THE GREAT PUSH - An Episode on the Western Front during the Great War E-Book

Patrick Macgill

• Herausgeber: Abela Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

By 1915 the trenches of the Western Front were in different states of repair, including the captured trenches, which had all but been destroyed as a result of shell fire. The countryside and villages were a scene of utter devastation, nothing but mud and mounds of rubble where communities and fields of wheat had once stood.The main battles during 1915 were Ypres, French Flanders, Artois, Aisne, Champagne and Vosges. During September and October 1915 an attack by French and British forces from Vimy Ridge to La Bassée, was called the Artois-Loos Offensive or the Third Battle of Artois.This novella by Patrick Macgill, the 5th of 20, is based on his experiences in the trenches of Loos during this period, which resulted in arguably his best book on World War One. A classic of war literature, The Great Push could be considered autobiographical in nature and is nevertheless a passionate and compelling book which describes the fear, resilience, humour and fatalism of those who fought in the raw edge of one of the most terrifying wars ever to have been waged.MacGill had somehow penned all but the last two chapters in the trenches of Loos before being wounded. He wrote the last two chapters while recovering in hospital in the latter part of 1915.===============Patrick Macgill 1889 – 1963, was an Irish journalist, poet and novelist, known as "The Navvy Poet" because he had worked as a navvy before he began writing. During the First World War, MacGill served with the London Irish Rifles (1/18th Battalion, The London Regiment) and was wounded at the Battle of Loos on 28 October 1915. He was recruited into Military Intelligence, and wrote for MI 7b between 1916 and the Armistice in 1918. During his lifetime he penned 20 novels, 5 volumes of poetry and 2 plays. 

Leseprobe

THE GREAT PUSH

An Episode During The Great War

BY

PATRICK MACGILL

Originally printed by

HERBERT JENKINS LIMITEDLONDON S.W. MCMXVI

Resurrected by

ABELA PUBLISHING

LONDON MMXVII

The Great Push

Typographical arrangement of this edition

© Abela Publishing 2017

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Abela Publishing

London

United Kingdom

2017

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DEDICATION

TOMARGARET

If we forget the Fairies,

And tread upon their rings,

God will perchance forget us,

And think of other things.

When we forget you, Fairies,

Who guard our spirits' light:

God will forget the morrow,

And Day forget the Night.

INTRODUCTION

The justice of the cause which endeavours to achieve its object by the murdering and maiming of mankind is apt to be doubted by a man who has come through a bayonet charge. The dead lying on the fields seem to ask, "Why has this been done to us? Why have you done it, brothers? What purpose has it served?" The battle-line is a secret world, a world of curses. The guilty secrecy of war is shrouded in lies, and shielded by bloodstained swords; to know it you must be one of those who wage it, a party to dark and mysterious orgies of carnage. War is the purge of repleted kingdoms, needing a close place for its operations.

I have tried in this book to give, as far as I am allowed, an account of an attack in which I took part. Practically the whole book was written in the scene of action, and the chapter dealing with our night at Les Brebis, prior to the Big Push, was written in the trench between midnight and dawn of September the 25th; the concluding chapter in the hospital at Versailles two days after I had been wounded at Loos.

Patrick MacGill.

CONTENTS

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION

THE GREAT PUSH

CHAPTER I In the Advance Trenches

CHAPTER II Out from Nouex-les-Mines

CHAPTER III Preparations for Loos

CHAPTER IV Before the Charge

CHAPTER V Over the Top

CHAPTER VI Across the Open

CHAPTER VII Germans at Loos

CHAPTER VIII How my Comrades Fared

CHAPTER IX At Loos

CHAPTER X A Night in Loos

CHAPTER XI Loos

CHAPTER XII Retreat

CHAPTER XIII A Prisoner of War

CHAPTER XIV The Chaplain

CHAPTER XV A Lover at Loos

CHAPTER XVI The Ration Party

CHAPTER XVII Michaelmas Eve

CHAPTER XVIII Back at Loos

CHAPTER XIX Wounded

CHAPTER XX For Blighty

THE GREAT PUSH

CHAPTER IIn the Advance Trenches

Now when we take the cobbled road

We often took before,

Our thoughts are with the hearty lads

Who tread that way no more.

Oh! boys upon the level fields,

If you could call to mind

The wine of Café Pierre le Blanc

You wouldn't stay behind.

But when we leave the trench at night,

And stagger neath our load,

Grey, silent ghosts as light as air

Come with us down the road.

And when we sit us down to drink

You sit beside us too,

And drink at Café Pierre le Blanc

As once you used to do.

The Company marched from the village of Les Brebis at nightfall; the moon, waning a little at one of its corners, shone brightly amidst the stars in the east, and under it, behind the German lines, a burning mine threw a flame, salmon pink and wreathed in smoke, into the air. Our Company was sadly thinned now, it had cast off many—so many of its men at Cuinchy, Givenchy, and Vermelles. At each of these places there are graves of the London Irish boys who have been killed in action.

We marched through a world of slag heaps and chimney stacks, the moonlight flowing down the sides of the former like mist, the smoke stood up from the latter straight as the chimneys themselves. The whirr of machinery in the mine could be heard, and the creaking wagon wheels on an adjoining railway spoke out in a low, monotonous clank the half strangled message of labour.

Our way lay up a hill, at the top we came into full view of the night of battle, the bursting shells up by Souchez, the flash of rifles by the village of Vermelles, the long white searchlights near Lens, and the star-shells, red, green and electric-white, rioting in a splendid blaze of colour over the decay, death and pity of the firing line. We could hear the dull thud of shells bursting in the fields and the sharp explosion they made amidst the masonry of deserted homes; you feel glad that the homes are deserted, and you hope that if any soldiers are billeted there they are in the safe protection of the cellars.