Chapter 54: Strangling The British Army’s Main Artery
December 24, 1914, 7:30 p.m.
The snow that had briefly stopped a couple of days ago began falling again gradually from noon today, growing heavier, with the sound of the snowstorm covering most of the surrounding noises, returning heaven and earth to a vast white expanse.
“If I hadn’t transmigrated to the war era, back in my previous life on Christmas Eve with weather this good, I would’ve definitely arranged some white school romantic encounter…”
Lelouch looked at the snow that lingered unmelted on his leather gloves, and thinking that his first Christmas Eve after transmigrating would be spent in a trench, he couldn’t help but feel a surge of anger inside. Tonight, he was determined to kill a few more Indians to vent his rage.
These leather gloves were ones he had ordered from a company that made military uniforms when he was in Munich, along with camouflage uniforms and work boots—the bolt weight on the first batch of MP15 submachine guns hadn’t been adjusted yet, better light than heavy. There was serious blowback flame and smoke during rear ejection, and without gloves, hands would get burned.
These gloves were very well made, with good material selection, the leather thin and elastic to avoid fingers being too thick to fit into the trigger guard after putting them on. But soldiers still complained a bit during normal times, always feeling they weren’t as handy as going barehanded.
But with the sudden heavy snow and sharp drop in temperature today, the advantage of soldiers wearing leather gloves immediately became apparent.
These submachine gunners were all in high morale, having downed a couple shots of whiskey and smoked a cigar before battle, just waiting for the order from above to launch the charge.
Meanwhile, in the enemy trenches opposite, who knew how many soldiers from South Asian tropical regions were shivering and huddling from the cold.
Even though quartermasters had issued cotton jackets, they couldn’t withstand such harsh cold. Plus, none of the South Asian soldiers had gloves, and some had even lost fingertips to frostbite—some South Asian soldiers had kept their fingers on the steel triggers of their rifles in the extreme cold.
After leaving them there too long, trying to remove them would tear off at least a layer of skin and flesh with a pull, and the unlucky ones would lose a whole finger joint. It was just like licking an iron railing in the Northeast winter.
After so many such cases, soldiers no longer dared to patrol or stand guard holding their rifles; they all tossed their guns in trench corners and shrank their hands into their sleeves.
Add to that the Canadian soldiers and South Asian soldiers not getting along, eyeing each other with disdain—one side wanting the other to do more work, the other feeling bullied. The overall morale of the British colonial army was dismally low, and management chaotic to an astonishing degree.
Lord Canna and all his men were holed up in Stenford City for warmth, celebration, and Christmas Eve dinner. The open defense line around the city outskirts was left entirely to South Asian soldiers for patrolling.
From 5 to 5:30 p.m., the German Army conducted half an hour of intense bombardment fire preparation, but as usual, no ground assault followed, so the defenders assumed it was just routine bombardment for show.
No one even bothered to repair the defense facilities bombed out along the line; everyone figured that even if repaired, they’d be blown apart again in over 4 hours, so better wait till dawn tomorrow—anyway, the enemy wouldn’t really attack.
……
“It’s 7:30! Execute the infiltration order as planned!”
Right on time, Major Bock and Major Rundstedt immediately issued orders; each assault battalion split off two companies, dispersing by platoon in small groups to infiltrate forward.
The German Army’s chosen assault points weren’t directly facing Stenford City either, but as usual, bypassing from the west side suburbs, attempting to swing halfway around to cut off Stenford and the railway line to the rear, without hoping to sneak in and siege the city directly under cover of darkness.
No bombardment fire preparation—just sneaking up in the dark like this.
Lelouch’s company was also in the first wave assault sequence, with Platoon Leader Model as the spearhead, leading two platoons in the charge.
Platoon Leader Dieter led the other two platoons, mainly with light machine guns, providing support from the second line.
Lelouch stayed back with Schweinsteiger guarding the radio, with over a dozen grenade launcher teams gathered nearby, ready to provide fire support to the comrades at the forefront anytime.
After the Battle of Bailleul a few days ago, everyone acknowledged: Officer Lelouch had a real talent for commanding artillery and grenade launcher troops. He graduated from architecture department, excelling especially in math—geometry in particular—and physics too.
It wasn’t that his aiming was super precise, but he always maximized any temporary favorable weather and terrain conditions that arose, creating advantages on the spot.
This afternoon, seeing the weather suddenly turn colder, Lelouch had a flash of inspiration and made some small moves—he had hot water brought over and poured into the forward trenches of several pre-selected grenade launcher positions, slightly melting the accumulated snow on the ground.
But the subsequent new snow and harsh cold would quickly refreeze it into a self-leveling ice surface, perfect as a reference plane for the elevation angle when deploying grenade launcher teams.
