CHAPTER VI

BRITISH FIGHTERS IN FRENCH FORTS

[We very slowly learned something of the many extraordinary features of this amazing war. Nothing is too astonishing or stupendous to happen in connection with the fight to crush the militarism of Prussia. Through this story by Private J. Boyers, of the Durham Light Infantry--the old 68th Foot, long known by reason of its devotion on many a bloody field like Salamanca and Inkerman as the “Faithful Durhams”--we get to know something of the British and French fighting side by side in the forts at Lille, one of the strongest of the famous fortresses of France. Lille is a great manufacturing town, the Manchester of France, and early in October 1914, and later, it was the scene of much desperate fighting between the Allied Armies and the Germans.]

I went from England with the first party in the Expeditionary Force, and after landing on the other side of the Channel, we had a march of fifty miles to Mons, where I had my first battle.

I was in the great retirement--but I suppose you have heard enough about that and Mons already, so I will leave it. After that beginning, I took part in the Battle of the Marne and the Battle of the Aisne, and later on I was shot in the thigh and bowled out.

I am only a young soldier--I am a native of Sunderland, and was born in 1891--and I have only been in the army a few months--in the old 68th, the “Faithful Durhams,” so I think I have seen a fair lot of the big war and have got to know what it means.

The Durhams have done splendidly and suffered terribly, and many a chum of mine is sleeping with thousands more British soldiers on the battlefields of France and Belgium. A great many have been wounded, and of course there are a number of missing, mostly men, I dare say, who are prisoners of war.

I had been at sea before joining the army, and thought I knew something about roughing it; but even the North Sea in bad weather was nothing compared with the hardships of the retirement from Mons, and the living and sleeping in the trenches when the ground was sodden and deep in water.

Sometimes we were very short of food, and once for several days on end we were almost starving, because the supplies could not get up to us, and we had been forced to throw away a lot of our packs and things.

A good many of us had to carry a seven-pound tin of bully beef in addition to our heavy packs and a great many rounds of ammunition. In the fearfully hot weather we could not carry all this weight, and the tins of beef had to go. We should have been thankful for them later on, when we ran short and some of the beef we had with us had gone bad through the tins getting punctured, which happened in all sorts of strange ways, including bullet-holes and bayonet pricks. But these were things that couldn’t be helped, and in spite of them all we kept very cheerful, and often enough, both on the march and in the trenches and French forts, when we got to them, we sang and joked and whistled as if there was no such thing going on as war.

Our officers shared everything with us, and suffered just as we did, though often worse, so that whenever we got a bit downhearted, their example cheered us up and put us right. I don’t think there’s a man who’s fought in this great war who won’t say the same thing about his officers.

We had so much fierce fighting when the work really began, and saw so many strange and dreadful things, that it is not easy to say what stands out most clearly in our minds in such a business, but one of the things I do remember, and shall never forget, is the week or so we spent in one of the big French forts at Lille, fighting side by side with French soldiers. I will tell you about that later, but we did a lot before we got to Lille.

When we were on the march we had a great deal of exciting work to do in hunting Germans. Small bodies of them were everywhere, apart from the immense numbers of spies who were in the Lille district and elsewhere.

The French bagged a lot of spies and gave them short shrift. They hid in all sorts of queer places--some of them got into the tall mill chimneys--but they were routed out and shot.

We found a fair lot of Germans in houses and farms when we were on the march. We examined these places thoroughly. When we arrived at farmhouses and suchlike places, a non-commissioned officer, with a small party of men would make inquiries, often with the help of French cavalrymen who were with us and could speak English, and we always found that threats of fearful punishment to the womenfolk had been made by the Germans if they told us that any Germans had been seen about. But the women told us readily enough, especially when there happened to be any Germans in hiding--those who were too drunk to get away and had been left behind. It didn’t take long to make these fellows prisoners, and they rubbed their eyes a lot when they got sober and found that the British had bagged them--though I fancy that most of them were glad to be caught and out of the fighting.

We saw some dreadful sights in these farms and houses that we entered, and it was no uncommon thing for us to bury the women who had been done to death by these invaders who were worse than heathens. We had to carry out this sad work at night, to escape the German fire, for no matter what we were doing they went for us with rifles and machine-guns and anything else that came handy.

Time after time on the march we saw proof of the terrible way in which the French and Germans fought, and saw how bravely the French had defended their country and how freely they had given their lives to get something like even with the enemy.

The Frenchmen were naturally even more upset than the British soldiers were at many of the sights that met us, and in the streets along which we marched we often saw dead bodies of Frenchmen and Germans lying close together, where they had fallen after a desperate fight on the pavements or in the roadway. They had met and fought to the death, and it looked as if no quarter had been given. And with all this there had been a perfectly savage destruction of everything that the Germans could lay their hands on.

The Germans had thieved and killed wherever they had gone, led on in the work by their officers, and little supposing, I fancy, that the day of reckoning had come for them and that their brutal game was being spoiled. There is no doubt that they had been taught that they were going to have a walk over in France and were going to have a good time in Paris; but some of them were poor enough specimens when we caught them or they surrendered.

