Altogether, during the period I acted as gun-layer on the Western Front, I fired some 20,000 shells into the enemy lines.
I am not so naive as to imagine that all this weight of high explosive could have burst on the front line trenches without killing or maiming quite a number of youngsters of my own age and the sombre thought often weighs on my conscience, even today.
Yet, during the whole period, I was only involved in one personal incident (concerning which I prefer not to speak), in which I knew I had actually inflicted bodily harm, perhaps killed, a human being, and he was a man old enough to be my father.
He emerged from a shell-hole, probably with the intention of surrendering, but how was I to know that?
SOUVENIRS
Of course, I did not escape scot-free myself, I still carry the scar of a bullet wound in my left arm, the marks of half a dozen shell splinters in my right leg, a slight dose of phosgene gas at Passchendaele[1] left me subject to severe gastric attacks and I am permanently deaf in my left ear owing to the concussion of incessant gun-fire.
Curiously enough, it was the ear farthest away from the gun that felt the violence of the impact; almost as if one received a terrific blow on that side of the head every time the piece fired.
On first going into action we had been issued with rubber ear-plugs, but these were quickly lost or discarded. In turning out to support an infantry SOS call, one had other things than ear-plugs to think about.
Everything considered, however, I think I was extremely lucky and I often used to recall with a wry smile the words of the old sweat with one arm who greeted me at the Blackburn Artillery barracks:
“Ay, son thee take a good look at that. Afore tha’s finished, tha’ll think aw’m dommed lucky.”
He could have been so right.
ESCAPES
Actually, I consider that there were three different occasions when I ought to have been killed but just wasn’t through some inscrutable quirk of providence.
Once when my gun sustained a direct hit and the blast blew me clean out of the gun-pit; once when I was sitting target for a line of advancing German shock troops and once when a 15 in. shell buried itself in the ground under my feet and failed to explode.
Yes, I think I have been “dommed lucky” myself. I have had a shell-splinter deflected by a bunch of keys in my pocket; I have had my box respirator carried away by another and the front of my tunic slashed open by yet a third; I have had the heel of my boot cut away with a fragment of shell case and my tin hat dented by a huge piece of falling debris and here I am to tell the tale nigh fifty years later.
“Dommed lucky.” I’ll say I was.
INCESSANT
Many of the 20,000 rounds I lobbed across No-Man’s Land were expended while we were on the Nieuport front. What with the incessant shell-storms, when we blazed away as fast as we could load, fire, and eject the empty cartridge cases, and the nightly SOS rockets, blazing eerily, red over green over yellow, all along the tortured front line, our lives seemed spent in one constant reverberation of ear-splitting sound; no wonder I have had a permanent singing in my ears ever since.
To add to our tribulations, about this time we began to receive a lot of defective American ammunition, chiefly shrapnel.
In point of fact, shrapnel was very little use in the eternal mud of Flanders, or anywhere else for that matter.
Trench warfare required high explosive and plenty of it and spraying the enemy lines with shrapnel bullets was about as effective as flinging a handful of peas.
Actually, I believe it was Lord Kitchener who insisted on the artillery carrying 50 per cent of shrapnel. He was still living in the days of the Boer War.
The only time such shells became effective was when the Bosche delivered a mass attack in close formation and that was only in the very early stages of the war.
UNPOPULAR
But defective shrapnel ammunition could be the very devil. Each shell contained 190 lead pellets as big as marbles, detonated by a time fuse at the base, the idea being to set it so that it burst just over the heads of attacking troops.
But these infernal Yankee efforts, as often as not, burst as soon as they left the gun muzzle and sprayed the ground in front with a barrage of lead. And as at Nieuport there was another RFA battery immediately in front of us, we soon became exceedingly unpopular.
In fact, the battery commander insisted, with some feeling, that his men were in greater danger from us than from the enemy, a fact we could well appreciate.
And when one of his gunners, hit in the knee by a stray shrapnel bullet, insisted on the stretcher-bearers carrying him to our position, so that he could shake hands with the man who had given him such a comfortable “blighty”, it was obvious something would have to be done about it.
PAINFUL DUTY
We had just been issued with some patent night-lights which worked from a dry battery in the gun pit and which had to be connected every night with a long length of wire.
This was continually being cut by splinters and it was my painful duty, as gun-layer, to crawl out and repair it, often when the battery was blazing away upon some SOS line.
I have spent more than one blasphemous half-hour groping in the dark after loose ends of wire, with one ear cocked for the curious whine of a premature, which would have meant for me a sudden and sticky end, for our aiming posts to which the lights were fixed were immediately in front of the gun muzzles.
HEROES WHO BLAZED THE TRAIL FOR ‘THE FEW’
It seems likely that the arrival of British troops on the Nieuport front and particularly the 66th Division’s take-over from the French and Belgian forces on this sector was regarded by the Bosche as the preliminary to an attack across the flooded Yser river.
No doubt his suspicions were intensified by certain mysterious manoœuvres on the part of the 4th East Lancashires, who were brigaded with the division.
For some obscure reason they were placed under the orders of the Royal Engineers, ostensibly to construct a pontoon bridge over the Yser Canal. They also spent one memorable night under heavy fire, crossing its inky waters in a number of curious coracles known as Berthon Boats.
These monstrosities, as soon as they had been loaded with equipment, invariably capsized, precipitating their cursing occupants into the icy depths.
It was all very frustrating and only made sense to the brass-hats at GHQ, for the projected attack was never launched.
AERIAL DOG FIGHTS
But in consequence there was a sudden outbreak of activity behind the German lines, both on the ground and in the air, where both aides fought desperately to obtain the mastery.
Almost every morning, as we stood-to, we could see, outlined against the roseate flush of dawn, a dozen fighter planes engaged in a bitter dog-fight.
How we admired the courage of our gallant airmen in their rickety little machines, some little larger than kites.
These feeble bi-planes and tri-planes from both sides of the line – SPAD, Nieuport, Albatros, Sopwith and Fokker Fighters represented the eyes of the opposed forces and it was essential to the other side that they should be destroyed.
Sometimes whole squadrons would become locked in combat: on one occasion the famous German “ace” Richthoven swept across our front with his notorious “flying circus,” all painted a sinister red, inviting our own airmen to a “free-for-all”, of which they were quick to avail themselves.
The result was a sight for the gods; I have never seen such aerobatics either before or since.
Backward and forward loops, the “falling leaf”, the spin, the upward and downward dives; nothing carne amiss; all seemed to be inspired with a sheer contempt for death, and all the while their frenzied activities were punctuated by the staccato rattle of machine-guns.
I have seen as many as four hurtling down in flames together; I have seen one plane deliberately ram another, so that the two fell to earth together with wings inter-locked, and I have seen men, their clothes ignited by burning petrol, leap from the wrecked machines and crash to the ground like blazing torches.
Make no mistake about it, those early Royal Flying Corps men were worthy of the high tradition that led to our victory in the Battle of Britain of the Second World War. In such bitter fighting as this they set the pattern for a succeeding generation.
[1] The Battle of Passchendaele was one of the major battles of the First World War, taking place between July and November 1917. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Passchendaele
Remembering the First World War 