Never mind how effective this move was in actual combat.
Just his action sparking soldiers’ curiosity, then spreading by word of mouth about the cleverness of the trick, gave the soldiers extra confidence: “Following such a smart officer, we’ll definitely beat those stupid enemies!”
Second Lieutenant Model led groups of submachine gunners dispersing into small units, crawling low in the snow to advance stealthily. Several barbed wire fences encountered en route had been blown open with gaps by repeated noon and afternoon bombardments, and any booby traps that might have been on the barbed wire were completely cleared by the preemptive shelling.
Barbed wire is hard to fully destroy because of its small surface area hit. If the defenders had repaired diligently, restringing sections right after bombardment, they could easily plug the gaps.
But who told them they thought Christmas Eve wouldn’t see an attack, too lazy to repair diligently.
Model only needed to use wire cutters to snip open a few unavoidable spots, and he actually sneaked across the confrontation zone, safely reaching the enemy’s first-line trench.
“Who goes there? What the hell are you doing in this cold… urgh—”
Several sentries with curry-accented English heard the noise but didn’t react in time. Their hands were still tucked in their sleeves, peering around indifferently, not even grabbing their Lee-Enfield Rifles leaning against the trench wall nearby.
These night sentries were instantly cracked open by entrenching tools, hot brains splattering everywhere. Their screams didn’t even finish before cutting off, muffled by the snowstorm, failing to alert many comrades.
Second Lieutenant Model even personally wielded an entrenching tool in one hand and a C96 Mauser Pistol in the other, hacking down four enemy soldiers from the Lahore Division with the shovel.
His intent was to follow up with the pistol if he missed, but amazingly he chopped four before the fifth one survived a shovel blow, forcing him to execute the backup plan.
With scattered “pop pop” crisp sounds, the positions of the 7th Lahore Division finally started heating up; the German Army’s infiltration assault had been detected.
But when South Asian soldiers tried to drive the enemy from the trenches, they discovered the foes were so powerful, disciplined, fearless, and well-equipped.
The “rat-tat-tat~” of submachine gun bursts soon echoed through several nearby trenches, spanning one or two kilometers, with at least a dozen breakthrough points in crisis.
“Enemy attack! Enemy attack! Organize a counterattack quick!”
“How could there be an enemy attack? We didn’t even hear any bombardment!”
“Where are the enemies?”
Countless South Asian soldiers and a few Britannian overseers rushed toward the troubled defense line. Groups of soldiers fumbled in the dark for rifles tossed in trench corners, even trampling each other in the panic.
Some soldiers lucky enough to grab rifles, in their extreme haste and overforce, stuck to the guns and tore off a layer of skin and flesh!
These rifles had been left out in the icy snow for a long time, thoroughly frozen through.
The German assault teams surged along the trenches, killing fiercely, quickly seizing several communication trench junctions, expanding gains amid the chaos, sending the British Army positions into panic.
“Quick! Don’t stop! Expand the gains while we can, completely tear up the enemy’s defense line!” Model led a large group of submachine gun teams, flowing like mercury to assault the depth.
“Light machine gun teams, don’t stop! Full speed into the trenches, deploy to both sides! Suppress the enemies countercharging to reinforce!” Second Lieutenant Dieter, not far behind him, soon entered the enemy’s front few layers of trench network.
And Second Lieutenant Dieter was very smart too, immediately having light machine guns set up laterally along the trenches to control each junction.
In the dark chaos, enemies didn’t know which positions were lost and which weren’t, so they rushed blindly to reinforce.
When teams of South Asian infantry turned trench corners into segments clearly already lost but unknown to them, the German light machine guns would teach them a lesson.
“Rat-tat-tat-tat—” Spitting licking tongues of flame mowed down teams of South Asian soldiers marching in column along the trenches without warning, blood flowing along the trench, turning it into a bloody channel.
The British Army’s heavy machine gun firepoints weren’t giving in either, spraying wildly into the dark ahead, venting their unease, keeping the assault teams at bay. But these blindly exposed firepoints soon faced suppression from German assault team grenade launchers.
“Whoosh whoosh,” grenades arced high and relatively accurately into trench junctions, landing on tamped-earth pillbox tops spitting flames, blasting fire support points sky-high.
The sector of the 7th Lahore Division soon fell into massive chaos.
Its division headquarters was quickly jammed by galloping mounted couriers, various conflicting bad news and enemy reports momentarily stunning the command system.
Division Commander Walter Betting Major General had been sleeping, suddenly jolted awake by the flood of messages, momentarily confused about the situation.
