THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND AFTER
By 1916, the men who fought in the trenches knew the full horror of twentieth-century warfare. The bloodiest engagement was the Battle of the Somme, really a series of battles, fought between July 1916 and the end of the year. Huge hordes of men flung themselves against the entrenched positions of armed masses. The histories of most of the battalions which fought in what used to be known as the Great War have been written up. The description which L. B. Oatts gives in his book The Highland Light Infantry, of what happened to some of the Glasgow men was more or less the common experience of all British regiments in France at that time.
The Glasgow Highlanders lost four hundred and twenty one all ranks at High Wood, but fought on until within six weeks their casualties had mounted to thirty-three officers and seven hundred and fifty men, which was just about all they had. They were reinforced by three hundred and fifty-five men drawn from other Scottish regiments, of whom some were young, some rather old, and some were just out of hospital. But they went on fighting, day after day, week after week, in conditions which the devil himself could scarcely improve in hell. . . . By the autumn, the battlefield had become such a sea of mud that men and animals were sometimes swallowed up in it; but there was still no let-up, although when the Battle of the Ancre had commenced in November, it had begun to snow. Struggling though snow and sleet, the 16th and 17th H.L.I. advanced together against the Redan Ridge at dawn-November eighteenth. The whole of the 17th and the right company of the 16th were decimated by machine guns and rifle-fire. But the survivors pressed on into the German Munich and Frankfurt trenches, overcame all resistance with the bayonet, and sent back fifty prisoners. Attacks on either side having failed, the remnants of the 17th H.L.I., about one hundred men under a sergeant major, then became isolated in the Frankfurt trench, which they held for eight days. At the end of it there were only fifteen left, who were then taken prisoner because they had become so weak from lack of food that they could no longer stand up.
more to follow ........soon
