World War, 1914-1918 -- Campaigns -- Western Front; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
The "show" (as our men call it) near Le Transloy yesterday was more than
a raid--those daily in-and-out dashes which are doing most deadly work
along our line. It was an attack for the definite purpose of gaining an
important bit of ground on the slope which goes down to the ruined
village and of driving the enemy out of some strong points. The interest
of it, involving the capture of six officers and 352 men of picked
regiments, is the way in which we caught the enemy utterly by surprise
and the rapid, easy way in which the whole operation was done. A touch
which seems fantastic came at the end of the adventure when these young
Germans, still breathless with the amazement of their capture, were
bundled into omnibuses which had been brought up near the lines to wait
for them--the old London omnibuses which used to go "all the way to the
Bank--Bank--Bank!" in the days before the world began to crack--and
taken to their camp on our side of the battlefields.
It was a grim, cold morning--piercingly cold, with a wind cutting like a
knife across the snowfields. Not a morning when men might be expected to
go out into the nakedness of No Man's Land. It was a morning when these
German officers and men of the 119th and 121st Regiments, the
Würtembergers of Königin Olga, were glad to stay down in the warmth of
their dug-outs, cooking coffee on the little stove with which each man
of these favoured troops was provided, to the great envy of Bavarians on
their right, who go on shorter rations and fewer comforts. They had some
good dug-outs in and near the Sunken Road--which runs up from Morval to
Le Transloy, and strikes through a little salient in front of our
lines--till yesterday morning. The trenches on either side of the Sunken
Road were not happy places for Würtembergers. For months past our guns
had been pounding them so that they were mostly battered down, and only
held here and there by little groups of men who dug themselves in. There
was no wire in front of them, and here during the wet weather, and now
during the great frost, the German troops (as we know from the prisoners
to-day) suffered badly from trench-feet and stomach troubles, and in
spite of their moral (they were all stout-hearted men) from what the
French call the "cafard," and we call the "hump."
[Illustration: Map of the Bapaume Sector]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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