B00D2VJZ4G EBOK by Jon E. Lewis Read Free Book Online

afternoon, neither knowing nor caring to which port we were going, and about midnight stepped out on Folkestone quay. Day was breaking as we landed at Boulogne and marched through the town and up the long hill to the rest camp, where we stayed until the following afternoon. I had some splendid whistlers, and between these and the usual songs we were never short of music on the march. Going down to La Brique station they whistled the ‘Ça Ira’ alternately with the ‘Marseillaise’ faultlessly, to the no small joy of the villagers.
    All through the spring night we rumbled along in the wagons and, after stopping at every signal post in the Pas de Calais, we pulled up in Hazebrouck. Here a sergeant reported that one of my men had got up and dived out of the window somewhere
en-route
, and that the man was known to be an occasional sleepwalker. I wrote him down as our first casualty. The guns told us we were nearly there, at last.
    About 2 a.m. we turned out at Merville, and the next day we moved into farms in the Forest of Nieppe, and here my somnambulist rejoined. He woke up to find himself on the line, somehow reached a British police post, and was passed on to his unit. He served creditably all through the War and when I met him the other day he told me he had never walked in his sleep since that night.
    We went up in parties for trench experience, in the line between Armentieres and Neuve-Chapelle. La Gorgue, Estaires, and Laventie were still inhabited, but all frequently shelled. They had been looted by the Germans in 1914, and the Maire of Estaires had been shot for failing to produce the demanded ransom. The farms here were still cultivated, and old men, women, and children were at work in the fields within range not only of shells, but of stray bullets. The old breastworks below the Aubers Ridge have been often described; my fortune led me to the point where Fauquissart Church lay in ruins in the trench line, and my instructors were the best possible, the 1st Grenadier Guards.
    In a week or so our Division took over a line between Neuve-Chapelle and Fleurbaix. A country of little fields, innumerable roads and water-courses, hedges, woods, and thickly dotted with farms and houses. A country of deep soil, with water a foot below the surface, where (on our side) trenches were non-existent, and we held a continuous sandbag breastwork with sand-bagged avenues leading up to it from the nearest hedge.
    On the German side, a similar parapet in front, but behind it the long slope of the Aubers Ridge, dug all over with communication trenches, and looking into every inch of our positions. There was very little shelling, but continual rifle fire and sniping, day and night. More than one German sniper fell a victim to some of my crack shots, so they did not have it all their own way.
    There was a shelter in the support line that we used as a mess. Its top was visible from the German lines, and they had a fixed rifle trained on it. Someone had put an iron plate up where the bullets struck, and regularly every two minutes a bullet rang on the plate.
    This damnable and maddening iteration went on day and night, like the old torture of the regular drop of water on the victim’s head. I was in this place when the usual ‘ping’ was replaced by a dull thud. I ran out to the front line, and found, as I expected, that someone had got in the way. A fine young fellow was lying in the trench with a hole in his forehead and the back blown out of his head. He must have died instantly, but he was making that awful throaty gurgle which follows brain wounds.
    Shortly afterwards my second captain, a very promising young engineer, went the same way. These cases made one think of the damnable cry of 1914, ‘Single men first.’ Who would have been the greatest loss to England, a man like myself, with half his life’s work done and a family growing up, or these splendid lads just starting their careers, whose unbegotten offspring was cut off