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Updated: June 1, 2025
About half-past three the brigade-major called for our 18-pounders to drive off another Boche wave with a half-hour's shower of shrapnel; he also wanted our how. battery to devote itself to Sart Farm and Holland Post, which forward observers reported to be little strongholds of enemy trench-mortars and machine-guns. Still no sign of "Ernest."
Many batteries had been knocked out in their emplacements along the line of Bazentin and Longueval before the artillery was drawn back to Grand-court and a new line of safety. Battalion commanders clamored for greater supplies of hand-grenades, intrenching-tools, trench-mortars, signal rockets, and all kinds of fighting material enormously in excess of all previous requirements.
Many arms of the Service took honourable part in the enterprise heavy guns, field guns, trench-mortars, machine-guns; Sappers and Pioneers; Infantry in various capacities. But this narrative is concerned only with the part played by the Seventh Hairy Jocks.
Cavalry were concentrated behind the 60th Division ready to dash forward directly the line should be broken. At 4.30 on the morning of the 19th September, there suddenly opened an intensive bombardment of the enemy's coastal positions, carried out by all the artillery, trench-mortars and machine-guns that could be concentrated in this small sector, the navy also co-operating.
Our other casualties were Killed, 2; Wounded, 18; Missing, 1. Throughout April 13 and for several days afterwards desultory fighting, in which our trench-mortars under Miller performed good service, was maintained for the possession of Baquerolle Farm and another lying 150 yards south of it and christened Boase's Farm. Both remained in our hands.
They hold their front line thinly, trusting in case of accidents to recover it by a counter-attack. And if the French are not fighting a battle they generally keep their front as quiet as they can. This of course is all very different from our own system. If we had a quiet part of the line, it was generally because we had silenced the enemy's guns and trench-mortars by fighting.
Did they have any faint idea of life in a sector where men stood, slept, ate, worked, under the fire of eight-inch shells, five-point nines, trench-mortars, rifle-grenades, machine-gun bullets, snipers, to say nothing of poison-gas, long-range fire on the billets in small farmsteads, and on every moonlight night air raids above wooden hutments so closely crowded into a small space that hardly a bomb could fall without killing a group of men.
Five hundred years hence, if Amiens cathedral still stands, undamaged by some new and monstrous conflict in a world of incurable folly, the generation of that time will think now and then, perhaps, of the English lads in khaki who tramped up the highway of this nave with their field-caps under their arms, each footstep leaving the imprint of a wet boot on the old flagstones, awed by the silence and the spaciousness, with a sudden heartache for a closer knowledge, or some knowledge, of the God worshiped there the God of Love while, not far away, men were killing one another by high explosives, shells, hand-grenades, mines, machine-guns, bayonets, poison-gas, trench-mortars, tanks, and, in close fighting, with short daggers like butchers' knives, or clubs with steel knobs.
There is little else after that for them to learn but bombing and the warfare peculiar to trench fighting such as the conduct of trench-mortars, catapults, and other weapons of a similar description that they can well learn at the schools of instruction just behind the front. Pass them for the front, Sergeant. Put them down to go with a new draft which leaves for Verdun to-morrow evening.
Then, too, the sappers went in for experimental research by making trench-mortars out of old stove-pipes. To-day all that is changed. A chemical corps has come out to join the sappers, and the gunners have received some highly finished trench-mortars from Vickers's. A trench mortar is a kind of toy howitzer and very useful when you want to try conclusions with a neighbouring trench at short range.
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