The Irish Guards in the Great War, Volume 1 (of 2)

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY EMERY WALKER LTD., LONDON

Since the 21st August the Guards Division had been well employed. Its 2nd Brigade, with the Second Division on its right, had captured the Ablainzevelle-Moyenneville spur; and the Second Division had taken Courcelles. By the night of the 23rd, when the 3rd Guards Brigade relieved the 2nd, and the Second Division had captured Ervillers on the Arras-Bapaume road, the Guards Division, with their 1st Brigade in support, was within half a mile of St. Léger, and in touch with the Fifty-sixth Division on their left, which was trying to work round the head of the Hindenburg Line and turn in from the north. At this point resistance stiffened. The hilly ground, cut and cross-cut with old trenches and the beginnings of new ones, lent itself to the stopping game of well-placed machine-guns equally from round Croisilles, where the Fifty-sixth Division was engaged; from about St. Léger Wood, where the 3rd Guards Brigade, supported by tanks, was renewing its acquaintance with the German anti-tank-rifle; and from Mory, where the Sixty-second Division was delayed by the Division on its right being held up. An enemy balloon or two hung on the horizon and some inquisitive, low-flying aeroplanes hinted at coming trouble. The line expected as much, but they did not seem so well informed farther back.

The Affair of St. Léger

On the 26th August orders arrived that the 1st Guards Brigade would now take up the running from the 3rd, and advance eastward from St. Léger towards Ecoust till opposition was met. There were, of course, refinements on this idea, but that was the gist of it. The 2nd Grenadiers and the 2nd Coldstream would attack, with the Battalion in support. The men were in their trenches by tea-time on the 26th, No. 1 Company in Jewel Trench just east of the entrance to the little Sensée River valley, and the others disposed along the line of Mory Switch, an old trench now only a foot deep. Battalion Headquarters lay in an abandoned German stores dug-out. Final orders did not arrive till after midnight on the 26th, and there was much to arrange and link up between then and seven o’clock, barrage time. The Grenadiers were on the right and the Coldstream on the left of the Battalion, the latter following a quarter of a mile behind, with Nos. 1 and 3 Companies to feed the Grenadiers and Nos. 4 and 2 for the Coldstream. As the front was so wide, they split the difference and kept as close as might be to the dividing line between the two leading Battalions, which ran by Mory Switch and Hally Avenue. The hot day broke with a gorgeous sunrise over a desolate landscape that reeked in all its hollows of gas and cordite. A moment or two after our barrage (field-guns only) opened, the enemy put down a heavy reply, and into the smoke and dust of it the companies, in artillery formation, walked up the road without hesitation or one man losing his place. No. 1 Company leading on the right disappeared at once after they had passed their jumping-off point at Mory Switch. Almost the first shells caught the leading platoon, when Lieutenant J. N. Ward was killed and Lieutenant P. S. MacMahon wounded. As soon as they were clear of the barrage, they came under full blast of machine-gun fire and saw the Grenadiers presently lie down enfiladed on both flanks. Four of our machine-guns tried to work forward and clear out the hindrances, but the fire was too strong. Both battalions were finally held up, and the Grenadiers were practically cut to pieces, with their reserve companies, as these strove to reinforce the thinned line. After what seemed an immense time (two hours or so) Captain Thompson, seeing that, as far as that sector was concerned, the thing was hung up, ordered his men to dig in in support, and they spent till nightfall “recovering casualties”—their own, those of the battalions ahead, and of the Guards Machine-Guns.

No. 3 Company, which followed No. 1, suffered just as heavily from the barrage. Very soon their commander, Captain Joyce, was wounded and Lieutenant H. R. Baldwin killed. Second Lieutenant Heaton, who took over, was gassed in the course of the afternoon, and C.S.M. O’Hara then commanded. There was nothing for them to do either save dig in, like No. 1, behind the Grenadiers, and a little to the right of them.

No. 4 Company, under Captain Hegarty, following the Coldstream, got the worst barrage of all as soon as they were clear of their trenches, and found the Coldstream held up, front and flank, within fifty yards of the sunken road whence they had started. No. 15 platoon of the Irish Guards was almost wiped out, and the remains of it joined with No. 13 to make a defensive flank, while No. 14 crawled or wriggled forward to reinforce the Coldstream, and No. 16 lay in reserve in a sunk road. Sunk roads were the only shelter for such as did not wish to become early casualties.

No. 2 Company (Captain A. Paget) following No. 4 had been held back for a few minutes by the C.O. (Major R. Baggallay) on the fringe of the barrage, to be slipped through when it seemed to lighten. They also launched out into a world that was all flank or support, of battalions which could neither be seen nor found, who were themselves outflanked by machine-guns in a landscape that was one stumbling-block of shallow trenches which suddenly faded out. They crossed the St. Léger-Vraucourt road and bore east, after clearing the St. Léger wood, till they reached the St. Léger reserve trench, and held it from the Longatte road to where it joined the Banks Reserve. Says one record: “At this time, Captain Paget was in ignorance of the success or location of the attacking battalions, and both of his flanks exposed as far as he knew.” The enemy machine-guns were hammering home that knowledge, and one of the platoons had lost touch altogether, and was out in the deadly open. So in the trench they lay till an officer of the Coldstream came over and told Paget the “general situation,” which, unofficially, ran: “This show is held up.” He borrowed a section from No. 5 Platoon to help to build up a flank to guard the east side of St. Léger and vanished among the increasing shell-holes.

Well on in the morning a message arrived from Captain Hegarty, No. 4 Company, that he and his men were on the St. Léger-Vraucourt road and held up like the rest. Captain Paget went over, in the usual way, by a series of bolts from shell-hole to shell-hole, trying to clear up an only too-clear situation. On the way he found a lost platoon, sent it to dig in on the left of No. 2 Company, and also saw the C.O. 2nd Coldstream and explained his own dispositions. They were not made too soon, for in a short time there was an attack on No. 2 Company which came within sixty yards before it was broken up by our small-arm fire. The Germans were followed up as they returned across the Ecoust-Mory ridge by long-range shooting in which, for the sake of economy, captured enemy rifles and ammunition were used.

By this time the whole front was split up into small or large scattered posts in trenches or under cover, each held down by machine-guns which punished every movement. Two Companies (2 and 4) were near the St. Léger Trees, a clump of nine trees on the St. Léger-Ecoust road, mixed up with the Coldstream posts. The other two were dug in behind the Grenadiers on the right. Battalion Headquarters circulated spasmodically and by rushes, when it saw its chance, from one point to the other of the most unwholesome ground. Even at the time, some of its shell-hole conferences struck the members as comic; but history does not record the things that were said by dripping officers between mouthfuls of dirt and gas.

Every battle has its special characteristic. St. Léger was one of heat, sunshine, sweat; the flavour of at least two gases tasted through respirators or in the raw; the wail of machine-gun bullets sweeping the crests of sunken roads; the sudden vision of wounded in still-smoking shell-holes or laid in the sides of a scarp; sharp whiffs of new-spilt blood, and here and there a face upon which the sun stared without making any change. So the hours wore on, under a sense of space, heat, and light; Death always just over the edge of that space and impudently busy in that light.

