In the Line of Battle

It is well to remember the very fine life-saving work that was done by fishermen when the Formidable was lost, just as it was done by fishermen in the North Sea when the three cruisers were torpedoed. In their life-saving work at the loss of the Formidable, deep-sea fishermen added one more to the many splendid things they have done for the Navy since the war began.

One result of the failure of the steam was that the wireless could not be worked, so that not much could be done with the sending out of calls; but there was the Morse to fall back on, and so into the night the lamp signals were flashed, warning the other ships of what had happened and telling them to keep clear. They had to obey, having no option in the matter, and it must have been hard for them to leave the old ship to her fate, though I daresay they were comforted by the knowledge that her company were sure to meet their end like good Englishmen.

The Morse signals were understood by the other warships, but it seems that there were one or two other fishing vessels about which would most surely have given help if they had realised what had happened and had understood the nature of the signals. The Provident was packed, having only a very small cabin and her hold and fish-room, but once on board of her the survivors were safe, though as far as room and comfort went, we who were saved by the cruiser were a good deal better off.

I do not want to dwell on the finish of the battleship, and the terrible hour or so I spent in the icy cold of the Channel seas in the very heart of winter. The disaster was so sudden and tremendous that it had a numbing effect on you, and many a poor fellow died through exposure, either in the water or in the boats, which were constantly swept by the freezing seas, so that there was little difference between being in the boats and in the water.

Captain Loxley went down with his ship, you might almost say as a matter of course, his first and last thought being for the safety of his people. Many of the officers went with him, and as for those who were saved, they were all, except one or two who had been ordered to the boats to take charge of them, rescued from the seas into which they had plunged or had been thrown to take their chance just like the men.

CHAPTER XIII

A TROOPER’S TALE

[It has been said that in this war cavalry have ceased to exist. As mounted men their opportunities have undoubtedly been very limited; but in other ways they have done much to maintain their ancient reputation. In the earlier days of the fierce attempt of the Germans to break through the Allied Armies and get to Calais the teller of this tale – Trooper Notley, of the 5th Dragoon Guards – was engaged and was finally wounded and invalided home.]

There are a good many men who, like myself, were at Mons, the Marne and the Aisne, and then went into the Fight for the Coast, and I think they would all tell the same story – that that tremendous battle was fifty times worse than the Aisne.

The Aisne was very bad; but even there, though the Germans fought desperately to prevent themselves from being driven back and turned away from Paris, their efforts were not to be compared with the determination they showed in their attacks upon the troops who barred their way to Calais.

The Germans were mad in their resolve to hack their way through to Paris; but they were madder to break through and get to the coast, so that they could get within sight of hated England. They tried all they knew; even as I talk they are trying as hard as ever, but I’m as sure that they won’t succeed as I am that to-morrow will come.

People have heard and read a lot about the fighting at Ypres and Messines, and it is of this part of the battle that I am going to talk, because it was at these places that the 5th Dragoon Guards shared in a great deal of furious fighting.

We had had a long inning at the Aisne, then our brigade moved on to the Ypres region, which we reached after being fourteen days in the saddle. We made a short break at Amiens, where it was thought that we might have to help the French; but before long reinforcements arrived for them and we went on our road to the north, approaching Ypres as the advanced guard of a brigade.

It had been hard going on the march, and there was plenty of excitement with it, even before we got into the real fight for the coast. There were prowling Uhlans everywhere, and nothing would have pleased us better than to get at them in a thundering charge; but they didn’t give us the chance, they are not keen on that sort of thing, and kept in scattered bodies. But at one point quite a little surprise had been prepared for us by about three hundred Uhlans.

We were marching along when we discovered that these Uhlans had taken up a position commanding a road, and they had planted a Maxim, so that they could give us a warm welcome. They soon discovered that we were not going to be caught napping. Instead of keeping to the road we were promptly ordered to leave it and to take to a field running alongside. We made for the Uhlans as fast as we could go, but they did not stop to finish the welcome; they vanished, and I was unable to see the end of them; but it seems that they were completely surrounded and gathered in by some of our infantry.

This was the sort of small affair that was constantly happening, but it was a trifle compared with the real big fighting around Ypres. The cannonade was terrific, and the everlasting firing made it seem as though nothing existed on earth but the thundering of big guns and the screeching and bursting of shells all around.

