went on. We who had seen the sally-ports being made, heard the troop trains pouring in day and night for a week or so knew that we were in for it hot and heavy. Every thing pointed that way. Our battalion transport had been shelled and broken up on the St. Julien road. For the last four days of that battle we had very little, if any, food or water. We got a dose of combined tear- gas and chlorine gas on very empty stomachs which no doubt contributed to the number of deaths from gas. With food in our stomachs it would not have gotten such a quick and deadly hold and we would have vomited some of it out. The enemy artillery fire got very heavy during the last two days and we were well tied down to hugging what little shelter was left us. This was mostly the sections of breast’work that were braced or supported at a traverse. Most of the unsupported parts were all gone or nearly so. Shrapnel and high explosive shells were well mixed with mustard or tear gas shells especially through the night proceeding the attack by chlorine gas. This tear gas inflamed the lungs, throat, nostrils, and eyes until we were nearly blind even before the chlorine came over at all. Towards midday of the day before the assault I began to see by evidence all around me that I would have to strengthen the shelter at that place if I hoped to live much longer in the storm of shells. I worked all that afternoon and by piling up bags etc. made an embankment that was still more or less intact when we left that place later on. I know I would not have survived in that spot without the extra bit of shelter that instinct told me to build at that time. The Germans started to enfilade our section of the trench with a gun battery somewhere to the north and were doing great damage with this fire.
Knobel, our scout sergeant, had established an observation post in an old building close behind our front lines. He had us scouts hunting the country-side the night before for a ladder to put up behind the wall of this old building so he could get up to a shell hole he wanted to look from. We could not find a ladder but ripped a set of stairs out of a house about half a mile back carrying it bodily down there and putting it up for his O. P. He knew what he was driving at too. He was after the observer that was directing that enfilading enemy battery and he located him, watching him in the act of using a field telephone to the battery. After having gauged the map location correctly, our lone 18 pounder put a shell directly on him and then the enfilading stopped for awhile.
Just before daylight on the night we carried the stair-case we went to another old farm close behind our supports and lit a bonfire that would smoke, and smudge, and smolder for hours. The Germans took it for a cooking fire of troops in support plunking shells into that spot all day, and that was so many shells that never killed anyone.
The morning that we did all this I got very hungry from doing much hustling around the country, and seeing a fairly good looking tin of bully- beef sticking out of the mud, I nailed it, opened it, and ate part of it getting poisoned and was so sick I rolled on the ground with the pain. I don’t know if ptomaine poisoning is an antidote for chlorine or not but I had my full share of both and am still able to tell about it.
There was a corporal by the name of Harris who was armourer in our company and did any small repairs on rifles etc. He was a fine fellow and the afternoon before the gas attack he and I lay together behind the strengthened spot in the breast’work while a hundred kinds of scientific death smashed down, shrieking, roaring, crashing and rattling about our ears. He had a premonition that his hour was at hand and talked quietly about it. He showed me a picture of his wife and their two little children, a sweet looking trio they were too. It must have been a hard thing for him looking at them there and then. I saw him dying of gas poisoning the next day.
There was a peculiar thing happened to us as we sheltered behind that pile of heaped sand bags. A string of enemy shells pumped one after another into the front and base of that double traverse, until we counted 12 that drove in, repeatedly we could feel the heave and bulge of the earth in front of us and below, without a live shell in the whole lot. The fuse setter must have been a casualty on that gun for awhile, or our Guardian Angel was on the job, and we were not to be blown up that day. Every little while fritz would sweep the breaches and torn spots in our defense with savage bursts of machine gun fire. We of course on our side were not able to make much comeback to all this for we had practically no artillery at all and we were trying to save as many men and scanty machine guns as we could for the hour of assault that we knew was not far away. The day wore on with the night shell fire never ceasing although there were more mustard gas shells and less H. E. during the night. I remember we got so exhausted mentally and physically that we felt as though we were suspended with some sort of wire. There were pauses two or three times in the tornado of fire, that came suddenly, with every gun pausing at once. In those moments of sudden stillness we would drop and slump down into sleep in a second of time, and our heads would fall on our breasts as one