About what would have been tea-time in the real world, Captain Paget, a man of unhurried and careful speech and imperturbable soul, reported to the C.O., whom he found by the St. Léger Trees, that there were “Huns on his right—same trench as himself.” It was an awkward situation that needed mending before dusk, and it was made worse by the posts of the Coldstream and some Guards Machine-Guns’ posts, as well as those of our No. 4 Company, being mixed up within close range of No. 2. The C.O. decided that if a barrage could be brought to bear on the trench and its rather crowded neighbourhood, No. 2 might attack it. A young gunner, Fowler by name, cast up at that juncture and said it might be managed if the Battalion withdrew their posts round the area. He had a telephone, still uncut, to his guns and would observe their registration himself. The posts, including those of the Guards Machine-Guns, were withdrawn, and Fowler was as near as might be killed by one of his own registering shots. He got his 18-pounders to his liking at last, and ten minutes’ brisk barrage descended on the trench. When it stopped, and before our men could move, up went a white flag amid yells of “Kamerad,” and the Huns came out, hands aloft, to be met by our men, who, forgetting that exposed troops, friend and foe alike, would certainly be gunned by the nearest enemy-post, had to be shooed and shouted back to cover by their officers. The prisoners, ninety of them, were herded into a wood, where they cast their helmets on the ground, laughed, and shook hands with each other, to the immense amusement of our people. The capture had turned a very blank day into something of a success, and the Irish were grateful to the “bag.” This at least explains the politeness of the orderly who chaperoned rather than conducted the Hun officer to the rear, with many a “This way, sir. Mind out, now, sir, you don’t slip down the bank.” They put a platoon into the captured trench and lay down to a night of bursts of heavy shelling. But the enemy, whether because of direct pressure or because they had done their delaying work, asked for no more and drew back in the dark.

When morning of the 28th broke “few signs of enemy movement were observed.” Men say that there is no mistaking the “feel of the front” under this joyous aspect. The sense of constriction departs as swiftly as a headache, and with it, often, the taste that was in the mouth. One by one, as the lovely day went on, the patrols from the companies made their investigations and reports, till at last the whole line reformed and, in touch on either flank, felt forward under light shelling from withdrawing guns. An aeroplane dropped some bombs on the Battalion as it drew near to the St. Léger Trees, which wounded two men and two gunner officers, one of whom—not Fowler, the boy who arranged for the barrage—died in Father Browne’s arms. On the road at that point, where the wounded and dying of the fight had been laid, only dried pools of blood and some stained cotton-wads remained darkening in the sun. Such officers as the gas had affected in that way went about their routine-work vomiting disgustedly at intervals.

Battalion Headquarters, which had nominally spent the previous day in a waist-deep trench, set up office at the St. Léger Trees, and the advance of the Guards Division continued for a mile or so. Then, on a consolidated line, with machine-guns chattering to the eastward, it waited to be relieved. As prelude to their watch on the Rhine, the affair was not auspicious. The Grenadiers, on whom the brunt of the fight fell, were badly knocked out, and of their sixteen officers but four were on their feet. The Coldstream were so weakened that they borrowed our No. 4 Company to carry on with, and the Irish thought themselves lucky to have lost no more than two officers (Lieutenant J. N. Ward and Lieutenant H. R. Baldwin) dead, and six wounded or gassed, in addition to a hundred and seventy other ranks killed or wounded. The wounded officers were Captain W. Joyce; Lieutenants P. S. MacMahon and C. A. J. Vernon, who was incapacitated for a while by tear-gas in the middle of action and led away blinded and very wroth; also 2nd Lieutenants H. A. Connolly, G. T. Heaton, and A. E. Hutchinson.

The Division was relieved on the night of the 28th: the Battalion itself, as far as regarded No. 1 Company, by the 1st Gordons, from the Third Division, Nos. 2 and 4 Companies by another battalion, and No. 3 Company under the orders of the 2nd Grenadiers. They marched back to their positions of the night before the battle “very glad that it was all behind us,” and their shelters of bits of wood and rough iron seemed like rest in a fair land.

On the 29th August, a hot day, they lay in old trenches over the Moyenneville spur in front of Adinfer Wood facing Douchy and Ayette, where “three weeks ago no man could have lived.” They talked together of the far-off times when they held that line daily expecting the enemy advance; and the officers lay out luxuriously in the wood in the evening after Mess, while the men made themselves “little homes in it.”

Next day they rested, for the men were very tired, and on the last of the month the whole Battalion was washed in the divisional baths that had established themselves at Adinfer. But the enemy had not forgotten them, and on the first of September their shelters and tents in the delightful wood were bombed. Six men were injured, five being buried in a trench, and of these two were suffocated before they could be dug out.

Towards the Canal du Nord

And that was all the rest allowed to the Battalion. On the 2nd September the Canadian Corps of the First Army broke that outlying spur of the Hindenburg System known as the Drocourt-Quéant Switch, with its wires, trenches, and posts; and the Fifty-seventh and Fifty-second Divisions, after hard work, equally smashed the triangle of fortifications north-west of Quéant where the Switch joined the System. The gain shook the whole of the Hindenburg Line south of Quéant and, after five days’ clean-up behind the line, the Guards Division were ordered to go in again at the very breast of Hindenburg’s works. No one knew what the enemy’s idea might be, but there was strong presumption that, if he did not hold his defence at that point, he might crack. (“But, ye’ll understand, for all that, we did not believe Jerry would crack past mendin’.”)

The Battalion spent the night of the 2nd September, then, in shelters in Hamel Switch Trench on their way back from Adinfer Wood to the battle. The front had now shifted to very much the one as we held in April, 1917, ere the days of Cambrai and Bourlon Wood. The 1st Guards Brigade were in Divisional Reserve at Lagnicourt, three miles south-west of Ecoust-St.-Mein, where the Battalion had to cross their still fresh battle-field of less than a week back, as an appetizer to their hot dinners. They occupied a waist-deep old trench, a little west of Lagnicourt, and noticed that there was no shelling, though the roads were full of our traffic, “a good deal of it in full view of Bourlon Wood.” Going over “used” ground for the third time and noting one’s many dead comrades does not make for high spirit even though one’s own Divisional General has written one’s own Brigadier, “All battalions of the 1st Guards Brigade discharged their duty splendidly at St. Léger.”

Lagnicourt was shelled a little by a high-velocity gun between the 4th and the 6th of September, and seventeen bombs were dropped on the Battalion, wounding two men.

By all reason there should have been a bitter fight on that ground, and full preparation for it was made. But the enemy, after St. Léger, saw fit to withdraw himself suddenly and unexpectedly out of all that area. For one bewildering dawn and day “the bottom fell out of the front,” as far as the Guards Division was concerned. It is a curious story, even though it does not directly concern the Battalion. Here is one detail of it:

On the 3rd September the 2nd Brigade toiled in from Monchy, in full war-kit, and, tired with the long day’s heat, formed up west of Lagnicourt before dawn, detailed to win, if they could, a thousand yards or so of chewed-up ground. They “went over the top” under a creeping barrage, one gun of which persistently fired short, and—found nothing whatever in front of them save a prodigious number of dead horses, some few corpses, and an intolerable buzzing of flies! As they topped the ridge above Lagnicourt, they saw against the first light of the sun, dump after German dump blazing palely towards the east. That was all. They wandered, wondering, into a vast, grassy, habitationless plain that stretched away towards the Bapaume-Cambrai road. Not a machine-gun broke the stupefying stillness from any fold of it. Yet it was the very place for such surprises. Aeroplanes swooped low, looked them well over, and skimmed off. No distant guns opened. The advance became a route-march, a Sunday walk-out, edged with tense suspicion. They saw a German cooker wrecked on the grass, and, beside it, the bodies of two clean, good-looking boys, pathetically laid out as for burial. The thing was a booby-trap arranged to move our people’s pity. Some pitied, and were blown to bits by the concealed mine. No one made any comment. They were tired with carrying their kit in the sun among the maddening flies. The thousand yards stretched into miles. Twice or thrice they halted and began to dig in for fear of attack. But nothing overtook them and they installed themselves, about dusk, in some old British trenches outside Boursies, four miles and more, as the crow flies, from Lagnicourt! At midnight, up came their rations, and the punctual home-letters, across that enchanted desert which had spared them. They were told that their Brigade Artillery was in place behind the next rise, ready to deliver barrages on demand, and in due course the whole of our line on that sector flowed forward.