After the terrific battles of the Marne and the Aisne we were transferred rather quickly to La Bassée, which is not far from Lille, and then we had to take a share in defending Lille, in one of the big forts just outside the town.

The Germans had got up into that part of the country in very strong force, and they were making furious efforts to smash the forts and get hold of Lille, which had become a most important place for them.

Lille is a large manufacturing town and was very strongly defended by forts and in other ways. These big forts, about half-a-dozen in number, form a ring round the town and command all the countryside, or rather did, for they have been pretty badly hammered by this time; while the town itself is protected in other ways. Lille was also one of the big centres for French troops, but owing to the heavy drain caused by the immense numbers of Germans that had to be dealt with at the Aisne there were not a great many first-rate troops left, and a good deal of the defence had to fall on the territorials.

The particular fort where I had my strangest experiences was about a mile from Lille, and from the outside it looked like a low hill-top, so much so that when we were getting near it the fort seemed like a little round hill rising from the plain.

The fort was built of immense blocks of stone, and, as far as one could tell, great quantities of steel, so that its strength must have been enormous.

It was a romantic sort of business to get into the fort, because, first of all, we had to pass the sentries, then some huge stone sliding doors were opened, by a lever, I suppose, in the same way as the midway doors of a District Railway carriage open and shut. They were very big and heavy doors, yet they opened and shut quite easily, and when they were closed you could hardly see a crack between them.

Past this gloomy entrance was a narrow walled slope which led into darkness. We went down the slope into what looked like an archway and then we got into proper blackness. It was some time before you could get used to such darkness, but at last I saw that we had reached a large vault; but I can’t pretend to give details, because I never had a chance of properly making them out, and we were more concerned about the Germans than we were about the fort.

Of course it can be easily understood that owing to the presence of great quantities of ammunition and inflammable stores, only the dimmest lighting was possible--in fact, there was practically no lighting at all except by little portable electric lamps, and as for smoking, that was absolutely off.

The instant we reached the fort we were told that smoking was most strictly forbidden, and that disobedience was punishable by death. The French soldier is as fond as the British Tommy of his smoke, but it is a remarkable thing that in the darkness of the fort we didn’t feel the want of smoking, which isn’t much of a catch in the pitch darkness. As a matter of fact I had no wish to smoke when we were in the fort, so I was never tempted to run the risk of being shot.

Cooking, like smoking, was out of the question, for you can no more smoke with safety in a magazine like that than you can in a coal-mine--a spark is enough to do tremendous mischief, let alone a fire; so our rations had to be brought to us by the Army Service Corps, though they, with their carts, were a long way off.

The A.S.C. chaps were splendid all through, and the men in the fighting line owe a lot to them.

In this black dungeon, with such cunning Germans about, a sentry’s challenge was a good deal more than a formality; but it nearly became one when the welcome commissariat man arrived. But for his coming we should have had to fall back on our emergency rations. These were good, of their kind, but they can’t compare with the best efforts of the A.S.C.

But I’m getting off the track a bit. In the side of the vault, or cavern, there was a low, shallow dug-out which was meant to hold a rifleman lying at full stretch. This was something like a small cubicle in size and shape, and to enter it in the darkness was a proper problem. After a try or two, however, you got into the way of stumbling comfortably into it. By crouching and creeping, and using your hands and knees, you could secure a position from which it was fairly easy to draw yourself up into the dug-out. I dwell on this because I think it is important, seeing that four of us took two-hour watches throughout the twenty-four hours, so that getting to and from such a dug-out becomes an event in your daily life.

At one end of the dug-out was a loophole for a rifle or a maxim-gun, and here we patiently waited for those pests, the snipers. These German potters gave us no rest; but many a German who thought he was well hidden got the finishing touch from one of our loopholes.

This was thrilling fighting, especially when things became hot, and we manned all the loopholes in the fort, to the number of four, and at a pinch we could use two maxims at each. There were fourteen of us in the fort altogether, four officers and ten men. The orders, being in French, sounded very strange at first, but to my surprise, I soon fell into the way of understanding what was said around me, certainly so far as ordinary little things were concerned. I shall never forget the French for water so long as I remember the thirst I had in the black depths of the fort.

The life in the fort was one of the strangest parts of the whole of the fighting. It was queer enough to be in France, fighting with the French, but a good deal queerer to be living in one of the big famous French forts which the Germans were trying to pound to bits with their enormous siege guns. But we soon settled down and got fairly well used to the sound of the fort’s guns and the row of the German artillery and the crashing of the shells around us.

We were told off into parties in the fort, each party being commanded by a non-commissioned officer, who used to light the way for us with an electric lamp that he carried in front of him, hung round his neck.

We ate and drank and slept with the French gunners, and taken altogether we were very comfortable, and were spared something of the awful noise of the firing, for when the guns of the forts were fired the noise was worse than thunderbolts, and everything about was shaken in the most extraordinary manner.

