The challenge of the dead : $b A vision of the war and the life of the common soldier in France, seen two years afterwards between August and November, 1920Graham, Stephen
History
The challenge of the dead : $b A vision of the war and the life of the common soldier in France, seen two years afterwards between August and November, 1920
Graham, Stephen
World War, 1914-1918
Hinges now is quietly rebuilding itself and is a little-visited war
hamlet. A memory and shrine of the Festubert fight is the wayside
cemetery with its Gordons and Black Watch and Lancs men. Here lie two
unknown British soldiers of Lancashire regiments and on their temporary
wooden crosses have been nailed metal discs of the Lancastrians with
bright red roses and the words:--"They win or die who wear the rose of
Lancashire." Some devotee of his county has placed this disc on
thousands of the graves of the Lancastrians.
On the evening of the 15th May 1915, 2nd and 6th Gordons, 1st
Grenadiers, 2nd Scots and Borders marched out to the junction of the
roads rue de Bois and rue de l'Epinette, then filed through trenches
held by Indian troops, and reached an allotted storming position west of
"Princes Road." An elaborate time-table had been arranged, and each
unit knew its angle relative to the "gap in the wire" which the
artillery were going to make. At midnight all the troops were in
position. At a quarter past three in the morning Scots Guards and
Borders started up to lead the assault. What a narrow-fronted
concentrated effort it was may be judged by the battalion formation,
which was in eight lines of two platoons each.
One cannot be sure now what trenches each unit filled, but the trenches
are there and it is not difficult to imagine the crush of khaki in the
warm May night, the shrieking and thundering of the bombardment. Three
o'clock in the morning and the rum being doled out and the men poised
and ready for the race of death.
Near the corner of rue de l'Epinette and just before the village of
Richebourg l'Avoué lie three Colonels and a Major side by side--they are
the commanders of the Grenadiers and of the 2nd Border regiment, Major
Kennet the second in command of the 1st Grenadiers, and Colonel
Alexander of a Yorkshire regiment--all four perished at Festubert. The
corner of rue de l'Epinette has now a cottage of wood and bricks with a
cast-iron roof, a bright garden of flowers and beans. Opposite stands a
new estaminet. There is a jolly field of gathered haricots hanging to
dry on ten-foot poles. Once more, iron thorn-bushes of barbed wire each
side of the way, and where the men dug themselves in by the side of the
road--water and reeds. The Indian section has become the Indian
cemetery, and the brave dusky boys of Asian hills have passed away.
Festubert is a little place where the pile of old white stone and cement
which was the village church is higher than the huts which have sprung
up around it. But where are those blossoming orchards through which our
boys charged in the dawn twilight, where are the dead who lay so long
unrecovered in that pitiful no-man's land beyond? Unrecovered then and
irrecoverable now.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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