The Big Fight (Gallipoli to the Somme)Fallon, David
History
The Big Fight (Gallipoli to the Somme)
Fallon, David
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, British
But that’s getting somewhat ahead of my story. At five o’clock that
morning reinforcements came to Foster’s Anzacs and my thinned-out
platoons in the form of the Huntingdon Cyclists regiment and two
companies of engineers. You may be sure the Huntingdons weren’t riding
their bicycles over No Man’s Land, but had been impressed as infantry
for this affair. The German fire never let up, but the engineers
blasted temporary trenches for us in No Man’s Land and the Huntingdons
had brought with them an extra number of machine guns. A steadily
moving train of bearers was arriving with sandbags which we were
relieved to substitute for the bodies of our comrades we had used to
shelter us.
Thus with the coming of dawn we faced the German trench not more than
one hundred yards away on something like even terms. And soon we were
topside in advantage, for our shells began to find the German dug-outs
and smash down the barbed-wire defenses the enemy had renewed in the
night. By noon we were back in the German trench from which we had been
driven. And reports from other battalions all along the line began to
tell of similar successes in the attack. By noon the entire German
position had been taken. There were two fierce counter attacks and a
weak one. Then with the arrival of further reinforcements we started in
pursuit of Hans and he fled in panic to the Moquet Farm protection.
I did not want to leave the fight and stuck several hours after Col.
Reynolds, my commandant, had sent me word that I was to return and
that Captain Reed of A Company would be along to relieve my battered
platoons.
By eight o’clock that night, however, my shoulder wounds became angry
with pain and I was weak and chilled. I received word through a
messenger that Captain Reed was within ten minutes of arrival. So I
dropped exhausted into the seat of a field ambulance beside its driver,
the body of the car being crowded with more dangerously wounded men. At
Orvilles I switched to another ambulance and was able again to sit with
the driver. In this I was whisked to a field hospital located in the
captured “Hohenzollern Redoubt,” now well behind our foremost lines.
There the other pieces of shrapnel were removed from my shoulder, the
wound thoroughly cleansed and professionally bandaged.
All this time I never really thought of myself as being out of the
fight and had full intention to return, but the doctors ordered me to
Wimereaux (a charming seashore resort it had been in peace days), and I
remember meeting a professor of English in an Egyptian college whom I
had met while we were training for Gallipoli, who waved to me as I sat
beside the ambulance driver with my arm in fresh white bandages and a
sling. I learned afterward he had arrived in France only the day before
and had been immediately ordered into action.
“Lucky beggar, you Fallon,” he shouted laughingly to me, and indicated
my arm. “What wouldn’t I give for that Blighty!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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