The new year changed their ground, and, if possible, for the worse. It opened with black disappointment. They were entrained on the evening of the 2nd January for Corbie in a tactical train, whose tactics consisted in starting one hour late. On the two preceding days the Germans had got in several direct hits on its rolling stock; so that wait dragged a little. But they were uplifted by the prospect, which some one had heard or invented, of a whole month’s rest. It boiled down to less than one week, on the news that the Division would take on yet another stretch of French line. There was just time to wash the men all over, their first bath in months, and to attend the divisional cinema. By this date Lieutenant Hanbury had joined, the adjutancy was taken over by Captain Charles Moore, Lieutenant-Colonel P. L. Reid had to go down, sick, and the command of the Battalion had devolved on Major E. B. Greer.
By the 10th January they were at Maurepas, ready to move up next day via Combles and Frégicourt into their new sector, which lay the distance of one divisional front south of the old Sailly-Saillisel one. It lay on the long clean-cut ridge, running north from Rancourt, to which the French had held when they were driven and mined out of St. Pierre Vaast Wood, facing the north-west and west sides of that forest of horrors. It was of so narrow a frontage that but one brigade at a time went into the line, two battalions of that brigade up to the front, and but one company of each battalion actually to the front-line posts. These ran along the forward slope of the ridge, and were backed by a sketchy support-line a hundred yards or so on the reverse with the reserve five or six hundred yards behind it. “Filthy but vital” is one description of the sector. If it were lost, it would uncover ground as far back as Morval. If held, it screened our ground westward almost as far as Combles. (Again, one must bear in mind the extreme minuteness of the setting of the picture, for Combles here was barely three thousand yards from the front line.)
The reports of the Eighth Division who handed it over were not cheering. The front-line posts had been ten of ten men apiece, set irregularly in the remnants of an old trench. The only way to deal with them was to dig out and rebuild altogether on metal framings, and the Sappers had so treated four. The other six were collapsing. They needed, too, a line of efficient support-posts, in rear, and had completed one, but wire was scarce. All support and reserve trenches were wet, shallow, and badly placed. A largish dug-out a hundred yards behind the front had been used as Battalion Headquarters by various occupants, German and French, and, at one stage of its career, as a dressing-station, but it seemed that the doctors “had only had time to pull upstairs the men who died and dump them in heaps a few yards away from the doorway. Later, apparently, some one had scattered a few inches of dirt over them which during our occupation the continual rain and snow washed away. The result was most grisly.” The French have many virtues, but tidiness in the line is not one of them.
The whole situation turned on holding the reverse of the ridge, since, if the enemy really meant business, it was always open to him to blow us off the top of it, and come down the gentle descent from the crest at his ease. So they concentrated on the front posts and a strong, well-wired reserve line, half-way down the slope. Luckily there was a trench-tramway in the sector, running from the Sappers’ dump on the Frégicourt road to close up to the charnel-house-ex-dressing-station. The regular trains, eight trucks pushed by two men each, were the 5, 7, and 9 P. M., but on misty days a 3 P. M. might also be run, and of course trains could run in the night. This saved them immense backaches. (“But, mark you, the easier the dam’ stuff gets up to the front the more there is of it, and so the worse ’tis for the poor devils of wiring-parties that has to lay it out after dark. Then Jerry whizz-bangs ye the rest of the long night. All this fine labour-saving means the devil for the Micks.”)
The Germans certainly whizz-banged the working-parties generously, but the flights as a rule buried themselves harmlessly in the soft ground. We on our side made no more trouble than could be avoided, but worked on the wire double tides. In the heat of the job, on the night of the 11th January, the Brigadier came round and the C.O. took him out to see Captain Alexander’s party wiring their posts. It was the worst possible moment for a valuable brigadier to wander round front lines. The moon lit up the snow and they beheld a party of Germans advancing in open order, who presently lay down and were joined by more. At eighty yards or so they halted, and after a short while crawled away. “We did not provoke battle, as we would probably have hurt no one, and we wanted to get on with our wiring.” But had the Brigadier been wasted in a mere front-line bicker, the C.O., not to mention Captain Alexander, would have heard of it.