The Battalion relieved the 1st Scots Guards in the front line near Mœuvres on the 7th—a quiet relief followed by severe gassing. Here they passed two days in the delicate and difficult business of feeling all about them among the mass of old trenches, to locate enemy’s posts and to watch what points of vantage might offer. The wreckage of the houses round Mœuvres, into which the trenches ran, lent itself excellently to enemy activity; and men played blind-man’s buff round bits of broken walls wherever they explored. Their left was in the air; their right under the care of Providence; and their supports were far off. No. 3 Company (Captain G. L. Bambridge, M.C.), while trying to close a gap between the two front companies (3 and 1) by peaceful penetration with a bombing-party, found enemy in the trench, drove him up it as far as they could, built a barricade, and were then heavily counter-raided by a couple of officers and twenty men whom they ejected after, as the Company justly owned, “a good attempt.” The enemy “attempted” again about midnight on the 8th, when he was bombed off, and again on the afternoon of the 9th in an outlying trench, mixed up with smashed cellars and broken floors, where he captured two unarmed stretcher-bearers and three men who had not been in the line before. Though it does new hands no harm to realize that front-line trenches are not Warley Barracks (and stretcher-bearers, like orderlies, are prey to all the world), still the matter could not be passed over. Our trench-mortars attended vigorously to the enemy posts whence the raid had been launched, and in the afternoon sent a strong patrol to make the outraged trench secure. Later on, a platoon of No. 1 Company got into touch with the battalion (8th King’s) on their left, and took part in a small “bicker,” as it was described, but with no casualties.

They were relieved the same night, though they did not expect it, by the 1/5th Battalion Loyal North Lancs who had not made sure of their route beforehand, and so, in wet darkness, lost their way, failed to meet the guides at the rendezvous, and were heavily shelled. The relief dragged on till well towards dawn, when the battalions straggled off into some drenching trenches without any sort of accommodation. (“The whole thing the most appalling mess and agony I have ever experienced.”) The worst was when a stray light went up and showed the relieved Battalion under pouring rain playing “follow my leader” in a complete circle like caterpillars, in the hopeful belief that they were moving to their destination. They next took the place of the 3rd Guards Brigade in reserve-trenches near Edinburgh Support, where they stayed till the 14th September and were not even once shelled. Salvage and cleaning up was their fatigue—a dreadful job at any time, for the ground was filled with ancient offal as well as new—lost French of ’14 mingled grotesquely with the raw produce of yesterday’s bombing-raid. Yet men’s feelings blunt so by use that they will scavenge yard by yard over the very clay of the pit into which they themselves may at any instant be stamped, nor turn a hair at shapes made last year in their likeness. The Battalion was complimented by its Major-General on the extent and neatness of its dump. No mere campaigning interferes with the Army’s passion for elaborate economies. A little before this, the entire British Expeditionary Force was exhorted to collect and turn in all solder from bully-beef tins and the like. Naturally, the thing became a game with betting on results between corps; but when a dark, elderly, brooding private of the Irish spent three hours stalking a Coldstream cooker with intent to convey and melt it down, every one felt it had gone far enough.

On the 15th September they relieved the 1st Scots Guards in the old trenches west of Lagnicourt. There they managed to put in a little box-respirator drill which at the best is a dry fatigue, but, be it noted with gratitude, “beer was obtained for the men and sent up from transport-lines.” The whole area reeked of the various gases which the enemy were distributing with heavies. They hung in the hollows and were sucked up by the day’s heat, and no time or place was safe from them. Gas-discipline had to be insisted on strongly, for even veterans grow careless of a foe they cannot see; and the new hands are like croupy babies.

On the 17th September they relieved the 2nd Scots Guards in support, and No. 2 Company took over from a company of the Welsh Guards. Their trenches were in what had been the British front line of the old time—Fish Avenue, Sprat Post, Shark Support, Rat and Rabbit Avenue, and so forth.

There was desultory shelling on the morning of the 18th, and heavier work in the afternoon, causing six casualties, and slightly wounding Captain Vernon, Intelligence Officer. Then the silence of preparation for battle falls on the record. It was nothing to the Battalion that on the 18th September the enemy “apparently attacked south of the divisional front along the Bapaume-Cambrai road.” The dead must bury their dead on the Somme. They had their own dispositions to arrange and re-arrange, as men, for one cause or other, fell out and no unit could afford to take chances, with the Hindenburg Line ahead of them. (“An’ we knowin’ we was told off to cross that dirty ditch in front of ’em all.”) Their world, as with every other division, was limited to the Reserves behind them, who should come up to make good their casualties; their trench-mortar batteries alongside them; and their own selves about to be used in what promised to be one of the bloodiest shows of the war.

Those who were for the front line enjoyed a week to work and think things over. Those who were set aside for the second course were bombed by night and—went mushroom-picking in back-areas between parades, or played riotous cricket-matches with petrol-tins for wickets!

Their Divisional Commander, Major-General Feilding, had left on September 11 to succeed Sir Francis Lloyd in command of the London District, and General T. G. Matheson, C.B., had been appointed to the command of the Guards Division. The Battalion was full strength, officers and men, for there had been little during the past month to pull it down.

The Crossing of the Canal du Nord

Operations against the Hindenburg Line were to open on the 27th September with the attack of fourteen divisions of the First and Third Armies on a twelve-mile front from opposite Gouzeaucourt in the south to opposite Sauchy-Lestrée, sister to Sauchy-Cauchy—under the marshes of the Sensée River in the north. It would be heralded by two days’ solid bombardment along the entire fronts of the First, Third, and Fourth Armies, so that the enemy might be left guessing which was to hit first. When the First and Third Armies were well home, the Fourth would attend to the German position in the south, and heave the whole thing backward.

The share of the Guards Division in the northern attack was to cross the Canal du Nord at Lock Seven, north of Havrincourt, on a front of a mile; then work through the complicated tangle of the Hindenburg support line directly east along the ridge from Flesquières village to Premy Chapel which stands at the junction of the roads from Noyelles, Marcoing, and Graincourt, and to consolidate on the line of the Marcoing-Graincourt road. Meantime, the Third Division on their right would take the village of Flesquières; the Fifty-second Division would take the Hindenburg Line that lay west of the Canal in the bend of it, and would then let the Sixty-third through who would swing down from the north and attend to Graincourt and Anneux villages. The total advance set for the Guards Division was three miles, but, if the operations were fully successful, they were to push on to the outskirts of Noyelles; the Third Division to Marcoing; while the Fifty-seventh, coming through the Sixty-third, would take Cantaing and Fontaine-Notre-Dame. In the Guards Division itself, the 2nd Brigade was to move off first, and ferret its way through a knot of heavily wired trenches that lay between them and the Canal, take the Hindenburg support trenches, and then form a defensive flank to the left of the next advance till the Fifty-second and Sixty-third Divisions should have secured Graincourt. The 1st Brigade would pass through them and capture the trenches across the Canal to the north and north-east of Flesquières. If resistance were not too strong, that brigade was to go on to the spur running from Flesquières to Cantaing, and help the Sixty-third turn the Graincourt line. The 3rd Brigade, passing through the 1st, would carry on and take the high ground round Premy Chapel.

