Sporting Days in the Salient and
Elsewhere
88
THE YPRES TIMES
By Lieut.-Col. G. J. Henderson.
THE day before the battle of Neuve Chapelle, in March, 1915, I was posted
to command a battery in the 6th Division at Armentieres. Straight in front
of Armentieres, and in the German lines, was the village of Wesmacar which
contained a church with a fairly high tower, still standing, and fairly complete
except for a few shell holes through its sides. I had observed flashes of light at
one of these shell holes in the tower, which I took to be field glasses of a German
observing officer. I therefore reported the fact, and the 60-pounder guns were
turned on to knock the tower down. I witnessed the shoot from my O.P. It was
one of the prettiest pieces of pin-point shooting I have ever seen done. Sixteen
rounds were fired, and never one far off a direct hit. Six or seven shots actually
hit the tower, and the sixteenth brought it down with a crash. So we were rid of
that very annoying fellow with the field-glasses.
The whole performance seemed to annoy the enemy, for he retaliated by
violently shelling Chapelle d'Armentieres, one of our observing stations. He fired
60 or 70 rounds but failed to bring it down, which, I think, was one up to us.
Shortly after this the Second Battle of Ypres took place, and we at Armentieres
could see the bursting shells and hear the guns quite plainly. When it finished
the 6th Division was sent up to Ypres to relieve one of the British Divisions that
had fought in that infernal gas battle.
A friend of mine, who commanded another battery in the same brigade, was
very keen on attacking the enemy's guns with his 18-pounders. I caught the
infection, and we used to sort of hunt in couples for the hostile guns; and with
fairly good effect, as was proved by the fact that we saw the German gunners
running away from their guns in a certain battery of which we could see the
positiona shocking sight which I have seen more than once in the German
Artillery, but never once in our own. Later on, when I commanded a brigade, I
had to order the men away from the guns of one of my batteries, whose guns were
being steadily blown up by a German 8-inch battery with aeroplane observation.
It made me think that we had established a superiority over the German artillery
in morale, if not in weight and numbers.
To return to our muttons. We got comfortably settled down in the Salient,
and a month or two later I put one gun of my battery right forward about 800
yards behind the front line. This I called the subalterns' gun, as it was very
useful for training young subalterns who were a little shy of bringing the battery
into action to shoot at things they fancied. They did not have any shyness about
bringing the single gun into action.
I used to use it for attacking hostile anti-aircraft batteries. One could spot
these batteries fairly easily as they shot up into the air, and their slight puffs of
smoke were generally visible.
One of these batteries took up a position near the Frezenberg Road and we
called him the Frezenberg Battery. He had four guns. I located his position on
the map by a compass-bearing from my O.P. and by taking the time by stop-watch
between his flash and report. That I got him fairly accurately was proved by the
fact that whenever I saw one of our aeroplanes going out I turned my single gun
on to the Frezenberg Battery. The moment he opened fire I used to give him
three rounds gun-fire repeated several times. He never fired more than three or
four shots at the aeroplane, and then stopped firing.