By the time that the 1st Coldstream relieved them on the 14th January, the Battalion had fenced their private No Man’s Land and about six hundred yards of the line outside the posts, all under the come-and-go of shell-fire; had duck-boarded tracks connecting some of the posts; systematised their ration- and water-supply, and captured a multitude of army socks whereby companies coming down from their turn could change and be dry. Dull as all such detail sounds, it is beyond question that the arrangement and prevision of domestic works appeals to certain temperaments, not only among the officers but men. They positively relish the handling and disposition of stores, the fitting of one job into the next, the race against time, the devising of tricks and gadgets for their own poor comforts, and all the mixture of housemaking and keeping (in which, whatever may be said, the male animal excels) on the edge of war.
For the moment, things were absurdly peaceful on their little front, and when they came back to work after three still days at Maurepas, infantry “fighting” had become a farce. The opposing big guns hammered away zealously at camps and back-areas, but along that line facing the desolate woods of St. Pierre Vaast there was mutual toleration, due to the fact that no post could be relieved on either side except by the courtesy of their opponents who lay, naked as themselves, from two hundred to thirty yards away. Thus men walked about, and worked in flagrant violation of all the rules of warfare, beneath the arch of the droning shells overhead. The Irish realised this state of affairs gradually—their trenches were not so close to the enemy; but on the right Battalion’s front, where both sides lived in each others’ pockets, men reported “life in the most advanced posts was a perfect idyll.” So it was decided, now that every one might be presumed to know the ground, and be ready for play, that the weary game should begin again. But observe the procedure! “It was obvious it would be unfair, after availing ourselves of an unwritten agreement, to start killing people without warning.” Accordingly, notices were issued by the Brigade—in English—which read: “Warning. Any German who exposes himself after daylight to-morrow January 19 will be shot. By order.” Battalions were told to get these into the enemy lines, if possible, between 5 and 7 A. M. They anticipated a little difficulty in communicating their kind intentions, but two heralds, with three rifles to cover them, were sent out and told to stick the warnings up on the German wire in the dusk of the dawn. Now, one of these men was No. 10609 Private King, who, in civil life, had once been policeman in the Straits Settlements. He saw a German looking over the parapet while the notice was being affixed, and, policeman-like, waved to him to come out. The German beckoned to King to come in, but did not quit the trench. King then warned the other men to stand by him, and entered into genial talk. Other Germans gathered round the first, who, after hesitating somewhat, walked to his side of the wire. He could talk no English, and King, though he tried his best, in Chinese and the kitchen-Malay of Singapore, could not convey the situation to him either. At last he handed the German the notice and told him to give it to his officer. The man seemed to understand. He was an elderly person, with his regimental number in plain sight on his collar. He saw King looking at this, and desired King to lift the edge of his leather jerkin so that he in turn might get our number. King naturally refused and, to emphasise what was in store for careless enemies, repeated with proper pantomime: “Shoot! Shoot! Pom! Pom!” This ended the palaver. They let him get back quite unmolested, and when the mirth had ceased, King reported that they all seemed to be “oldish men, over yonder, and thoroughly fed up.” Next dawn saw no more unbuttoned ease or “idyllic” promenades along that line.
As the days lengthened arctic cold set in. The tracks between the posts became smears of black ice, and shells burst brilliantly on ground that was as pave-stones to the iron screw-stakes of the wiring. One shell caught a carrying-party on the night of the 20th January, slightly wounding Lieutenant Hanbury who chanced to be passing at the time, and wounding Sergeant Roddy and two men. The heavies behind them used the morning of the 21st to register on their left and away to the north. By some accident (the Battalion did not conceive their sector involved) a big shell landed in the German trench opposite one of their posts, and some thirty Huns broke cover and fled back over the rise. One of them, lagging behind the covey, deliberately turned and trudged across the snow to give himself up to us. Outside one of our posts he as deliberately knelt down, covered his face with his hands and prayed for several minutes. Whereupon our men instead of shooting shouted that he should come in. He was a Pole from Posen and the east front; very, very sick of warfare. This gave one Russian, one Englishman, and a Pole as salvage for six weeks. An attempt at a night-raid on our part over the crackling snow was spoiled because the divisional stores did not run to the necessary “six white night-shirts” indented for, but only long canvas coats of a whitey-brown which in the glare of Very lights showed up hideously.
