“Two days before, a quiet room, where Nelson’s Prayer stands on the mantel-shelf, saw the ripening of the plans that sent these sturdy sons of Britain’s four kingdoms marching all through the night.  Sir John French met the army corps commanders and unfolded to them his plans for the offensive of the British army against the German line at Neuve Chapelle.

“The onslaught was to be a surprise.  That was its essence.  The Germans were to be battered with artillery, then rushed before they recovered their wits.  We had thirty-six clear hours before us.  Thus long, it was reckoned (with complete accuracy as afterwards appeared), must elapse before the Germans, whose line before us had been weakened, could rush up reinforcements.  To ensure the enemy’s being pinned down right and left of the ‘great push,’ an attack was to be delivered north and south of the main thrust simultaneously with the assault on Neuve Chapelle.”

After describing the impatience of the British soldiers as they awaited the signal to open the attack, and the actual beginning of the engagement, the narrator continues: 

“Then hell broke loose.  With a mighty, hideous, screeching burst of noise, hundreds of guns spoke.  The men in the front trenches were deafened by the sharp reports of the field-guns spitting out their shells at close range to cut through the Germans’ barbed wire entanglements.  In some cases the trajectory of these vicious missiles was so flat that they passed only a few feet above the British trenches.

“The din was continuous.  An officer who had the curious idea of putting his ear to the ground said it was as though the earth were being smitten great blows with a Titan’s hammer.  After the first few shells had plunged screaming amid clouds of earth and dust into the German trenches, a dense pall of smoke hung over the German lines.  The sickening fumes of lyddite blew back into the British trenches.  In some places the troops were smothered in earth and dust or even spattered with blood from the hideous fragments of human bodies that went hurtling through the air.  At one point the upper half of a German officer, his cap crammed on his head, was blown into one of our trenches.

“Words will never convey any adequate idea of the horror of those five and thirty minutes.  When the hands of officers’ watches pointed to five minutes past eight, whistles resounded along the British lines.  At the same moment the shells began to burst farther ahead, for, by previous arrangement, the gunners, lengthening their fuses, were ‘lifting’ on to the village of Neuve Chapelle so as to leave the road open for our infantry to rush in and finish what the guns had begun.

“The shells were now falling thick among the houses of Neuve Chapelle, a confused mass of buildings seen reddish through the pillars of smoke and flying earth and dust.  At the sound of the whistle—­alas for the bugle, once the herald of victory, now banished from the fray!—­our men scrambled out of the trenches and hurried higgledy-piggledy into the open.  Their officers were in front.  Many, wearing overcoats and carrying rifles with fixed bayonets, closely resembled their men.