First World War Front Lines

by Boyd Cable

"...The attack on the wood had begun soon after dawn, and it was no more than 8 a.m. when the Corporal was dropped badly wounded in the advance line of the attack where it had penetrated about four hundred yards into the wood. But it was well into afternoon before he sufficiently woke to his surroundings to understand where he was or what had happened, and when he did so he found the realisation sufficiently unpleasant. It was plain from several indications—the direction from which the shells bursting in his vicinity were coming, a glimpse of some wounded Germans retiring, the echoing rattle of rifle fire and crash of bombs behind him—that the battalion had been driven back, as half a dozen other battalions had been driven back in the course of the ebb-and-flow fighting through the wood for a couple of weeks past, that he was lying badly wounded and helpless to defend himself where the Germans could pick him up as a prisoner or finish him off with a saw-backed bayonet as the mood of his discoverers turned. His left leg was broken below the knee, his right shoulder and ribs ached intolerably, a scalp wound six inches long ran across his head from side to side—a wound that, thanks to the steel shrapnel helmet lying dinted in deep across the crown, had not split his head open to the teeth..."

Kindle Edition

Published June 6, 2015

About the author

Ernest Andrew Ewart (1878-1943) was an Australian author who wrote under the pseudonym Boyd Cable.

Reviews

[Perry Whitford · Rating 3 out of 5]

Boyd Cable was the pseudonym used by Lieutenant-Colonel Ernest Andrew Ewart, a British soldier who fought in the Boer War. This collection of stirring and slightly romanticised short stories are about various exploits of derring-do during WWI. I presume that he served there too, but I can't find anywhere online to corroborate this assumption (he would have been thirty-six years old at the outbreak of hostilities).

As you would expect, there are stories of men going "over the top," in which Cable used all manor of onomatopoeic words to describe the 'vicious little hisses and whutts and sharp slaps and smacks' of the flying bullets.

There were no tanks and aeroplanes in the Boer War, yet Cable did such a good job of describing these technological game changers that I can only conclude that he did participate in WWI in some capacity or other. He took a humorous view of the mythical qualities of combat's newly introduced mechanical terror in 'The Diving Tank',' while 'Down in Hunland' illustrates how easy it must have been to get lost in the mist flying those early aeroplanes with open cockpits where snow could get on the instruments.

Humour is a typically British aid to storytelling, even during war. Cable includes a comic tale of friendly fire from a pair of overzealous anti-aircraft gunners ('An Air Barrage'), as well as an amusing "you lucky bastard" yarn about "the only man in this war that’s been wounded by a elephant.” ('Trench-made Art')

He didn't neglect the non-combatants. There are also vignettes paying tribute to the staff officers with their 'cushy' jobs away from the front ('The Golden Staff'), the Army Service Corps and those in charge of distributing ammunition ('A Roaring Trade'), and the men who took the injured from No Man's Land ('Stretcher-bearers')

To this day we salute them all.