World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, British
He was a very nice gentleman and the first officer to go down. When he
fell Lieutenant N. B. Dennison, the brigade machine-gun officer, took
charge. He volunteered to take over the gun, and was either killed or
wounded. Then Lieutenant Unett, the well-known gentleman jockey, crawled
on his stomach to the first line of the trenches, with some men,
dragging a machine-gun behind them. They got this gun into the very
front of the line of the trenches, then opened fire on the Germans with
disastrous effect. Lieutenant Unett was wounded and lay in the open all
the time.
This gallant deed was done between twelve noon and one o’clock, and I
was one of the few men who saw it. I am glad to be able to pay my humble
tribute to it.
There was a battery of the Royal Field Artillery on our left rear, about
800 yards behind the front line of trenches. Our gunners had such
excellent range on the Germans that the German gunners were finding them
with high explosive shell. It was mostly those shells that were dropping
on them till they got the range and killed the gunners. There were only
about five who were not either killed or wounded. The officer was
wounded; but in spite of that he carried a wounded man round the bottom
of the hill, then went back and fetched another man and repeated the
journey until he had taken every one of the five away. After that he
returned, picked up a spade and smashed the sights of the gun and made
it useless. We heard some time afterwards that he had been killed.
This brave deed was witnessed by most of us who were in the front line
of trenches.
When the German guns were got into position in front of us and the
Germans tried their hardest to blow us out of our trenches, they
searched for our artillery and, failing to discover it, they grew more
determined than ever to rout us out of the place from which we were
doing deadly damage.
In spite of the heavy losses around us we held on, and all the more
stubbornly because we expected every moment that the French would come
up and reinforce us. The French were due about four o’clock, but owing
to some accident they did not arrive, and it seemed as if nothing could
save us.
There was a falling off in our artillery fire, and it was clear that one
of our batteries had been put out of action. And no wonder, for the
German guns were simply raining shells upon us. The Germans at that time
were sticking to the dense formations which had been their practice
since the war began--and they hurled themselves forward in clouds
towards the 37th Field Battery.
So furiously did they rush, so vast were their numbers, and so certain
were they that they had the guns as good as captured, that they actually
got within a hundred yards of the battery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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