Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 257
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[Page 257]
127
The attack had been a complete success, without very heavy casualties. A number of decorations were approved, and I was awarded a Military Cross for my part in the offensive. After being relieved by another battalion we had a good rest in the back-of-the-line billets. I slept deeply for fourteen hours, having had no more than an hour's fitful slumber for three days and nights.
For the remainder of the Summer the Western Front relapsed back into static trench warfare, and our Division was in various sectors between Messines and Ypres. They were rather uneventful days excepting that on one long hot afternoon in front of Wytschaete, my Company was shelled continuously for six hours in newly dug trenches by two batteries of German artillery. The two lines of front trenches were, more or less, thirty yards apart, about two hundred yards long, and sheltered nearly two hundred men. Though at least three hundred shells were fired at us, not a man was hit and the trenches were struck only in four or five places. We could detect "lanes" in the firing, and also lulls when the range was increased or decreased to concentrate on one line of trench at a time, during which we would scuttle into the other trench: but what really saved us was the softness of the ground and the stupidity of the Germans in not concentrating one battery on one line of trench.
In the early Autumn we were moved farther north into the Ypres Salient and participated in the Third Battle of Ypres, the main objective of which was to take the Passchendaele Ridge and overrun the open country beyond it, to the coast. A bloody but successful battle had been fought by English units to capture Zonnebeke, in appallingly wet weather. The shelling on both sides had been extremely intensive, and the terrain which had been a prehistoric swamp became a vast quagmire of mud and water-filled shell holes, between which narrow duckboards led up to the front. To walk clear of them was to risk sinking to the knees, and often the suction dragged the thigh-length rubber boots off one's legs. To walk about in this morass