In the morning the members of the
raiding party were taken back a mile or so to the
rear and were given instruction and rehearsal.
This was the first raid that “Batt” had
ever tried, and the staff was anxious to have it a
success. There were fifty in the party, and Blofeld,
who had organized the raid, beat our instructions into
us until we knew them by heart.
The object of a raid is to get into
the enemy’s trenches by stealth if possible,
kill as many as possible, take prisoners if practicable,
do a lot of damage, and get away with a whole hide.
We got back to the front trenches
just before dark. I noticed a lot of metal cylinders
arranged along the parapet. They were about as
big as a stovepipe and four feet long, painted brown.
They were the gas containers. They were arranged
about four or five to a traverse, and were connected
up by tubes and were covered with sandbags. This
was the poison gas ready for release over the top
through tubes.
The time set for our stunt was eleven
P.M. Eleven o’clock was “zero.”
The system on the Western Front, and, in fact, all
fronts, is to indicate the time fixed for any event
as zero. Anything before or after is spoken of
as plus or minus zero.
Around five o’clock we were
taken back to Mechanics trench and fed a
regular meal with plenty of everything, and all good.
It looked rather like giving a condemned man a hearty
meal, but grub is always acceptable to a soldier.
After that we blacked our faces.
This is always done to prevent the whiteness of the
skin from showing under the flare lights. Also
to distinguish your own men when you get to the Boche
trench.
Then we wrote letters and gave up
our identification discs and were served with persuader
sticks or knuckle knives, and with “Mills”
bombs.
The persuader is a short, heavy bludgeon
with a nail-studded head. You thump Fritz on
the head with it. Very handy at close quarters.
The knuckle knife is a short dagger with a heavy brass
hilt that covers the hand. Also very good for
close work, as you can either strike or stab with
it.
We moved up to the front trenches
at about half-past ten. At zero minus ten, that
is, ten minutes of eleven, our artillery opened up.
It was the first bombardment I had ever been under,
and it seemed as though all the guns in the world
were banging away. Afterwards I found that it
was comparatively light, but it didn’t seem so
then.
The guns were hardly started when
there was a sound like escaping steam. Jerry
leaned over and shouted in my ear: “There
goes the gas. May it finish the blighters.”
Blofeld came dashing up just then,
very much excited because he found we had not put
on our masks, through some slip-up in the orders.
We got into them quick. But as it turned out there
was no need. There was a fifteen-mile wind blowing,
which carried the gas away from us very rapidly.
In fact it blew it across the Boche trenches so fast
that it didn’t bother them either.
The barrage fire kept up right up
to zero, as per schedule. At thirty seconds of
eleven I looked at my watch and the din was at its
height. At exactly eleven it stopped short.
Fritz was still sending some over, but comparatively
there was silence. After the ear-splitting racket
it was almost still enough to hurt.
And in that silence over the top we went.
Lanes had been cut through our wire,
and we got through them quickly. The trenches
were about one hundred twenty yards apart and we still
had nearly one hundred to go. We dropped and started
to crawl. I skinned both my knees on something,
probably old wire, and both hands. I could feel
the blood running into my puttees, and my rifle bothered
me as I was afraid of jabbing Jerry, who was just
ahead of me as first bayonet man.
They say a drowning man or a man in
great danger reviews his past. I didn’t.
I spent those few minutes wondering when the machine-gun
fire would come.
I had the same “gone”
feeling in the pit of the stomach that you have when
you drop fast in an elevator. The skin on my face
felt tight, and I remember that I wanted to pucker
my nose and pull my upper lip down over my teeth.
We got clean up to their wire before
they spotted us. Their entanglements had been
flattened by our barrage fire, but we had to get up
to pick our way through, and they saw us.
Instantly the “Very” lights
began to go up in scores, and hell broke loose.
They must have turned twenty machine guns on us, or
at us, but their aim evidently was high, for they
only “clicked” two out of our immediate
party. We had started with ten men, the other
fifty being divided into three more parties farther
down the line.
When the machine guns started, we
charged. Jerry and I were ahead as bayonet men,
with the rest of the party following with buckets
of “Mills” bombs and “Stokeses.”