Enough rain fell the day before to grease the ground uncomfortably, and when at 3.30 A. M. the Irish Guards moved off from their reserve trenches west of Lagnicourt to their assembly positions along the Demicourt-Graincourt road to Bullen Trench, the jumping-off place, it was pouring wet. They were not shelled on the way up, but the usual night-work was afoot in the back-areas, and though our guns, as often the case on the eve of an outbreak, held their breath, the enemy’s artillery threatened in the distance, and the lights and “flaming onions” marked their expectant front. Just before the Battalion reached the ruins of Demicourt, there was an explosion behind them, and they saw, outlined against the flare of a blazing dump, Lagnicourt way, a fat and foolish observation-balloon rocking and ducking at the end of its tether, with the air of a naughty baby caught in the act of doing something it shouldn’t. Since the thing was visible over half a Department, they called it names, but it made excuse for a little talk that broke the tension. Tea and rum were served out at the first halt—a ritual with its usual grim jests—and when they reached the road in front of Demicourt, they perceived the balloon had done its dirty work too well. The enemy, like ourselves, changes his field-lights on occasion, but, on all occasions, two red lights above and one below mean trouble. “Up go the bloody pawnbrokers!” said a man who knew what to expect, and, as soon as the ominous glares rose, the German trench-mortars opened on the Battalion entering the communication-way that led to Bullen Trench. Our barrage came down at Zero (5.20) more terrifically, men said, than ever they had experienced, and was answered by redoubled defensive barrages. After that, speech was cut off. Some fifty yards ahead of Bullen Trench—which, by the way, was only three feet deep—lay the 1st Scots Guards, the first wave of the attack. On, in front of, and in the space between them and the Irish, fell the rain of the trench-mortars; from the rear, the Guards Machine-Guns tortured all there was of unoccupied air with their infernal clamours. The Scots Guards went over among the shell-spouts and jerking wires at the first glimmer of dawn, the Irish following in a rush. The leading companies were No. 3 (Lieutenant H. A. A. Collett) on the left, and No. 4 (2nd Lieutenant C. S. O’Brien) on the right. The 1st Guards Trench Mortar Battery (2nd Lieutenant O. R. Baldwin, Irish Guards) was attached experimentally to No. 3 Company in the first wave instead of, as usual, in support. No. 2 Company (Captain C. W. W. Bence-Jones) supported No. 3, and No. 1 (Lieutenant the Hon. B. A. A. Ogilvy) No. 4. They stayed for a moment in the trench, a deep, wide one of the Hindenburg pattern, which the Scots Guards had left. It was no healthy spot, for the shells were localised here and the dirt flung up all along it in waves. Men scrambled out over the sliding, flying edges of it, saw a bank heave up in the half-light, and knew that, somewhere behind that, was the Canal. By this time one of the two Stokes guns of the Mortar Battery and half the gunners had been wiped out, and the casualties in the line were heavy; but they had no time to count. Then earth opened beneath their feet, and showed a wide, deep, dry, newly made canal with a smashed iron bridge lying across the bed of it, and an unfinished lock to the right looking like some immense engine of war ready to do hurt in inconceivable fashions. Directly below them, on the pale, horribly hard, concrete trough, was a collection of agitated pin-heads, the steel hats of the Scots Guards rearing ladders against the far side of the gulf. Mixed with them were the dead, insolently uninterested, while the wounded, breaking aside, bound themselves up with the tense, silent preoccupation which unhurt men, going forward, find so hard to bear. Mobs of bewildered Germans had crawled out of their shelters in the Canal flanks and were trying to surrender to any one who looked likely to attend to them. They saluted British officers as they raced past, and, between salutes, returned their arms stiffly to the safe “Kamerad” position. This added the last touch of insanity to the picture. (“We’d ha’ laughed if we had had the time, ye’ll understand.”)

None recall precisely how they reached the bottom of the Canal, but there were a few moments of blessed shelter ere they scrambled out and reformed on the far side. The shelling here was bad enough, but nothing to what they had survived. A veil of greasy smoke, patched with flame that did not glare, stood up behind them, and through the pall of it, in little knots, stumbled their supports, blinded, choking, gasping. In the direction of the attack, across a long stretch of broken rising ground, were more shells, but less thickly spaced, and craters of stinking earth and coloured chalks where our barrage had ripped out nests of machine-guns. Far off, to the left, creaming with yellow smoke in the morning light, rose the sullen head of Bourlon Wood to which the Canadians were faithfully paying the debt contracted by the 2nd Battalion of the Irish Guards in the old days after Cambrai.

At the crest of the ascent lay Saunders Keep, which marked the point where the Scots Guards would lie up and the Irish come through. Already the casualties had been severe. Captain Bence-Jones and 2nd Lieutenant Mathieson of No. 2 Company were wounded at the Keep itself, and 2nd Lieutenant A. R. Boyle of No. 1 earlier in the rush. The companies panted up, gapped and strung out. From the Keep the land sloped down to Stafford Alley, the Battalion’s first objective just before which Lieutenant Barry Close was killed. That day marked his coming of age. Beyond the Alley the ground rose again, and here the Irish were first checked by some machine-gun fire that had escaped our barrages. Second Lieutenant O’Brien, No. 3 Company, was hit at this point while getting his men forward. He had earned his Military Cross in May, and he died well. The next senior officer, 2nd Lieutenant E. H. R. Burke, was away to the left in the thick of the smoke with a platoon that, like the rest, was fighting for its life; so 2nd Lieutenant O’Farrell led on. He was hit not far from Stafford Alley, and while his wound was being bandaged by Sergeant Regan, hit again by a bullet that, passing through the Sergeant’s cap and a finger, entered O’Farrell’s heart. The officer commanding the remnants of the Mortar Battery took on the company and his one gun. Meantime, Collett and a few of No. 3 Company had reached Silver Street, a trench running forward from Stafford Alley, and he and Lieutenant Brady were bombing down it under heavy small-arm fire from the enemy’s left flank which had not been driven in and was giving untold trouble. No. 2 Company, with two out of three of its officers down, was working towards the same line as the fragment of No. 3; though opinion was divided on that confused field whether it would not be better for them to lie down and form a defensive flank against that pestilent left fire. Eventually, but events succeeded each other like the bullets, Collett and his men reached their last objective—a trench running out of Silver Street towards Flesquières. Here he, Brady, and Baldwin drew breath and tried to get at the situation. No. 4 Company lay to the right of No. 3, and when 2nd Lieutenant E. H. R. Burke, with what was left of his platoon before mentioned, came up, he resumed charge of it without a word and went on. No. 1 Company (Lieutenant the Hon. B. A. A. Ogilvy) had, like the rest, been compelled to lead its own life. Its objective was the beet-sugar factory in front of Flesquières ahead of and a little to the right of the Battalion’s final objective, and it was met throughout with rifle, bomb, and flanking fire. Lieutenant Ogilvy was wounded at a critical point in the game with the enemy well into the trench, or trenches. (The whole ground seemed to the men who were clearing it one inexhaustible Hun-warren.) As he dropped, Lieutenant R. L. Dagger and Sergeant Conaboy, picking up what men they could, bombed the enemy out, back, and away, and settled down to dig in and wait; always under flank-fire. The Sergeant was killed “in his zeal to finish the job completely”—no mean epitaph for a thorough man. By eleven o’clock that morning all the companies had reached their objectives, and, though sorely harassed, began to feel that the worst for them might be over. There were, however, two German “whizz-bangs” that lived in Orival Wood still untaken on the Battalion’s left, and these, served with disgusting speed and accuracy, swept Silver Street mercilessly. The situation was not improved when one of the sergeants quoted the ever-famous saying of Sergeant-Major Toher with reference to one of our own barrages: “And even the wurrums themselves are getting up and crying for mercy.” The guns were near enough to watch quite comfortably, and while the men watched and winced, they saw the “success” signal of the Canadians—three whites—rise high in air in front of Bourlon Wood. Then No. 1 Company reported they were getting more than their share of machine-gun fire, and the 1st Guards Brigade Trench Mortar Battery, reduced to one mortar, one officer, one sergeant, four men, and ten shells, bestowed the whole of its ammunition in the direction indicated, abandoned its mortar, and merged itself into the ranks of No. 3 Company. It had been amply proved that where trench-mortars accompany a first wave of attack, if men are hit while carrying two Stokes shells apiece (forty pounds of explosives), they become dangerous mobile mines.