A month of mixed fatigues followed ere they saw that sector again. They cleaned up at Morval on the 22nd, and spent a few days at the Briquetterie near Bernafay Corner, where three of the companies worked at a narrow-gauge line just outside Morval, under sporadic long-range shell-fire, and the fourth went to Ville in divisional reserve. The winter cold ranged from ten to twenty degrees of frost in the Nissen huts. Whereby hangs this tale. The mess stove was like Falstaff, “old, cold, and of intolerable entrails,” going out on the least provocation. Only a few experts knew how to conciliate the sensitive creature, and Father Knapp, the R.C. chaplain, was not one of them. Indeed, he had been explicitly warned on no account whatever to attempt to stoke it. One bitter morning, however, he found himself alone in the mess with the stove just warming up, and a sand-bag, stuffed with what felt like lumps of heaven-sent coal, lying on the floor. Naturally, he tipped it all in. But it was the mess Perrier water, which had been thus swaddled to save it from freezing—as the priest and the exploding stove found out together. There were no casualties, though roof and walls were cut with glass, but the stove never rightly recovered from the shock, nor did Father Knapp hear the last of it for some time.
From the close of the month till the 19th of February they were in divisional reserve, all together at Ville in unbroken frost. While there (February 1), Lieutenant F. St. L. Greer, one of the best of officers and the most popular of comrades, was wounded in a bombing accident and died the next day. In a battalion as closely knit together as the 2nd Irish Guards all losses hit hard.
Just as the thaw was breaking, they were sent up to Priez Farm, a camp of elephant huts, dug-outs and shelters where the men were rejoiced to get up a real “frowst” in the confined quarters. Warriors do not love scientific ventilation. From the 16th to the 25th February, the mud being in full possession of the world again, they were at Billon, which has no good name, and on the 25th back at St. Pierre Vaast, on the same sector they had left a month before. Nothing much had been done to the works; for the German host—always at its own time and in its own methodical way—was giving way to the British pressure, and the Battalion was warned that their business would be to keep touch with any local withdrawal by means of patrols (Anglice, small parties playing blind-man’s buff with machine-gun posts), and possibly to do a raid or two. But it is interesting to see that since their departure from that sector all the ten posts which they had dug and perspired over, and learned to know by their numbers, which automatically come back to a man’s memory on his return, had been re-numbered by the authorities. It was a small thing, but good men have been killed by just such care.
They watched and waited. The air was full of rumours of the Germans’ shifting—the home papers called it “cracking”—but facts and news do not go together even in peace. (“What annoyed us were the newspaper reports of how we were getting on when we weren’t getting on at all.”)
The Twenty-ninth Division on their left were due to put in a two-Battalion attack from Sailly-Saillisel on the dawn of the 28th February, while the battalion in the front line was to send up a smoke-screen to distract the enemy and draw some of his barrages on to themselves. So front-line posts were thinned out as much as possible, and front companies sent out patrols to see that the Hun in front of them was working happily, and that he had not repaired a certain gap in his wire which our guns had made and were keeping open for future use. All went well till the wind shifted and the smoke was ordered “off,” and when the Twenty-ninth Division attacked, the tail of the enemy barrage caught the Battalion unscreened but did no harm. A heavy fog then shut down sarcastically on the whole battle, which was no success to speak of. Through it all the Battalion kept guard over their own mouse-holes and the gap in the wire. Sudden activities of our guns or the enemies’ worried them at times and bred rumours, all fathered on the staff, of fantastic victories somewhere down the line. They saw a battalion of Germans march by platoons into St. Pierre Vaast Wood, warned the nearest artillery group, and watched the heavies searching the wood; heard a riot of bombing away on their left, which they put down to the situation at Sailly-Saillisel (this was on the 1st of March), and got ready for possible developments; and when it all died out again, duly sent forth the patrols, who reported the “enemy laughing, talking, and working.” There was no sign of any withdrawal there.
On the 6th March, in snow and frost, they took over from the 1st Coldstream a new and unappetising piece of front on the left which the Coldstream had taken over from the Twenty-ninth Division. It consisted of a line of “about twelve so-called posts which were practically little more than shell-holes.” The Coldstream had worked like beavers to get them into some sort of shape, but their predecessors had given the local snipers far too much their head; and the long, flat-topped ridge where, under an almost full moon, every moving man offended the sky-line, was as unwholesome as could be desired. The Coldstream had lost six men sniped the night before their relief, and it was impossible to reach two of the posts at all. Another post was practically untenable, as the enemy had direct observation on to it, and one sniper who specialised in this neighbourhood had accounted for fourteen men in one tour. The Battalion settled down, therefore, to fire generously at anything that fired. It was noisy and, maybe, wasteful, but it kept the snipers’ heads down.
Emery Walker Ltd. del. et sc.
