It is unclear how or when Michael McAuliffe was killed on 11 April 1917. The Battalion suffered heavy casualties from the advance and capture of the village of Monchy le Preux, near Arras. The Official History mentions how ‘the 13/Rifle Brigade has suffered heavily and had been broken up into small bodies. The remnants of this battalion were finally established in a trench on the north-west outskirts’.

Many casualties were also sustained from a concentrated ‘box barrage’ of artillery fire which was laid down on the village by the Germans. By this stage the village was full of cavalry troops and horses (10th Hussars, 3rd Dragoons and Essex Yeomanry). The effect of high explosive in the confines of the village is vividly described by Alan Thomas, a Lieutenant in the 6th Queen’s Own (Royal West Kent Regiment) in his book A Life Apart. Thomas’s battalion was one of those sent to relieve 37th Division troops in Monchy on 11/12 April.

“As we turned the bend of the road to go up the hill, I stopped. The sight that greeted me was so horrible that I almost lost my head. Heaped on top of one another and blocking up the roadway for as far as one could see lay the mutilated bodies of our men and their horses. These bodies, torn and gaping, had stiffened into fantastic attitudes. All the hollows of the road were filled with blood.

This was the cavalry. As I learnt afterwards, when our horsemen had gathered in Monchy the German had put down a box barrage round the place – the four sides of the barrage gradually drawing inwards. The result of this shooting lay before me.

Nothing that I had seen before in the way of horrors could be even faintly compared with what I saw around me now. Death in every imaginable shape was there for the examining.

I walked up the hill, picking my way as best I could and often slipping in the pools of blood, so that my boots and the lower parts of my puttees were dripping with blood by the time I reached the top. Nor, I discovered on my way up, were all the men and animals quite dead.”

Sadly, whilst the Battalion war diary notes the deployment of Companies e.g. “I sent up 2 Coys to the 10th Royal Fusiliers and 13th Royal Fusiliers and kept 1 Coy on plateau WEST of MONCHY with 4 Lewis Guns”, it is not clear which companies these are. We know that Michael McAuliffe served with A Company from the following entry in May’s war diary but it is impossible to narrow down that company’s movements for the entire 9-12 April period.

steve hunt