It was pretty light, there were so
many flares going up from both sides. When I
jumped on the parapet, there was a whaling big Boche
looking up at me with his rifle resting on the sandbags.
I was almost on the point of his bayonet.
For an instant I stood with a kind
of paralyzed sensation, and there flashed through
my mind the instructions of the manual for such a
situation, only I didn’t apply those instructions
to this emergency.
Instead I thought if such
a flash could be called thinking how I,
as an instructor, would have told a rookie to act,
working on a dummy. I had a sort of detached
feeling as though this was a silly dream.
Probably this hesitation didn’t
last more than a second.
Then, out of the corner of my eye,
I saw Jerry lunge, and I lunged too. Why that
Boche did not fire I don’t know. Perhaps
he did and missed. Anyhow I went down and in
on him, and the bayonet went through his throat.
Jerry had done his man in and all
hands piled into the trench.
Then we started to race along the
traverses. We found a machine gun and put an
eleven-pound high-explosive “Stokes” under
it. Three or four Germans appeared, running down
communication trenches, and the bombers sent a few
Millses after them. Then we came to a dug-out
door in fact, several, as Fritz, like a
woodchuck, always has more than one entrance to his
burrow. We broke these in in jig time and looked
down a thirty-foot hole on a dug-out full of graybacks.
There must have been a lot of them. I could plainly
see four or five faces looking up with surprised expressions.
Blofeld chucked in two or three Millses
and away we went.
A little farther along we came to
the entrance of a mine shaft, a kind of incline running
toward our lines. Blofeld went in it a little
way and flashed his light. He thought it was about
forty yards long. We put several of our remaining
Stokeses in that and wrecked it.
Turning the corner of the next traverse,
I saw Jerry drop his rifle and unlimber his persuader
on a huge German who had just rounded the corner of
the “bay.” He made a good job of it,
getting him in the face, and must have simply caved
him in, but not before he had thrown a bomb.
I had broken my bayonet prying the dug-out door off
and had my gun up-ended clubbed.
When I saw that bomb coming, I bunted
at it like Ty Cobb trying to sacrifice. It was
the only thing to do. I choked my bat and poked
at the bomb instinctively, and by sheer good luck fouled
the thing over the parapet. It exploded on the
other side.
“Blimme eyes,” says Jerry,
“that’s cool work. You saved us the
wooden cross that time.”
We had found two more machine guns
and were planting Stokeses under them when we heard
the Lewises giving the recall signal. A good
gunner gets so he can play a tune on a Lewis, and the
device is frequently used for signals. This time
he thumped out the old one “All policemen
have big feet.” Rat-a-tat-tat tat,
tat.
It didn’t come any too soon.
As we scrambled over the parapet we
saw a big party of Germans coming up from the second
trenches. They were out of the communication
trenches and were coming across lots. There must
have been fifty of them, outnumbering us five or six
to one.
We were out of bombs, Jerry had lost
his rifle, and mine had no “ammo.”
Blofeld fired the last shot from his revolver and,
believe me, we hooked it for home.
We had been in their trenches just
three and a half minutes.
Just as we were going through their
wire a bomb exploded near and got Jerry in the head.
We dragged him in and also the two men that had been
clicked on the first fire. Jerry got Blighty on
his wound, but was back in two months. The second
time he wasn’t so lucky. He lies now somewhere
in France with a wooden cross over his head.
Did that muddy old trench look good
when we tumbled in? Oh, Boy! The staff was
tickled to pieces and complimented us all. We
were sent out of the lines that night and in billets
got hot food, high-grade “fags”, a real
bath, a good stiff rum ration, and letters from home.
Next morning we heard the results
of the raid. One party of twelve never returned.
Besides that we lost seven men killed. The German
loss was estimated at about one hundred casualties,
six machine guns and several dug-outs destroyed, and
one mine shaft put out of business. We also brought
back documents of value found by one party in an officer’s
dug-out.
Blofeld got the military cross for
the night’s work, and several of the enlisted
men got the D.C.M.
Altogether it was a successful raid.
The best part of it was getting back.