THE SOMME
Second Battalion
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY EMERY WALKER LTD., LONDON
On the 7th March it was clear that the troops in front of them had been replaced by a more cautious and aggressive enemy. So the Battalion turned a couple of their most untenable posts into listening-posts, occupied by night only, and some one suggested that the new artillery which had just come in behind them might put down a creeping barrage for the greater discouragement of snipers. They cleared out a post or two first, in anticipation of stray shots, and lost one man killed and one wounded; but when the barrage arrived it was weak and inaccurate. Guns need time to learn to work in well with their brethren ahead, and the latter are apt to be impatient when they think they are being experimented on.
Not till towards mid-March did the much-written-of German “crack” affect their chilly world. The C.O.’s of the battalions conferred at Brigade Headquarters on the 13th to discuss the eventuality, and in the middle of it the Major-General came in and announced there was good reason to think that the retirement in front of them would begin that night. In which case, so soon as scouts had reported that the enemy trenches were held very lightly or had been abandoned (“But Jerry never abandoned his dam’ machine-guns till we was on top of ’em”), two patrols from each company in the front line, of an officer and twelve men apiece, would go forward on schedule time and occupy. They would be followed by the two front companies, who would make good the enemy’s old front and support lines. With two battalions in the front line to draw from, this made a force of four companies, all of whom were to be under the command of the Senior Lieut.-Colonel in the battalions engaged. He would be known as “O.C. Situation Centre,” and would issue all orders, acting as in command of an advanced guard. But the two reserve companies of the battalions in line would be with the main body of the brigade and would not move without the Brigadier’s direct orders. In other words, no one was to be drawn into anything like a vulgar brawl. And on the 14th March, from a hill near by, a vast fire could be seen far off, which was Péronne a-burning. That same afternoon the enemy began shelling their own front line along the western edge of St. Pierre Vaast Wood. The situation betrayed itself. An officer’s patrol out from the 1st Scots Guards reported the enemy gone from in front. Whereupon the battalions in the line, the 2nd Irish Guards and the 1st Coldstream, moved out cautiously at dusk and established themselves partly in the first of the enemies’ abandoned trenches, with supports, more or less, in our old front line. When their relief came it was a pitch-black night, and the Coldstream had pushed out some patrols into bits of the German trench beyond the chaos of No Man’s Land, who, naturally, did not even themselves know where in France they might be, but had to be discovered and relieved just the same, which took the relieving battalion till two o’clock in the morning. At three o’clock the C.O. of the 2nd Irish Guards—Colonel E. B. Greer—was warned that “Situation Centre”—the two advanced companies who were to beat out hidden snipers—would be formed at 7 A. M. By the accident of Lieut.-Colonel Godman of the Scots Guards being sick, it fell to Greer to command that advanced force. Captain Alexander took our two forward companies, and Captain Sir Ian Colquhoun the two companies of the Scots Guards. The general advance was to begin all along the divisional front at 10 A. M. By that hour the German shelling was intense. They used 5.9’s and larger, as they were firing from a long way back. The trouble for the 2nd Irish Guards companies developed almost at once on their left, where their patrol was fired at by machine-guns from a German trench on the edge of the wood. Their own 1st Battalion, trying to push out of Sailly-Saillisel, was hung up, too—they heard and saw it—for the same reason. The Division could have driven through at the cost of fairly heavy casualties, but nothing was to be gained by wasting men in rushes on hidden machine-guns that can lay out thirty good lives in two minutes. The Scots Guards got on into the wood without much trouble at first, till they, too, ran on snipers between tree-stumps and up and down the defaced trenches, or opened some single machine-gun slinking from cover to cover. It was all slow “feeling,” with alternating advances at walking pace, and long checks—“something like drawing a gorse for wolves instead of foxes.” The shelling through the day was heavy, but ineffective. With such a broken line as ours advancing, the enemy could not tell where any portion was in strength. The force lay up where they happened to stop, and before dawn on the 16th March were told to feel ahead, while the Scots Guards on their right got into touch with the Eighth Division. Progress was slow as the day before, under heavy shelling—sometimes considered and dealt out with intention—at others evidently from a battery using up ammunition before going back. As they worked their way more into St. Pierre Vaast Wood came the sensation, which there was no mistaking, that they were being played with by the Hun, and losing touch as he intended them to do. Certain vital trenches would be controlled by a few snipers and machine-guns; a sunk road offering shelter would be plastered with heavies, and a full company would be held in it, digging for more cover, by dead accurate long-range fire; while far and far behind the orderly German withdrawal of the main body continued in peace.