Enemy aeroplanes now swooped down with machine-gun fire; there seemed no way of getting our artillery to attend to them and they pecked like vultures undisturbed. Then Battalion Headquarters came up in the midst of the firing from the left, established themselves in a dug-out and were at once vigorously shelled, together with the neighbouring aid-post and some German prisoners there, waiting to carry down wounded. The aid-post was in charge of a young American doctor, Rhys Davis by name, who had been attached to the Battalion for some time. This was his first day of war and he was mortally wounded before the noon of it.

The trench filled as the day went on, with details dropping in by devious and hurried roads to meet the continual stream of prisoners being handed down to Brigade Headquarters. One youth, who could not have been seventeen, flung himself into the arms of an officer and cried, “Kamerad, Herr Offizier! Ich bin sehr jung! Kamerad!” To whom the embarrassed Islander said brutally: “Get on with you. I wouldn’t touch you for the world!” And they laughed all along the trench-face as they dodged the whizz-bangs out of Orival Wood, and compared themselves to the “wurrums begging for mercy.”

About noon, after many adventures, the 2nd Grenadiers arrived to carry on the advance, and Silver Street became a congested metropolis. The 2nd Grenadiers were hung up there for a while because, though the Third Division on the right had taken Flesquières, the Sixty-third on the left had not got Graincourt village, which was enfilading the landscape damnably. Orival Wood, too, was untaken, and the 1st Grenadiers, under Lord Gort, were out unsupported half a mile ahead on the right front somewhere near Premy Chapel. Meantime, a battalion of the Second Division, which was to come through the Guards Division and continue the advance, flooded up Silver Street, zealously unreeling its telephone wires; Machine-Gun Guards were there, looking for positions; the 2nd Grenadiers were standing ready; the Welsh Guards were also there with intent to support the Grenadiers; walking wounded were coming down, and severe cases were being carried over the top by German prisoners who made no secret of an acute desire to live and jumped in among the rest without leave asked. The men compared the crush to a sugar-queue at home. To cap everything, some wandering tanks which had belonged to the Division on the right had strayed over to the left. No German battery can resist tanks, however disabled; so they drew fire, and when they were knocked out (our people did not know this at first, being unused to working with them), made life insupportable with petrol-fumes for a hundred yards round.

About half-past four in the afternoon a Guards Battalion—they thought it was the 1st Coldstream—came up on their left, and under cover of what looked like a smoke-barrage, cleared Orival Wood and silenced the two guns there. The Irish, from their dress-circle in Silver Street, blessed them long and loud, and while they applauded, Lieut.-Colonel Lord Gort, commanding the 1st Grenadiers, came down the trench wounded on his way to a dressing-station. He had been badly hit once before he thought fit to leave duty, and was suffering from loss of blood. The Irish had always a great regard for him, and that day they owed him more than they knew at the time, for it was the advance of the 1st Grenadiers under his leading, almost up to Premy Chapel, which had unkeyed the German resistance in Graincourt, and led the enemy to believe their line of retreat out of the village was threatened. The Second Division as it came through found the enemy shifting and followed them up towards Noyelles. So the day closed, and, though men did not realize, marked the end of organized trench-warfare for the Guards Division.

The Battalion, with two officers dead and five wounded out of fifteen (killed: Lieutenant B. S. Close, and 2nd Lieutenant A. H. O’Farrell; wounded: Captain the Hon. B. A. A. Ogilvy, Captain C. W. W. Bence-Jones, and 2nd Lieutenants A. R. Boyle, G. F. Mathieson, and C. S. O’Brien, M.C., died of wounds), and one hundred and eighty casualties in the ranks, stayed on the ground for the night. It tried to make itself as comfortable as cold and shallow trenches allowed, but by orders of some “higher authority,” who supposed that it had been relieved, no water or rations were sent up; and, next morning, they had to march six thousand yards on empty stomachs to their trench-shelters and bivouacs in front of Demicourt. As the last company arrived a cold rain fell, but they were all in reasonably high spirits. It had been a winning action, in spite of trench-work, and men really felt that they had the running in their own hands at last.

Back-area rumours and official notifications were good too. The Nineteenth and Second Corps of the Second Army, together with the Belgian Army, had attacked on the 28th September, from Dixmude to far south of the Ypres-Zonnebeke road; had retaken all the heights to the east of Ypres, and were in a fair way to clear out every German gain there of the past four years. A German withdrawal was beginning from Lens to Armentières, and to the south of the Third Army the Fourth came in on the 29th (while the Battalion was “resting and shaving” in its trench-shelters by Demicourt) on a front of twelve miles, and from Gricourt to Vendhuille broke, and poured across the Hindenburg Line, then to the St. Quentin Canal. At the same time, lest there should be one furlong of the uneasy front neglected, the Fifth and Sixth Corps of the Third Army attacked over the old Gouzeaucourt ground between Vendhuille and Marcoing. This, too, without counting the blows that the French and the Americans were dealing in their own spheres on the Meuse and in the Argonne; each stroke coldly preparing the next.

The Germans had, during September, lost a quarter of a million of prisoners, several thousand guns, and immense quantities of irreplaceable stores. Their main line of resistance was broken and over-run throughout; and their troops in the field were feeling the demoralisation of constant withdrawals, as well as shortage from abandoned supplies. Our people had known the same depression in the March Push, when night skies, lit with burning dumps, gave the impression that all the world was going up in universal surrender.

Towards Maubeuge

But work was still to do. Between Cambrai, which at the end of October was under, though not actually in, our hands, and Maubeuge, lay thirty-five miles of France, all open save for such hastily made defences as the enemy had been able to throw up after the collapse of the Hindenburg systems. There, then, the screw was turned, and on the 8th October the Third and Fourth Armies attacked on a front of seventeen miles from Sequehart, north of Cambrai, where the Cambrai-Douai road crosses the Sensée, southward to our junction with the French First Army a few miles above St. Quentin. Twenty British divisions, two cavalry divisions, and one American division were involved. The Battalion faced the changed military situation, by announcing that companies were “at the disposal of their commanders for open warfare training.” After which they were instantly sent forward from their Demicourt trenches, to help make roads between Havricourt and Flesquières!

On the 3rd October they had orders to move, which were at once cancelled—sure sign that the Higher Command had something on its mind. This was proved two days later when the same orders arrived again, and were again washed out. Meantime, their reorganisation after the Flesquières fight had been completed; reinforcements were up, and the following officers had joined for duty: Lieutenants H. E. Van der Noot and G. F. Van der Noot, and 2nd Lieutenants A. L. W. Koch de Gooreynd, the Hon. C. A. Barnewall, G. M. Tylden-Wright, V. J. S. French, and R. E. Taylor.

On the 4th October the Commanding Officer went on leave, and Major A. F. L. Gordon, M.C., took command of the Battalion. Once more it was warned that it would move next day, which warning this time came true, and was heralded by the usual conference at Brigade Headquarters, on the 7th October, when the plans for next day’s battle in that sector of the line were revealed. The Second Division, on the left, and the Third, on the right of the Guards Division, were to attack on the whole of the front of the Sixth Corps at dawn of the 8th October. The Guards Division was to be ready to go through these two divisions on the afternoon of that day, or to take over the line on the night of it, and continue the attack at dawn on the 9th. The 1st Guards Brigade would pass through the Third Division, and the 2nd Brigade through the Second Division. As far as the 1st Brigade’s attack was concerned, the 2nd Coldstream would take the right, the 2nd Grenadiers the left of the line, with the 1st Irish Guards in reserve. It was all beautifully clear. So the Battalion left Demicourt, recrossed the Canal du Nord at Lock 7, and were “accommodated” in dug-outs and shelters in the Hindenburg Line, near Ribecourt.

