RECOUNTS OF WWI: PVT. WALTER HARE

"Some of our chaps were dropping down at the side of me, but I kept going and jumped into the German trench.

There were about twenty of us left...and there was one officer. And after we'd been there some time he says, "...you can prepare -- we're going to attack the wood."

But by that time there was a corporal from a different regiment he'd got mixed up with and said, "We're not going up there, sir."

"This is an order!" The officer replied.

"I don't care, sir. I'm not going up there."

The officer said "When you get out, I'll report you to be court martialed."

The corporal replied: "None of us will get out if we go there."

The officer said, "...well fix your bayonets!"

The corporal exclaimed: "You can't -- you can't fight machine guns with with bayonets."

The officer went off on his own, and I never saw him again.

We stayed there all that day and that following night. No food, no water, getting short on ammunition. On the third day, one of our chaps from headquarters came forward to us and he said: "I'm bringing orders for you. You've got to retire to the trenches you left, as best you can. Get back as best you can."

So we did, one at a time, we dodged off back and got through this wire and back to our trench.

So we finished up there, where we left. I think there were two hundred and thirty odd casualties, and we never gained a yard of ground. We never gained the wood of course, and the stupid part was, we could have taken that wood later on, the Germans left it, we could have got it without firing a shot.

The trouble was that the people who gave these orders -- for the attacks -- were in a chateau ten miles behind the line. They'd never been to the trenches, they didn't know...what the conditions were like.

...I've always said, if some of these generals had spent one day in the front line with us, they wouldn't have been so keen on looking at a map and saying, "Oh there's a wood here -- we'll attack this."

– Private Walter Hare, 16th Bn, West Yorkshire Regt., Bois de Rossignol, Hébuterne, France, Feb. 1917