A panorama of Loretto Heights including part of Vimy Ridge. Notre Dame de Lorette, a pilgrimage site in 1914, stood on the Heights, and was, with Vimy Ridge, part of the high ground seized by German troops in the Race to the Sea after the Battle of the Marne. French commander Joffre hoped to capture Loretto Heights and Carency, a village the Germans had fortified, in the First Battle of Artois in December, 1914.
Panorama der LorettohöhePanorama of Loretto HeightsReverse:Message dated June 25, 1916, and field postmarked the next day by the Fourteenth Reserve Corps.
"Cursing, grumbling, complaining, each one of us marched along, dragging himself forward as best he could. To arrive where? In gloomy boyaux, full of mud, where we argued with each other over half-collapsed holes which our predecessors had dug. Only the officers had halfway decent shelters at their disposal.A few slabs of sheet metal, some planks placed across the top of the trench and covered with earth, would have been enough to give us a shelter, if not comfortable, at least sufficient to protect us from the glacial wind and the downpours. But no. There, like practically everywhere else, nothing had been planned for, nothing had been ordered, by some colonel or other or by Generalissimo Joffre, to shelter the human cattle against the bad weather."
Extract from the notebooks of French Corporal Louis Barthas whose reserve unit was moving into reserve trenches near Neuville-Saint-Vaast on October 28, 1915. The men had taken part in the Third Battle of Artois, part of the great autumn Anglo-French offensive of 1915 and, since its suspension, had been trained in grenade throwing (much of by throwing rocks) to harass the Germans through the coming winter. Boyaux are communication trenches.
Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918 by Louis Barthas, page 131, copyright © 2014 by Yale University, publisher: Yale University Press, publication date: 2014
1915-10-28, 1915, October, Barthas, Neuville-Saint-Vaast, Artois
