Читать книгу The War History of the 1st/ 4th Battalion, 1914-1918. The Loyal North Lancashire Regiment онлайн

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It is quite impossible to try to convey in print the impression of one’s first march up to the line: one remembers the dark, strange road, broken trees, loose telephone wires, a long halt in a battered village, then on through interminable miles of breastworks manned by Canadians, crawling cautiously along in single file and breathless silence—then a halt, and platoons are sent off down various alleys, to find at the end a trench full of Scotsmen anxiously awaiting relief. The right of the Battalion rested on the QUINQUE RUE, the left on the road from RUE DE L’EPINETTE to FERME COUR D’AVOUE; A and D Companies and Machine Gun Section occupied the front line, No. 2 platoon having an advanced post about 200 yards in front of the main line; C was in support and B in reserve. The fire trench had only recently been built, and the forward bit had 18in. of water in it; no wire had been put up. The support trench was an old German trench about 300 yards to the left rear of the fire trench, while the reserve trench was again 200 yards behind the latter. The parapets were revetted with, and in some cases entirely built of, sandbags; dugouts—very sketchy—were built in the parados! The trenches were nowhere more than two feet deep, the rest of the cover being above ground; there were narrow communication trenches. Every house in the neighbourhood was in utter ruin, and the ground was a mass of shell holes. Equipment, rifles, ammunition, clothing, tins, both our own and enemy, were strewn everywhere, and dozens of bodies—chiefly of Scots Guards and Germans—lay about as they had fallen in the May Battle of Festubert; the stench was awful. Some old German trenches, not occupied by us, were interesting as showing the elaborate way they had dug themselves in. One dugout was a room about 15ft. square, with doors and a window, lined throughout with wood planking covered with cloth, and furnished with leather-covered chairs and a table; in one a quantity of feminine underclothing was found—what it was doing there could only be guessed.