Current Information:

Age-28

50, Seward Road, Hanwell

Honnechy British Cemetery, France

The changes in the front line brought about by the Battle of Cambrai left a salient poking into the German lines around the village of Flesquières. For seven miles it bulged out towards the enemy from Demicourt in the north to Gouzeaucourt in the south, overlooking the German held village of Marcoing at its apex. Before the battle it had been in the German rear and when 63rd Division took over the front there in the middle of December, 1917, it was little more than a line of isolated posts. By the end of the year, nightly working parties had completed a continuous if shallow trench system of three lines but like all salients it was a dangerous place to be. Vulnerable on three sides it was a weak point and an obvious target for the enemy artillery and machine-guns.

The weather here was cold, frosty and snowy on 30th December, 1917 when, at 6.30am, the enemy began an intense and very destructive artillery bombardment along the whole front held by 63rd Division followed a quarter of an hour later by an infantry attack. The German soldiers were clothed in white giving them excellent camouflage against the snow. Nevertheless the first wave of attackers was beaten back or killed in the trenches as the British fire took its toll. But the second wave broke into the communication trenches and began bombing their way along them to the support trenches and when the third wave arrived all the forward positions were submerged with great loss of life among the defenders. Troops in the support trenches launched a counter attack and there followed a day of bitter fighting as they regained some, but not all of their earlier losses.

190 Brigade were holding the northern part of the salient and 7th Royal Fusiliers took the full force of the attack here. The position they held in Eagle Trench was a precarious one being an old German trench with no communication trenches leading back to the support line and even the wire still on the wrong side of the trench. When the attack arrived the companies in the front line were practically wiped out and Eagle Trench was lost. Working along the captured trench the enemy then forced back 4th Shropshire Light Infantry, the left hand battalion of 190 Brigade. In the afternoon, the reserve battalion 28th London (Artists Rifles) were brought up to try to recover the lost ground and at 2.15pm, without the protection of an artillery bombardment they launched their counter attack. Easily picked out against the white background many of them fell victim to the enemy fire and the attack soon went to ground. Just before midnight they rose to the attack again, just at the same time that the Germans also renewed their attack and a  confused, bitter and bloody struggle developed in no-man’s-land. At 2am on 31st December they tried yet again and clawed back a bit more of lost ground, but it was not until the following day that other reserve battalions arrived and the line was stabilised. All units involved in this struggle against what was one of the largest German raids of the war, lost heavily and included in this number was John Edwards of 7th Royal Fusiliers who died from wounds on 2nd January, 1918.