The Front Line
Reading accounts of the battalion's arrival at the Western Front sounds like a slow descent into hell. Remember these people were desperate to get to France and join the fight against "The Hun". What stories they had heard about life in the trenches were presumed to be exaggerations. After 20 months of training, they were desperately naive, but then no amount of training could prepare anyone for what lay ahead of them. Each day in France was another step towards hell. On the train from Marseilles, they saw their first war casualties, men lying on stretchers screaming in agony, limbs missing, flesh hanging off. As they approached the Somme they saw bombed buildings and streets, when they disembarked from the train finally they could hear the war, the low rumble of shelling and sporadic machine gun fire in the distance. Then they'd have marched a little closer to the front and been able to see war in the night sky. Then they marched a little closer, close enough for shells to drop in near by fields. Then they arrived at the front line and only then did they finally start to realise precisely what kind of hell war was.
Each hour that passed would have brought a fresh new experience to each soldier; first the smell of filth and war and rotten corpses just metres into no mans land where it is too dangerous to recover them, then the empty look on the faces of those that had already experienced war and were reduced to soulless automatons waiting to die. Then the first shell to land in the trench, the first person from the battalion to be wounded, the first to die, the first mortar bomb attack. the first gas attack, the death of a superior officer, a friend or a colleague.
Despite all this, there were still certain strong beliefs; they believed that very soon the "big push" would happen and they would defeat the Germans in the opposing trenches; they believed that the endless shelling from their own side was destroying the wire defending those trenches and pummelling those trenches to bits. They believed the words sent to them on the eve of the Big Push when it finally arrived.... "You are about to attack the enemy with far greater numbers than he can oppose to you...You are about to fight in one of the greatest battles of the world...Keep your heads, do your duty, and you will utterely defeat the enemy.".
