More shelling during the day, particularly at a battery about 200 yards N of our hd qrs. they got direct hits on all the emplacements and dugouts but did no damage.
At 10.30pm the gas alarm was sounded, and everyone was warned. The guns opened a heavy barrage on our front. I got onto the Borders and Inniskillings and both sent in messages that though they could smell gas it was not being discharged on their front. The Inniskillings message proved to have been a mistake on the part of the signallers. On this information I stopped the guns firing on our front. Fuller & Mellor were up regulating the transport & came in to our hd qrs. After about 20 minutes we began to smell gas in Ypres so we all put our helmets on, but it never got really bad, occasionally getting thicker and then dying away. The relief of the two reserve battns went on at the prison and on the canal bank and they hardly felt its effects at all. At 12 midnight everything seemed to be over so I went to bed. The prepared blankets over all the doors and windows kept the gas out of the dugouts quite effectively.
Brigadier General CHT Lucas was CO of the 87th Brigade on the Somme. An Old Contemptible and Captain in the BEF, he had spent 1915 in the Dardanelles. This blog is made up of his Diary entries and letters written in the Summer of 1916. These are his words, published on the corresponding day as when they were written in 1916. In August 1916 his brigade was withdrawn from the Somme and deployed to the Ypres salient.
No comments:
Post a Comment