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

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Second Lieutenant Rogerson was away at General Headquarters attending a Machine Gun Course, and Lieutenant Gregson was attached to the Grenadier Company at the time.

The casualties among the men were heavy, especially among the N.C.O.’s.[D] They were:—

Killed 26 Wounded 266 Missing 110 Total 402

It must be assumed that most of the missing are killed. The list therefore stands with a high ratio of killed to wounded.

The respective strengths of the Companies on June 30th, according to Orderly Room returns, were:—

A Company 146 B Company 99 C Company 149 D Company 126 Total 520

15 Officers on strength. The effective rifle strength was 358.

The German trenches after the two days’ bombardment were in a bad state. In many places they had been completely destroyed, and when we took them we found them piled deep with German dead. The dugouts, which had been made in the parados, seemed whole, but were full of dead and wounded, probably the work of the bombers. The communication trench was also partially destroyed, and littered with German dead. The whole series of trenches were full of German equipment in great confusion. Like our trenches, they were built of sandbags, but their communication trench was very deep and well traversed, and was probably intended to serve as a fire trench against M 4. There was an abandoned German machine gun in the fire trench in a stretcher carriage, which could not be moved. There was a good amount of German equipment outside the trench about the point Z. This place was the wildest spot, a mass of shell holes and fragments of works. The German barbed wire was very strong, of abnormal thickness in closeness and strength of spikes and in the wire itself. The ditch in front of the sap was heavily wired under the water. The German casualties must have been very heavy. The artillery Officers said they caught the reinforcements coming up on the road first with the 4.5 howitzers, and later with the 9in. guns. Bombers say something of what they saw there, but not all of them agree on the point. The trenches were occupied at the time of the attack by Bavarians, it is said. The counter-attack was made by the reserve Division of the Prussian Guards.