On the 9th October the Battalion moved to Masnières, four miles or so south of Cambrai. Here, while crossing the St. Quentin Canal, No. 3 Company had three killed and three wounded by a long-range gun which was shelling all down the line of it. They halted in the open for the rest of the day. A curious experience followed. The idea was to attack in the general direction of Cattenières, across the line of the Cambrai-Caudry railway, which, with its embankment and cuttings, was expected to give trouble. The New Zealand Division was then on the right of the Guards Division; but no one seemed to be sure, the night before the battle, whether the Third Division was out on their front or not. (“Everything, ye’ll understand, was all loosed up in those days. Jerry did not know his mind, and for that reason we could not know ours. The bottom was out of the war, ye’ll understand, but we did not see it.”) However, it was arranged that all troops would be withdrawn from doubtful areas before Zero (5.10 A. M.), and that the 2nd Coldstream and the 2nd Grenadiers would advance to the attack under a creeping barrage with due precautions which included a plentiful bombardment and machine-gunning of the railway embankment.

The Battalion, in reserve, as has been said, moved from Masnières to its assembly area, among old German trenches near the village of Seranvillers, in artillery formation at 2.40 A. M., and had its breakfast at 5 A. M., while the other two battalions of the Brigade advanced in waves, preceded by strong patrols and backed by the guns. There was no shelling while they assembled, and practically none in reply to our barrage; nor did the leading battalions meet opposition till after they had cleared out the village of Seranvillers, and were held up by screened machine-guns in a wood surrounding a sugar-factory north of Cattenières. The Battalion followed on in due course, reached the railway embankment, set up Headquarters in a road-tunnel under it (there was no firing), and received telephonic orders that at 5 A. M. on the 10th October they would pass through the other two battalions and continue the advance, which, henceforth, was to be “by bounds” and without limit or barrage. Then they lay up in the railway embankment and dozed.

They assembled next morning (the 10th) in the dark, and, reinforced by seven Corps Cyclists and a Battery of field-guns, went forth into France at large, after a retiring enemy. Nothing happened for a couple of miles, when they reached the outskirts of Beauvais-en-Cambrensis, on the Cambrai-Le-Cateau road, where a single sniper from one of the houses shot and killed 2nd Lieutenant V. J. S. French, No. 4 Company. A mile farther on, up the Beauvais-Quiévy road, they found the village of Bevillers heavily shelled by the enemy from a distance, so skirted round it, and sent in two small mopping-up parties. Here No. 4 Company again came up against machine-gun and sniper fire, but no casualties followed. Their patrols reported the next bound all clear, and they pushed on, under heavy but harmless shelling, in the direction of Quiévy. At eight o’clock their patrols waked up a breadth of machine-gun nests along the whole of the front and that of the battalions to their left and right. They went to ground accordingly, and when the enemy artillery was added to the small-arm fire, the men dug slits for themselves and escaped trouble. For some time past the German shell-stuff had been growing less and less effective, both in accuracy and bursting power, which knowledge cheered our troops. In the afternoon, as there were signs of the resistance weakening, our patrols put forth once more, and by five o’clock the Battalion had reached the third bound on the full battalion front. Then, in the dusk, came word from the New Zealand division on their right, that the division on their right again, had got forward, and that the New Zealanders were pushing on to high ground south of Quiévy. With the message came one from No. 4 Company, reporting that their patrols were out ahead, and in touch with the New Zealanders on their right. There is no record that the news was received with enthusiasm, since it meant “bounding on” in the dark to the fourth bound, which they accomplished not before 10.30 that night, tired officers hunting up tired companies by hand and shoving them into their positions. These were on high ground north-east of Quiévy, with the Battalion’s right on a farm, called Fontaine-au-Tertre, which signifies “the fountain on the little hill,” a mile beyond the village. The 1st Scots Guards were on their left holding the village of St. Hilaire-les-Cambrai. Then, punctual as ever, rations came up; Battalion Headquarters established itself in a real roofed house in the outskirts of Quiévy, and No. 1 Company in reserve, was billeted in the village.

Next morning (11th October), when the 3rd Guards Brigade came through them and attacked over the naked grass and stubble fields towards St. Python and Solesmes, the Battalion was withdrawn and sent to very good billets in Quiévy. “The men having both upstairs and cellar room. All billets very dirty,” says the Diary, “owing to the previous occupants (Hun) apparently having taken delight in scattering all the civilian clothes, food, furniture, etc., all over the place.” Every one was tired out; they had hardly slept for three nights; but all “were in the best of spirits.” Brigade Headquarters had found what was described as “a magnificent house” with “a most comfortable” bed in “a large room.” Those who used it were lyric in their letters home.

The total casualties for the 10th and 11th October were amazingly few. Second Lieutenant V. J. S. French was the only casualty among the officers, and, of other ranks, but three were killed and nine wounded.

The officers who took part in the operations were these:

They lay at Quiévy for the next week employed in cleaning up dirty billets, while the 3rd and 2nd Brigades of the Division were cleaning out the enemy rear-guards in front of them from the west bank of the Selle River, and roads and railways were stretching out behind our armies to bring redoubled supply of material. One of the extra fatigues of those days was to get the civil population out of the villages that the enemy were abandoning. This had to be done by night, for there is small chivalry in the German composition. Quiévy was shelled at intervals, and no parades larger than of a platoon were, therefore, allowed. The weather, too, stopped a scheme of field-operations in the back area between Quiévy and Bevillers, and a washed and cleanly clothed battalion were grateful to their Saints for both reliefs.

On the 17th October the Sixty-first Division took over the Guards area, and that afternoon the Battalion left Quiévy by cross-country tracks for Boussières and moved into position for what turned out to be all but the last stroke of the long game.

The enemy on that front were by now across the steeply banked Selle River, but the large, straggling village of Solesmes, of which St. Python is practically a suburb, was still held by them and would have to be cleaned out house-to-house. Moreover, it was known to be full of French civils and getting them away in safety would not make the situation less difficult.

St. Python

It was given out at Brigade conference on the 17th that the Sixty-first Division would take place on the right of the Guards Division and the Nineteenth on its left in the forthcoming attack, and that the Sixty-first would attend to Solesmes, while the Guards Division pushed on north-east between St. Python and Haussy on a mile-wide front through the village of Escarmain to Capelle, a distance of some three and a half miles. The 1st and 3rd Brigades would lead, the 2nd in reserve, and the passage of the Selle would be effected in the dark by such bridges as the Sappers could put up.

The Battalion moved nearer their assembly areas to St. Hilaire-les-Cambrai, on the night of the 18th after Company Commanders had thoroughly explained to their men what was in store; and on the 19th those commanders, with the Intelligence Officer, Captain Vernon, went up to high ground overlooking the battle-field. It was a closer and more crumpled land than they had dealt with hitherto, its steep-sided valleys cut by a multitude of little streams running from nor’-west to south-east, with the interminable ruled line of the Bavai road edging the great Forest of Mormal which lay north of Landrecies. The wheel was swinging full circle, and men who had taken part in that age-ago retreat from Mons, amused themselves by trying to pick out familiar details in the landscape they had been hunted across four years before. But it was misty and the weather, faithful ally of the Germans to the last, was breaking again. Just as the Battalion moved off from St. Hilaire to their area on the railway line from Valenciennes to Le Cateau, rain began and continued till six next morning, making every condition for attack as vile as it could. They dug them shallow trenches in case of shell-fire, and sent down parties to reconnoitre the bridges over the Selle. Four bridges were “available,” i.e. existed in some shape, on or near the Battalion front, but no one had a good word to say for any of them.

