Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 14, 2025
The following evening our Transport lines and Quartermaster's Stores moved to Labourse and we went into the line, relieving the 2nd York and Lancaster Regiment in the Hulluch right sector. For six days we lived in tunnels, with a front line which consisted of odd isolated posts at the end of each passage. The old front line trench seemed to have disappeared entirely.
To the left the ruins of Hulluch fretted the low-lying clouds of smoke, and beyond a huddle of broken houses far away was the town of Haisnes. Fosse 8 and the Hohenzollern redoubt were hummocks of earth faintly visible through drifting clouds of thick, sluggish vapor.
For a few days the Battalion remained in support, sending forth working parties each night for the battle that was still continuing. On the 13th October the 1st Division attacked the village of Hulluch. An intense barrage was directed against the enemy trenches in the early part of the afternoon, and after a discharge of cloud gas an attempt was made in vain to reach the enemy trenches.
We were shelling Hulluch and Haisnes and Fosse 8 with an intense, concentrated fire, and the enemy was retaliating by scattering shells over the town of Loos and our new line between Hill 70 and the chalk-pit, and the whole length of our line from north to south. Only two men moved about above the trenches.
There was mud and wet chalk everywhere, and a very poor water supply for drinking purposes. What few dug-outs existed were the usual small German front line post's funk holes, and all faced the wrong way. It was a bad place. There was, however, one redeeming feature. From the hill we could see everything, Hulluch, Wingles, Vendin and Cité St.
Artillery incessantly thundered in Flanders, Champagne, Artois, the Vosges, and on the British lines at Hulluch and Armentières. By January 10, 1916, it looked as though the Germans intended to retrieve the misfortunes of Champagne.
Scattered about in different villages lying round Bethune, our battalions passed the next two months in the usual training before we should take up our own sector of the line, and we saw little or nothing of each other. March found us engaged, though still only attached by companies to more seasoned troops, in some rough crater-fighting on the ugly mine-riddled stretch between Loos and Hulluch.
Hulluch, a small village still in possession of the Germans, was to our left front. Midway between Hill 70 and Hulluch and immediately to the front of our position, there was a long stretch of open country which sloped gently forward for six or eight hundred yards, and then rose gradually toward the sky-line.
Peering over the parapet, we saw the whole panorama of the battleground. The villages of Haisnes and Hulluch fretted the skyline, and Fosse 8 was a black wart between them. The "Tower Bridge," close by in the town of Loos, was the one high landmark which broke the monotony of this desolation. No men moved about this ground.
This attack we watched from the back of Lone trench, and later in the day were able to give material assistance. The German counter attack came from behind Hulluch, near Wingles, and the troops for it assembled and started their attack in view of our posts.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking