Men of 18 in 1918: Memories of the Western Front in World War One (The History of World War One) by Frederick James Hodges

Author:Frederick James Hodges [Hodges, Frederick James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sapere Books
Published: 2022-07-31T07:00:00+00:00

FIVE POINT NINES

As I sat musing, a 5.9 shell roared down very close to us, and burst with a loud crash just beyond the graves on the other side of the field track. Widdowson, who had been in France for over three years, was quite unconcerned. He had survived several wounds and many battles, including the appalling winter conditions at Ypres and Passchendaele. He regarded a tour on the Somme battlefront as greatly preferable, despite its grim record of unceasing casualties since 1st July 1916.

By this stage of the war, the Line had acquired its own history, and the small minority of men in the battalion who had fought in some of the great battles of 1915, 1916 and 1917 spoke of those days AS history. “When we were in the old front line”, they would say, meaning before our big Somme Offensive in 1916. Or, they would say, “Oh that was before Jerry pulled back to the Hindenburg Line in March, 1917” or, “When we came back the first time from Ypres to the Somme.”

To us, the young soldiers of 1918, whose task it was to finish the war, those old days were indeed simply history. I had read the newspaper accounts of these old battles; I was familiar with all the famous place names, and now here I was on the very spot where some of those old battles had taken place.

Now, they told us, WE were going to finish it. The thinly held Line of General Gough’s 5th Army of 21st March was now heavily reinforced. We had held and contained that great attack, despite our heavy losses, and NOW, the tide was about to turn.

Widdowson was sitting behind me in our cramped quarters, and he casually said “Better pull your legs in, Corporal, you might need ’em yet.”

German 5.9s are noisy brutes, but usually they can be heard coming with an ever increasing roar which reaches a crescendo that hurts the ear drums. Then they explode with an earthquaking stunning thump. For about ten minutes they continued to whine and growl over us before bursting with violent crashes in the sodden field. Those which were very close to us like the first one, roared down with a terrifying crescendo of noise and thumped into the ground with tremendous force, scattering deadly pieces of jagged metal.

Despite their destructive power, most of us preferred them to the German 77mm Whizz-bang, which arrived, three or four at a time, with no warning except the final rush, and then exploded like giant firecrackers into slivers of steel which sighed and screamed through the air. Sometimes the nosecap would buzz past like an angry bee. When the shelling ceased, Widdowson brewed up some tea on a Tommy Cooker, a very primitive heater consisting of a small tin, about the size of a Nestles milk tin, full of solidified fat from the cookhouse. When the fat eventually ignited, it would, after an age, boil some water in a billy can, and then tea and sugar was thrown in.

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