There is a tale concerning the rivers here, which may be given (without guarantee) substantially as told: “Rivers round Maubeuge? ’Twas all rivers—the Aunelle and the Rhônelle and the Pronelle, an’ more, too; an’ our Intelligence Officer desirin’ to know the last word concernin’ each one of ’em before we paddled it. Michael an’ me was for that duty. Michael was a runner, afraid o’ nothing, but no small liar, and him as fed as myself with reportin’ on these same dam’ rivers; and Jerry expendin’ the last of his small-arm stuff round and round the country. I forget which river ’twas we were scouting, but he was ahead of me, the way he always was. Presently he comes capering back, ‘Home, please, Sergeant,’ says he. ‘That hill’s stinking with Jerries beyond.’ ‘But the river?’ says I. ‘Ah, come home,’ says Michael, ‘an I’ll learn ye the road to be a V.C.!’ So home we went to the Intelligence Officer, and ’twas then I should have spoke the truth. But Michael was before me. I had no more than my mouth opened when he makes his report, which was my business, me being sergeant (did I tell ye?), to put in. But Michael was before me. He comes out with the width of the river, and its depth, and the nature of its bottom and the scenery, and all and all, the way you’d ha’ sworn he’d been a trout in it. When we was out of hearing, I told him he was a liar in respect to his river. ‘River,’ says he, ‘are ye after calling that a river? ’Tis no bigger than a Dickiebush ditch,’ he says. ‘And anyway,’ says he, ‘the Battalion’ll rowl across it in the dark, the way it always does. Ye cannot get wetter than wet, even in the Micks!’ Then his conscience smote him, an’ when his company went down to this river in the dark, Michael comes capering alongside whishpering between his hands: ‘Boys!’ says he, ‘can ye swim, boys? I hope ye can all swim for, Saints be my witness, I never wint near the river. For aught I know it may be an arrum of the sea. Ah, lads, thry an’ learn to swim!’ he says. Then some one chases him off before the officer comes along; an’ we wint over Michael’s river the way he said we would. Ye can not get wetter than wet—even in the Micks.”

It was a quiet night, except for occasional bursts of machine-gun fire, but there was no shelling of the assembly area as the 2nd Grenadiers formed up on their right, with the 2nd Coldstream in reserve. Nos. 1 and 2 Companies (Captain A. W. L. Paget, and Lieutenant E. M. Harvey, M.C.) moved off first, No. 3 in support (Captain Bambridge), and No. 4 (2nd Lieutenant O. R. Baldwin) in reserve. The barrage opened with a percentage of demoralising flame-shells. There was very little artillery retaliation, and beyond getting rather wetter than the rain had already made them, the Battalion did not suffer, except from small-arm fire out of the dark. The first objective, a section of the Solesmes-Valenciennes road, was gained in an hour, with but eight casualties, mainly from our own “shorts” in the barrage, and several prisoners and machine-guns captured. The prisoners showed no wish to fight.

The companies had kept direction wonderfully well in the dark, and reached the second and last objective under increased machine-gun fire, but still without much artillery. The 3rd Guards Brigade on their left had been hung up once or twice, which kept No. 2 Company, the left leading company, and Nos. 3 and 4 (in support) busy at odd times forming defensive flanks against sniping. By half-past five, however, they were all in place, and set to dig in opposite the village of Vertain. Then dull day broke and with light came punishment. The enemy, in plain sight, opened on them with everything that they had in the neighbourhood, from 7 A. M. to 10 P. M. of the 20th. The two front companies were cut off as long as one could see, and a good deal of the stuff was delivered over open sights. It was extremely difficult to get the wounded away, owing to the continuous sniping. But, through providence, or the defect of enemy ammunition, or the depth of the slits the men had dug, casualties were very few. Battalion Headquarters and the ground where No. 4 Company lay up were most thoroughly drenched, though an officer of No. 3 Company, whose experience was large, described his men’s share as “about the worst and most accurate shelling I have been through.” They were, in most places, only a hundred yards away from a dug-in enemy bent on blessing them with every round left over in the retreat. During the night, which was calmer, our Artillery dealt with those mixed batteries and groups so well that, although no man could show a finger above his shelter in some of the company areas, the shelling next day was moderate. The forward posts were still unapproachable, but they sent out patrols from Nos. 1 and 2 Companies to “report on the River Harpies,” the next stream to the Selle, and to keep it under observation. This was an enterprise no commander would have dreamed of undertaking even three months ago. The enemy sniping went on. The 2nd Coldstream, who had been moved up to protect the right flank of the 2nd Grenadiers (the Sixty-first Division, being delayed some time over the clearing up and evacuation of Solesmes, was not yet abreast of them), were withdrawn to billets at St. Hilaire in the course of the afternoon; but word came that neither the Grenadiers nor the Irish need look to be relieved. It rained, too, and was freezing cold at night. Another expert in three years of miseries writes: “One of the worst places I have ever been in. Heavy rain all day and night.... More shelling if we were seen moving about. Heavy rain all day.... Soaked through and shivering with cold.” The Diary more temperately: “The men were never dry from the time they left their billets in St. Hilaire on the evening of the 20th, and there was no shelter whatever for any of the companies.” So they relieved them during the night of the 21st, front Companies 1 and 2 returning to the accommodation vacated by their supports, 3 and 4.

Battalion relief came when the 24th Battalion Royal Fusiliers (Second Division) took over from them and the Grenadiers and got into position for their attack the next morning. An early and obtrusive moon made it difficult to fetch away the front-posts, and though the leading company reached the Selle on its way back at a little after five, the full relief was not completed till half-past nine, when they had to get across-country to the main road and pick up the lorries that took them to “very good billets” at Carnières. Their own Details had seen to that; and they arrived somewhere in the early morning “beat and foot-sore,” but without a single casualty in relieving. Their losses for the whole affair up to the time of their relief were one officer (Captain and Adjutant J. B. Keenan) wounded in the face by a piece of shell, the sole casualty at Battalion Headquarters; ten other ranks killed; forty-two wounded, of whom two afterwards died, and two missing—fifty-five in all.

The companies were officered as follows:

Cleaning up began the next day where fine weather in “most delightful billets” was cheered by the news that the Second Division’s attack on Vertain had been a great success. In those days they looked no further than their neighbours on either side.

Every battle, as had been pointed out, leaves its own impression. St. Python opened with a wild but exciting chase in the wet and dark, which, at first, seemed to lead straight into Germany. It ended, as it were, in the sudden rising of a curtain of grey, dank light that struck all the actors dumb and immobile for an enormously long and hungry stretch of time, during which they mostly stared at what they could see of the sky above them, while the air filled with dirt and clods, and single shots pecked and snarled round every stone of each man’s limited skyline; the whole ending in a blur of running water under starlight (that was when they recrossed the Selle River), and confused memories of freezing together in lumps in lorries, followed by a dazed day of “shell-madness,” when all ears and eyes were intolerably overburdened with echoes and pictures, and men preferred to be left alone. But they were washed and cleaned and reclothed with all speed, and handed over to their company officers for the drill that chases off bad dreams. The regimental sergeant-major got at them, too, after their hair was cut, and the massed brigade drums played in the village square of Carnières, and, ere the end of the month, inter-company football was in full swing.

A draft of ninety-one other ranks joined for duty on the 22nd October. Lieutenant-Colonel Baggallay, M.C., came back from leave and, in the absence of the Brigadier, assumed command of the Brigade, and Captain D. W. Gunston joined.

