Eyewitness by Garrie Hutchinson Page B

drenching the whole area with gas – with phosgene, ‘Yellow Cross II’, ‘mustard’, ‘sneezing’ and ‘vomiting’ gas.
    Early in the morning of the 24th of April there was a heavy bombardment. Where we were we had few casualties, but the thunder of doom rolled and boomed along the front.
    Mid-morning grew calm. There was an insistent shelling of roads and approaches. Royal Berks. and East Lancs. came by with stretchers. They had been almost annihilated by the weight of metal. They had looked up and seen above them the iron prows of enemy tanks – used here for the first time on the Western Front – then the German masses had rolled like a juggernaut over the remnants of the garrison. The Australian line had held, but the defenders of Villers-Bretonneux had been completely smashed. The town was lost.
    At midday, horses were harnessed to our field-cookers and galloped away. We grumbled at losing our meal, then suddenly became aware that the opposite hill was full of German infantry. Then came orders to stop all stragglers of whatever Allied nationality, and keep them with us. We were not sorry thus to reinforce our weak platoons. The Tommies proved themselves good men that night, and we thanked our stars we had escaped the hell that they had already endured. Nevertheless, we would have preferred Australians.
    We heard one or two guns firing. That was some of the Australian artillery slamming at the enemy over open sights. Their fire and the existence of the long and elaborate Aubigny Line – of which the Germans already possessed the plans – alone appear to have bluffed the enemy from pushing forward then and there. If he had, there was nothing to stop him, except a few gunners. At evening we received orders to proceed to the English sector and retake the town.
    From a chain of hills parallel to the Somme and south of it, an arm reaches out towards the river. Villers-Bretonneux is on a high hill at the biceps, Vaire is the elbow, Hamel is a lump on the wrist. From Villers-Bretonneux alone is there a clear view of Amiens, twelve miles away. With their overwhelming preponderance of artillery, the enemy dominated Amiens, the most vital nerve centre of the front, the most vulnerable part of the Allied spine. It was the point at which the main railway (Calais–Amiens–Paris–Verdun–Belfort) approached most nearly to the battle line. It was the point opposite which the French and British armies joined – always a vital spot, but never so much as now. Moreover, apart from ordinary dangers of a deep enemy penetration, the Germans were here within a few days’ march of the estuary of the Somme near Abbeville, between which and Nieuport all the British armies could be confined and wiped out in detail, leaving the flank of the French in the air, the road to Paris open. Alternatively, the British, flying along the coast from Nieuport to Havre, might perhaps have escaped that trap, and in a concave V retained touch with the French. It is hard to see how; but in any case, that line of retreat was double the distance between the Germans and Paris. Under these circumstances, the best for which we could have hoped was to lose Paris, the Channel ports, and 150 miles of coastline fronting the south of England – and to postpone an utter defeat for a few weeks only.
    A mere embarrassment near Amiens would have been sufficient to put the world in dreadful jeopardy. From Villers-Bretonneux the enemy, if he had decided to stay there, could have rendered the railway at Amiens useless and blown the city to dust – had in fact already begun to do so; for he possessed strong artillery of his own, against which we had a few – relatively very few – light guns and howitzers. But he would not have stayed on the ridge. He would have been in Amiens in two days, had not a handful of Australians flung themselves against a German corps in that black hour.
    The line was stretched to breaking point, like a sheet of rubber into which a