South Asian divisions were smaller than homeland ones, with only 12 battalions and 12,000 men per division. To ensure combat effectiveness, Britannians didn’t dare use all native South Asians, often mixing in a third colonial whites—four battalions of whites.
But on Christmas Eve, most whites in the Lahore Division had drunk some, even sneaking off to celebrate. Major General Betting could hastily muster only one or two thousand white soldiers.
He could only grit his teeth and hope these whites could control the situation, preventing the collapse from spreading.
But these numbers weren’t even more than the two assault battalions on Lelouch’s side, and far inferior in elite quality.
This firefighting team meant to plug the leak had just been thrown up when, under light machine gun blockade suppression, it was battered half-crippled and pinned down in the trenches, unable to lift their heads.
Grenades from grenade launchers overhead also fell sporadically, arcing extremely high into the trenches, splashing up showers of blood.
Major General Walter Betting and several white officers leading at various levels were wounded in succession, after which the troops lost control.
The German Army slaughtered into the positions of the motley Indian mob whose guns they couldn’t even hold steady from cold, like tigers among sheep. Groups of dazed dark-skinned soldiers fled in panic, scattering like birds and beasts.
In merely half the night, the German Army swiftly broke through and tore open several kilometers deep into the positions, infiltrating from west Stenford City suburbs all the way around, cutting the railway line northwest from the city to the rear. This scene was incredibly similar to the previous Battle of Bailleul.
The only difference was that tonight the German Army exploited the enemy’s Christmas Eve complacency, the unimaginably low morale of the South Asian Indian soldiers, and their pathetically weak combat effectiveness. This allowed the British Army to step in the same pit twice.
After the British Army discovered the railway cut, they did try a hasty counterattack to retake the positions.
Soldiers of the 1st and 2nd Canadian Divisions, who had just finished Christmas Eve dinner and were snoring drunk in the city, were roused overnight by officers.
They were made to quickly don uniforms, grab weapons, and launch a counterstrike in the winter night, to retake the positions and railway line lost by the Indians before the enemy could consolidate.
But when Lord Canna organized the assault formation and counterattacked, facing them were German assault battalions already dug in on positions around both sides of the railway, with MG15 light machine gun positions set up.
Due to the night, the German main force couldn’t follow up immediately. They feared mishaps and coordination errors from large-scale night troop movements.
But relying on just two assault battalions to hold the newly seized positions for a few hours was still feasible.
Moreover, Lord Canna’s counterattack didn’t have everyone arriving simultaneously. In such chaos, troops arriving piecemeal to form incremental tactics was perfectly normal.
Groups of Canadians, also untested by battle fire, thus mechanically charged repeatedly against the light machine gun positions, finally piling up stacks of corpses at the front.
Light machine guns with barrels buried in the snow had nearly heavy machine gun sustained fire. Only when the troops’ carried bullets ran out did the German assault battalion have to slightly abandon a small segment of newly seized position, trading space for time.
“Company Commander! Our company’s 32 light machine gun teams have fired all their ammo! The riflemen’s 5-round clips were mostly temporarily fed into the machine gun belts!”
When Lelouch heard this report from his subordinate Dieter, he couldn’t help but feel a headache.
He hadn’t expected these Canadians to be so stubborn! Though lacking combat experience, their courage was decent.
This reminded him of Earth in WWII, when Canadians were sold out by allies, sent to a probing landing just to die and silence them—six thousand Canadian soldiers’ lives sold off by the metropole’s politicians.
Unexpectedly in this world, the Canadians’ first battle where the metropole sold them out to teammates fell into his hands.
Lelouch was still unwilling: “A machine gun team has 800-round belts, plus riflemen topping off over a thousand! Not enough? Then borrow from Company Commander Rommel next door!”
Dieter smiled bitterly: “Really not enough! The whole company fired at least 30,000 machine gun bullets! Company Commander Rommel’s machine guns are out too!”
“Too bad, never thought there’d be a day when machine gun bullets ran out forcing contraction!”
Surveying at least a thousand Canadian corpses at the front, Lelouch could only sigh in frustration and temporarily pull back a few hundred meters, with submachine gunners providing blocking and rearguard cover.
But fortunately, his core tactical objective was achieved. Tonight’s assault had cut off Stenford and the rear railway line.
The entire British Army in the Ypres Highlands salient could no longer obtain new supplies by train.
By dawn, when the assault battalions held out, the main force divisions from the rear finally filled the line fully, consolidating and holding all seized positions.
And the Canadians and South Asian soldiers finally gave up counterattacking, thoroughly sealed back by the German Army.
——
PS: If later enemy-breaking methods are similar without novelty in advances, I’ll summarize briefly, no padding, rest assured.