The Break-up

On the last day of October they moved from Carnières to St. Hilaire and took over the 3rd Grenadiers’ billets in the factory there, all of which, house for house, officers and men, was precisely as before the attack on the 20th, ten days ago. But those ten days had borne the British armies on that front beyond Valenciennes in the north to within gun-shot of Le Quesnoy in the centre, and to the Sambre Canal, thirty miles away, in the south. Elsewhere, Lille had been evacuated, the lower half of western Flanders cleared, from the Dutch frontier to Tournai, while almost every hour brought up from one or other of the French and American armies, on the Meuse and the Argonne, fresh tallies of abandoned stores and guns, and of prisoners gathered in rather than captured. Behind this welter, much as the glare of a mine reveals the façade of a falling town-hall, came word of the collapse of Bulgaria, Turkey, and Austria. The whole of the herd of the Hun Tribes were on the move, uneasy and afraid. It remained so to shatter the mass of their retiring forces in France that they should be in no case to continue any semblance of further war without complete destruction. Were they permitted to slink off unbroken, they might yet make stand behind some shorter line, or manufacture a semblance of a “face” before their own people that would later entail fresh waste and weariness on the world.[9]

The weather and the destruction they had left in their wake was, as on the Somme, aiding them now at every turn, in spite of all our roadmen and engineers could do. Our airmen took toll of them and their beasts as they retreated along the congested ways; but this was the hour when the delays, divided councils and specially the strikes of past years had to be paid for, and the giant bombing-planes that should have taught fear and decency far inside the German frontiers were not ready.

A straight drive from the west on to the German lateral communications promised the quickest return. It was laid in the hands of the First, Third, and Fifth Armies to send that attack home, and with the French and American pressure from the south, break up the machine past repair.

Men, to-day, say and believe that they knew it would be the last battle of the war, but, at the time, opinions varied; and the expectations of the rank and file were modest. The thing had gone on so long that it seemed the order of life; and, though the enemy everywhere fell back, yet he had done so once before, and over very much the same semi-liquid muck as we were floundering in that autumn’s end. “The better the news, the worse the chance of a knock,” argued the veterans, while the young hands sent out with high assurance, at draft-parades, that the war was on its last legs, discovered how the machine-gun-fenced rear of retirements was no route-march. (“There was them that came from Warley shouting, ye’ll understand; and there was them that came saying nothing at all, and liking it no more than that; but I do not remember any one of us looked to be out of it inside six months. No—not even when we was dancing into Maubeuge. We thought Jerry wanted to get his wind.”)

On the 4th November, one week before the end, twenty-six British divisions moved forward on a thirty-mile front from Oisy to north of Valenciennes, the whole strength of all their artillery behind them.

The Guards’ position had been slightly shifted. Instead of working south of Le Quesnoy, the Division was put in a little north of the town, on the banks of the river Rhônelle, between the Sixty-second Division on their right and the Forty-second on their left. The Battalion had marched from St. Hilaire, in the usual small fine rain, on the 2nd November to billets in Bermerain and bivouacs near by. It meant a ten-mile tramp of the pre-duckboard era, in the midst of mired horse- and lorry-transport, over country where the enemy had smashed every bridge and culvert, blocked all roads and pulling-out places with mine-craters, and sown houses, old trenches, and dug-outs with fanciful death-traps. The land was small-featured and full of little hills, so heavily hedged and orcharded that speculative battalions could be lost in it in twenty minutes. There were coveys, too, of French civils, rescued and evacuated out of the villages around, wandering against the stream of east-bound traffic. These forlorn little groups, all persuaded that the war was over and that they could return to their houses to-morrow, had to be shifted and chaperoned somehow through the chaos; but the patience and goodwill of our people were unending.

The wet day closed with a conference at Brigade Headquarters, but the enemy had thrown out our plan for action on that sector by thoughtlessly retiring on both flanks of the Division, as well as a little on the front of it, and final orders were not fixed till after midnight on the 3rd November.

The 1st and 2nd Guards Brigade were to attack, the 3rd in reserve. Of the 1st Brigade, the 2nd Coldstream would take the line as far as the first objective; the 2nd Grenadiers would then come through and carry on to the next line, the Irish Guards in support. The Brigade’s assembly area was across the Rhônelle River, east of the long and straggling village of Villers-Pol, on the Jenlain-Le Quesnoy road. Zero was fixed for 7.20. The Battalion marched from Bermerain, and met its first enemy shell as it was going under the Valenciennes railway embankment. What remained of the roads were badly congested with troops, and one gets the idea that the Staff work was casual. To begin with, the Battalion found the 3rd Grenadiers and the 1st Scots Guards between themselves and the 2nd Grenadiers, which was not calculated to soothe any C.O. desirous of keeping his appointment. Apparently they got through the Scots Guards; but when they reached the Rhônelle, its bridge being, of course, destroyed, and the R.E. working like beavers to mend it, they had to unship their Lewis-guns from the limbers, tell the limbers to come on when the bridge was usable, and pass the guns over by hand. While thus engaged the Scots Guards caught them up, went through them triumphantly, made exactly the same discovery that the Irish had done, and while they in turn were wrestling with their limbers, the Irish, who had completed their unshipping, went through them once more, and crossed the Rhônelle on the heels of the last man of the 3rd Grenadiers—“one at a time, being assisted up the bank by German prisoners.” By the mercy of the Saints, who must have been kept busy all night, the shelling on the bridge and its approaches ceased while that amazing procession got over. They were shelled as they reformed on the top of the steep opposite bank, but “by marvellous good-luck no casualties”; got into artillery formation; were shelled again, and this time hit, and long-range machine-gun fire met them over the next crest of ground. It was all ideal machine-gun landscape. The 2nd Grenadiers, whom they were supporting, had been held up by low fire from the village of Wagnies-le-Petit on their left, a little short of the first objective, which was the road running from Wagnies, south to Frasnoy. The Battalion dug in behind them where it was, and after an hour or so the enemy opened fire with one solitary, mad trench-mortar. Not more than a dozen rounds were sent over, and these, very probably, because the weapon happened to lie under their hands, and was used before being abandoned. And luck had it that this chance demonstration should kill Lieutenant A. L. Bain (“Andy” Bain), who had joined for duty not a week ago. He was the last officer killed in the Battalion, and one of the best. Lieutenant F. S. L. Smith, M.C., also was wounded. They stayed in their scratch-holes till late in the afternoon, as the troops of the Forty-second Division on their left were held up too, but the 2nd Guards Brigade on their right gradually worked forward. Some of their divisional field-guns came up and shelled Wagnies-le-Petit into silence, and at half-past four orders arrived for the Battalion to go through the 2nd Grenadiers and continue at large into the dusk that was closing on the blind, hedge-screened country. There was no particular opposition beyond stray shells, but the boggy-banked Aunelle had to be crossed on stretchers, through thick undergrowth, in a steep valley. Everything after that seemed to be orchards, high hedges, and sunk and raised roads, varied with soft bits of cultivation, or hopelessly muddled-up cul-de-sacs of farm-tracks. The companies played blind-man’s buff among these obstacles in the pitch-dark, as they hunted alternately for each other and the troops on their flanks. There was “very heavy shelling” on the three most advanced companies as well as on Brigade Headquarters throughout the night. The men dug in where they were; and casualties, all told, came to about twenty. Very early on the 5th November the 3rd Guards Brigade passed through them and continued the advance. Preux-au-Sart, the village behind them, had been taken by the 2nd Brigade the evening and the night before, so the Battalion “came out of its slits” and went back to billet in its relieved and rejoicing streets, where “the inhabitants on coming out of their cellars in the morning were delighted to find British troops again, and showed the greatest cordiality.” If rumour be true, they also showed them how easily their Hun conquerors had been misled and hoodwinked in the matter of good vintages buried and set aside against this very day. “The men were very comfortable.”