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Updated: May 28, 2025
I hated to leave him there to his agony... The colonel himself was all nerves, and he loathed the rats as much as the shell-fire and the mining, those big, lean, hungry rats of the trenches, who invaded the dugouts and frisked over the bodies of sleeping men. One young subaltern was in terror of them. He told me how he shot at one, seeing the glint of its eyes in the darkness.
Our trouble was to know where to go. The righting on the previous night had covered a wide area, but a good many of the wounded had been brought back. Where the wounded still lay the enemy's shell-fire was so heavy that the Belgian ambulances could get nowhere near.
There were the five old windmills of Cassel that wave their arms up the hill road, and the estaminets by which one found one's way down country lanes "The Veritable Cuckoo" and "The Lost Corner" and "The Flower of the Fields" and the first smashed roofs and broken barns which led to the area of constant shell-fire. Ugh! So it was still going on, this bloody murder!
It was very annoying using a feeble word to battalion officers and men of the 3d Division Suffolks and King's Own Liverpools, Gordons and Royal Scots who had first come out of the salient, out of its mud and snow and slush and shell-fire, to a pretty village far behind the lines, on the road to Calais, where they were getting back to a sense of normal life again.
Native Indian troops were brought to France to face the diabolical shell-fire of modern guns, and Territorials went out to India to take the place of the British regulars who were withdrawn for France. Every rifle that England could bring to the assistance of the French in their heroic stand was a rifle to the good. Meanwhile, she was making her new army.
The chateau of Vermelles, where that had happened, was an empty ruin, and there was no sign of the gilt furniture, or the long mirrors, or the marble Venus when I looked through the charred window-frames upon piles of bricks and timber churned up by shell-fire. The gunner officer took us to the cemetery, to meet some friends of his who had their battery nearby.
It was the Sirdar who insisted upon the necessity of being supplied with these light and handy cannon. Neither the velocity nor the range of their shell-fire is great, but it is enough 4000 yards or thereby for all practical purposes, and is fairly accurate. The explosion of the picric shells was very violent, and the danger area about 300 yards from where they burst.
A communication trench which I visited, when paying an afternoon call at a dug-out, was wide enough to admit a pony and cart, and, as it has to serve to bring up ration-parties and stretcher-bearers as well as reliefs, it is made as wide as is consistent with its main purpose, which is to protect the approach and to localise the effect of shell-fire as much as possible, the latter object being effected by frequent "traversing."
The majority of wounds was due to shell-fire and unaimed machine-gun bullets, as there was very little genuine fighting. Many awards were made in connection with this well-executed operation; they are given in an appendix. I may mention here that Captain Cawley, who was wounded, received the M.C. and the Italian Silver Medal, and C.S.-M. Alder the same Italian decoration, together with the D.C.M.
After this hill was taken the fire was indirect and much less effective; our own portion had only one dose of the enemy's shell-fire, but it was brisk while it lasted and there were a few wounded casualties including Lieut. Tomeny.
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