The Germans were mad to get at us and they shot tons and tons of shells at us, and time after time made efforts to storm the forts and Lille itself. In these attempts they lost immense numbers of men, and when we got outside of the fort we saw the dead bodies of the Germans lying about in thousands--so thick on the ground were they that we had to clamber over them as best we could.

Our own fort was pretty lucky, but the next one to us was very badly damaged, huge holes being made where the monster shells got home, and most of the defenders of the fort being wiped out. The German big guns certainly did a vast amount of mischief against forts--so the Germans will know what to expect when our own big guns get to work on forts in Germany.

It was soon clear that it would not be possible to hold on at Lille for long, because we were so hopelessly outnumbered. The fight went on, day and night, for a full week, and the Germans bombarded everything.

On Sunday, October 4th, there was some desperate fighting in the streets of the town and the outskirts. German troops were rushed up in armoured trains and motors, but when it came to hand-to-hand fighting they were not much good, and on the Monday they were driven away with heavy loss.

We had a few goes at them with the bayonet, and that charging was very hard work. It had to be done in short rushes of about a hundred yards, but we could not get near enough to them to give the bayonet a fair chance. In that respect it was the same old story--the Germans would not face the steel. In anything like equal numbers they can’t stand up against a charge. They would mostly run for it, firing at us over their shoulders as they bolted, but not doing a great deal of mischief that way. When they could run no more and saw that the game was up, they would throw away their rifles and surrender, and we then brought them in.

Before the fighting began, and while it was going on, a good many of the inhabitants got into a panic and fled to Boulogne and Calais; but the French troops held out gamely, and on the Tuesday a fearful lot of execution was done amongst the masses of Germans by the French artillery fire. Neither the German guns nor the infantry could make a stand against this onslaught, and at this time the German losses were particularly heavy, hundreds of men falling together. At the end of that part of the battle the Germans for the time being were completely routed, and they were driven back a good dozen miles.

The Durhams suffered greatly in the fighting, and the good old West Yorkshires, who had seen a lot of hard work with us, had been badly cut up too. Some splendid help was given by the little Gurkhas, who had joined the British; but unfortunately I was not able to see much of what they did, because soon after they appeared with their famous knives I got my wound.

Some of the most exciting and dangerous work was done at night, when we tried to get at the Germans with the bayonet and rout them out of their trenches and positions. We had to do everything so quietly--creep out of the forts, creep along the ground, and creep up to the enemy as near as we could get, and sometimes that was not very close, because of such things as barbed wire entanglements.

These entanglements were particularly horrible, because they were so hard to overcome and tore the flesh and clothing. At first we had a pretty good way of destroying them, and that was by putting the muzzles of our rifles on the wire and blowing it away; but there were two serious drawbacks to that trick--one was that it was a waste of ammunition, and the other was that the noise of the firing gave us away, and let the Germans loose on us with guns and rifles.

We soon got too canny to go on with that practice, and just before I was wounded and sent home a very ingenious arrangement had been fixed to the muzzle of the rifle for wire-cutting--a pair of shears which you could work with a swivel from near the trigger, so that instead of putting the muzzle of the rifle against the wire, you could cut it by using the pliers.

It was in one of these night affairs that I was nearly finished as a soldier. I was ordered to join a reconnoitring party. We got clear of the fort, and made our way over the country for about a mile. We were then in a field which had been harvested and harrowed, so that it was pretty hard ground to go over. In spite of it all we were getting on very nicely when the Germans got wind of our movements and opened a terrible fire with rifles and maxims.

We lost a lot of men, and where a man fell there he had to lie, dead or living.

Suddenly I fell plump on the ground, and found that I could not get up again, though I did my best to keep up with my chums. Then I felt an awful pain in my thigh and knew that I was hurt, but I must have been struck five minutes before I fell, by a bullet from a German rifle. It had gone clean through my right thigh. They told me afterwards that I had had a very narrow shave indeed; but a miss is as good as a mile.

I knew there was nothing for it but pluck and patience, so I made the best of things, and waited till the day broke and brought the battalion stretcher-bearers,

who always came out just about dawn to collect the wounded.

I was lying on the ground, in a sort of ditch, for six hours before I was picked up by the stretcher-bearers and carried to a stable which was being used as a temporary hospital.

The Germans fired on the wounded as they were being carried off in the grey light, but they didn’t hit me again.

I lay in the stable for about eight hours, waiting for the ambulance, which took me to the rail-head, and then I was put in a train and taken to Rouen--and that travelling was simply awful, because the French trains jolt like traction-engines.

All the same, I had a pleasant voyage to Southampton, and hoped that I might be sent to a hospital near home, but I was too ill to go a long journey to the north, so I was taken to Woolwich, and afterwards sent here, to the Royal Hospital at Richmond, where everybody is kindness itself, and can’t do enough for you, it seems.

I’ve had a month in bed, so far, but I’m hoping to be out of it soon and hobbling about.