42 THË YPRES TIMES
By Charles Smith.
ALTHOUGH I arrived in France in March, 1916, after a short stay in Egypt,
I did not see service on the Ypres sector until October, 1917, where I had
the most terrible time of all my war experiences.
At that time I was a Bombardier in B Battery of the 152nd Brigade,
R.F.A. (34th Division).
We had spent the summer in the district of Caulaincourt, a beautiful wooded
region where the Germans had not been able to spoil the natural surroundings,
although, before his evacuation in the previous spring, the enemy had destroyed
every house, bridge, and building. There was a big chateau in the village, at
which it was said the Kaiser had made his headquarters.
Apart from the mosquitos, the district was a pleasant one to soldier in. Our
Battery position was in a coppice near Vadencourt. It was a quiet front.
Here I spent a number of nights at the Observation Post. It was a dull and
monotonous job, with hardly a sound of even a rifle shot and Very lights few and
far between.
It was the calm before the storm. On the 3rd of October we were relieved by
a Battery from the Ypres front, and the gunners told us some lurid stories of
their experiences in that sector.
We then had a few days' rest, and entraining at Peronne we arrived at Proven
on the 9th of October. Here we were told of the conditions which prevailed at
the guns. They are so bad," so the story ran, that the gunners have to be
relieved every three days."
After four days in Camp at Proven, and nightly air raids, the selected gun
teams, of which I was one, journeyed along the boarded tracks over the famous
pontoon bridge at Boesinghe, and through the water-logged wilderness of shell-
holes to a battery position near the Steenbeek, where we took over the 18-pounders
of the battery we were relieving.
The conditions were really terrible, and I do not blame the gunners who were
relieved for their haste in getting away from the position. They had suffered
some severe losses, and the day before our arrival, had one of their guns blown up,
and there it lay, a shattered wreck in a shell-hole nearly as big as a mine crater.
On the right of the position was a concrete pill-box," in which the officers
and men were herded. To get to the guns was to risk drowning in shell-holes, and
nearly everywhere one moved was knee-deep in slush.
We had just made an inspection of the guns and taken a record of the
registered targets, when the position was heavily shelled, and we had to scramble
round the shell-holes to a place of safety, but the shells seemed to follow us. One
great burst occurred just behind my sergeant and myselfabout ten yards away.
It sounded like a 12-inch. We dropped to mother earth, every minute expecting
to receive in some part of our anatomy a relic of the German iron foundries, for
splinters and mud were dropping round like rain. However, when the firing
ceased, it was found that, except for a little damage to clothes and nerves, we had
come through the first round with men and guns intact.
This position came in for very heavy shelling during the three days we were
in occupation, and our gas drill served us in good stead. Sleep was almost out of
the question, and we spent the nights in the pill-box dozing in a sitting position,
with frequent gas alarms, which, while they saved many lives, added to the
miseries of our existence, for to sit with gas masks on while the enemy pelted the
position with gas shells is not exactly a picnic.