In and around Ypres, the Allies had pushed far into the enemy’s line, and the Germans were concentrating all their men and metal to crumple us up. They strained every nerve and made the most dreadful sacrifices to carry out the Kaiser’s command to break through; but though they hurled themselves to certain death, in thousands, they were driven back.

Messines, a village quite near to Ypres, came within the zone of this furious attack, and it was at Messines that most of the brigade, including my own squadron, was posted.

When we got to the village, which we reached by way of the fields – rough going, but safer than the roads – my squadron was ordered to hold the place by the main road, and another squadron went about nine hundred yards up the road and spent the night in digging trenches, which were occupied by the whole regiment on the following morning.

As we moved into the trenches we were under incessant fire, and we were fired on all the time we were in them.

For twelve days and twelve nights we held fast to our trenches, against the onslaughts of forces that were certainly five times as great as our own – and, in spite of their countless losses, the proportion of the Germans was never less than that.

We seemed to have nothing but shell fire and night attacks, and to get anything like decent rest under such conditions was impossible.

There was a curious sameness in this life in the trenches. We had no chance, as we had at the Aisne, of digging ourselves in, because the lie of the land was against us. At the Aisne our positions were very strong and we could afford to smile at the efforts of the Germans to dig us out; but it was a very different matter in country which is as flat as a floor. There was nothing impregnable in our little artificial gullies, and in this absence of help from Nature we had to keep our wits about us to escape the shrapnel and to prevent the nightly visits of our German neighbours.

We were a mixed lot at Messines. Our line consisted of the Connaught Rangers, the Somersets, Bengal Lancers and some Ghurkas – a mere handful compared with the hosts of Germans that were flung against us, with an enormous number of guns. The more troops they sent the more we shot.

Day after day this fighting went on, the German attacks getting fiercer every day. Nightfall was the time when they would make particularly stubborn attempts to drive us out. They would leave their own trenches and advance two or three hundred yards at a time, then throw themselves flat on the ground before beginning the next stage. We had them under observation all the time, but did not let a sound reach them; in fact, we lured them on by seeming not to be there.

On they came, till they were something like fifty yards away, then we got the order for rapid fire, and let drive into the ranks that it was not possible to miss. In this manner great numbers of Germans were destroyed; we punished them terribly, for our rapid fire was certain destruction for their front ranks.

It is not always clear to people, I find, that trenches may be constructed according to the needs of the moment, at all sorts of odd corners and angles. The idea seemed to be that the Germans dug themselves in along a perfectly straight line, while we dug ourselves in along a parallel line a few hundred yards away. In our position by Messines the trenches were splayed out, so to speak, some of them making an angle of ninety degrees or so with each other. We were so entrenched that we were inviting the Germans to step into a hollow square, or rather to form the fourth side of it, which with their heaps of dead and wounded they occasionally did. Of course the positions varied from hour to hour, both in guarding against attempts to enfilade us and in avoiding cross-fire between units of our own forces.

One night a supreme effort was made by the Germans. The Indians had relieved us that very morning, and one troop of our men had got into a barn and cut loopholes in the walls, while another troop had taken up a position at a barricade made up of old wagons and sacks of earth.

At about three o’clock in the morning we suddenly heard the sound of a bugle, and presently the Germans set up a hullabaloo and fairly hurled themselves at our trenches. They came in such strong numbers that the Indians, who had been dealing out death half the night, were overweighted by the enemy, who got round their flank and attacked them in the rear.

A Maxim gun section of the 11th Hussars was hurried down, and from the window of one of the buildings it blazed away at the Germans and covered the retirement of the Indians. The way in which the Maxims have been handled in the war has been a revelation to a lot of people. These handy weapons have been got into upstairs and downstairs rooms and even into the tops of trees, and they have caused terrific havoc in the Germans’ solid ranks.

That night affair was desperate; but it seemed as if nothing could stop the mad onrush of the Germans, and at last there was nothing for it but to give way, and so we received orders to evacuate the barn.

Near this particular point the road forks, and a couple of men were left to fire up the right-hand road and two to fire up the road on the left, and for the time being we were effectually covered.

It was at this stage that there arose the chance for a Territorial regiment to come into action for the first time. The Territorials to win this great distinction were the London Scottish.

The Scottish had been ordered up to relieve the pressure, and they came on quickly and in gallant style and took up a position at one end of the barn, while the Highland Light Infantry, the brave old 71st, took up a position at the other, and between them the two carried the barn with a bayonet charge and killed, captured or drove away the Germans.

The Scottish had their baptism of blood in proper good style, with a very strange preparation in the shape of a cunning German trick.

Not far from the Scottish was a windmill which had had three of its sails blown away or destroyed, leaving only the fourth sail, and that looked as if it had been cut clean in half. It was noticed that this crippled sail was working about in the most astonishing fashion, and those who saw it were puzzled to account for the movements; but it was soon discovered that there was a German spy hidden in the mill, and that he was moving the sail to indicate the position of the Scottish, and so bring the German gun-fire to bear on them. When the dodge had been discovered and the signaller settled the Scottish got their own back.

By this time I was blazing away from a barricade in an old covered yard, and there was a straggling fire going on all around; but it was clear that we should want reinforcements if we were to hold our own and save Messines.

At last we heard shouts, and I cannot tell you what it meant to us when we knew that the shouts came from our own fellows, and that three battalions of infantry had hurried up and got into action and given the Germans more than they could comfortably carry.

It was at this moment of the saving of Messines that I was struck by a shrapnel bullet and had to leave the fighting-line and come home, with the fight for the coast going on. I had been in it right from the start and had got used to the awful business, even to the “coal-boxes,” which the Germans were everlastingly firing. They made a particular target of the church, and for nine days bombarded it before they set the building on fire.

One of the strangest things about a shell is that you never know what it is going to do, and some of the “coal-boxes” acted like freaks.

During this bombardment of the church I watched one of the shells come, and expected that it would do something smashing, for it hit the building full in the middle of one of the main walls. I looked for the wall to be shattered, but the shell never shifted a brick or a bit of mortar; it simply burst in on itself, so to speak, and did no damage to anything except itself, and in the end the Germans got a fire going by sending a much smaller shell, something like a fifteen-pounder.

In a general way of speaking, however, these “coal-boxes” did some terrible mischief when they really exploded, and no living thing within their reach had a chance of escaping. Horses, guns, men, wagons, everything that came within the area of explosions was shattered or wiped out. Often enough men who were killed by the explosions were found in the holes, so that the shell which had destroyed them had also scooped out their grave.

There were all sorts of side issues to the actual fighting. We billeted in every kind of building, some of them very strange; but I think the strangest of all was a cow-house. This does not sound promising; but that cow-house was one of the finest places I ever slept in.

The farm itself was beautiful, and everything about it was on the latest and best scale, so that the cow-house was lighted by electricity, and the fittings were in keeping with the illumination. I had a very comfortable stretch there, and it would not have been possible for us to be better looked after. The proprietor had had notice of our coming and had made every preparation for us, and we were only too grateful for the many good things he freely gave away. We had the same sort of kindness shown to us by the French wherever we came into contact with them.

It may seem somewhat odd that a cavalryman in talking of the war should dwell so much on the trench work and the shell-fire; but in this war a great deal of the work of the cavalry has been dismounted, and practically the same as the infantry, and there has not been the chance that every cavalryman longs for to get to close grips with the enemy’s mounted forces.

We had heard so much about the Uhlans that we expected to have some stirring times with them; but these big encounters did not come off, and one great thing we learned about the Uhlans was their skill in avoiding us. We saw them everywhere, but in scattered bodies, and they never gave us a chance of getting at them in the mass. Whenever we formed up in anything like force they melted away; but one fine day we had better luck – we came across them when they were in fair numbers, and before they could perform their vanishing trick we had got at them. At the end we found that we had punished them pretty heavily, for we broke up seven hundred lances which we had captured from them.

CHAPTER XIV

A DIARIST UNDER FIRE

[There is a peculiar interest in any record of experiences which is made while they are being undergone. Imperfect and incomplete though they may be, yet they are of special value because of their reliability. This is particularly the case with some of the diaries which have been kept while the writers were on active service; and extracts from such a one form this story. The author is Private Charles Hills, 2nd Battalion Australian Infantry. His share in the operations he describes was necessarily brief, for he was dangerously wounded, and was partially blinded and invalided to England, prior to returning to Australia. Just before leaving England he was examined by a Medical Board, and it was then found that he was quite blind.]

    Lemnos, May 3rd, 1915.