On the 17th March, for example, “we were never really in touch with the enemy’s rear-guard during the day except for one or two snipers.” On the 18th, “by daybreak we were out of touch with the enemy, and cavalry patrols of King Edward’s Horse and the 21st Lancers went through us.” Here is the comment of the time and the place on our advance: “The German retreat was conducted very skilfully. One cannot say that we caused them to leave one position an hour before they intended. They inflicted upon us a considerable number of casualties (twenty in this battalion, while on our left the 1st Battalion lost considerably more). On the other hand, we saw no evidence that in the actual retirement we had even damaged one German. They left little or nothing behind.”
And the professional judgment is equally fair. “But of course it must be remembered that the task of the (German) regimental officers was an easy one, however difficult it may have been for the Staff. Given time, there is no difficulty in withdrawing battalions from trenches by night, for a few snipers and machine-gunners, knowing the ground, and retreating from trench to trench, can hang up an advance indefinitely unless the troops advancing have strong reserves and are prepared for heavy losses.”
This last was not our situation. The Fourteenth Corps had no divisions in immediate reserve; the sector the Guards Division was working on had been greatly thinned out, and their artillery was relatively small. With tremendous losses in the past and the certainty of more to come, things had to be done as cheaply as possible. “Hence our mode of advance.” It led them into a stale hell which had once been soil of France but was now beyond grace, hope, or redemption. Most of the larger trees in St. Pierre Vaast were cut down, and the smaller ones split by shell or tooth-brushed by machine-gun fire. The ground was bog, studded with a few island-like formations of fire-trench, unrevetted, unboarded, with little dug-outs ten or twelve feet deep, all wet and filthy. There were no regular latrines. Numberless steel helmets and heaps of stick-bombs lay about under foot. The garrisons must have been deadly uncomfortable, and there was good evidence that the enemy had economised men beyond anything that we dared. The ground had been cut to bits by our fire, and in one place yawned what had been a battery position wiped out, unseeing and unseen, weeks ago, as the dead teams round it testified. Very few booby-traps were left behind. The Battalion lost only five men in all through this cause.
And on March 19 they came away from the filth and the multitudes of scattered, distorted dead who grimaced at them over their victory, and were laid off at Montauban next day, to be railway navvies for a few weeks. Their camp had last been occupied by a “labour” battalion. “It would be quite impossible to exaggerate the state of filth in which we found this place. No tins had apparently been burned or buried for months, and rotting matter lay all over the ground.” Something like this has been observed before by other battalions about labour corps. However, they mucked it out into moderate decency, and went daily with the 3rd Grenadiers and the 4th Coldstream to make the broad-gauge line from Trônes Wood to Rocquigny and eventually into Ypres. Eventually, when the Sappers had taught them a little, they slapped it down at the rate of more than half a mile a day. It meant at the last four hours’ marching to reach railhead, and as many hours of strenuous work when they got there. But “the men were quite happy in spite of the long hours and the absolutely vile weather.” They could acquire all the fuel they needed, and had no drills or parades. To toil with your belts or braces disposed as you please; and to wear your cap at outrageous civilian angles; to explain to your desk-bred N.C.O. (with reminiscences, till he cuts you short) that you have had experience on this job in civil life, repairing Dublin trams; to delve in a clean dirt uncumbered by stringy bundles that have once been the likes of yourself; to return, singing, down the road to bountiful meals and a satisfactory “frowst” afterwards, are primitive pleasures far above pay or glory.
Their navvying at one camp or another along the rail lasted till almost the end of April. They were rather pleased with the country round them near Rocquigny, because there was grass on it, and they found passable football grounds. It was a queer, part rural, part mechanical, part military life, in which people grew fat and jovial, and developed sides of their character that the strain of responsibility had hid. The Battalion made friendships, too, with troops in the railway trade—men whom they met day after day at the same place and job, just as though people on the Somme lived for ever. They were taught how to ballast permanent ways, or lever the eternally derailed troop- and construction-trains back on to the sprawling metals.
On the 27th April they were all called in from their scattered labours, reminded that they were guards once more, and promised a long programme of field-training. Inevitably, then, the evening after, came orders to strike their camp at Bois de Hem, pitch it on the Lesbœufs road and get back to road-work between Ginchy, Lesbœufs, and Le Transloy. The march was hot and dusty; which impressed them, for they had forgotten heat. Camp lay close to where the right of the 2nd Guards Brigade had reached, in the battle of September 15, 1916. Here is the picture. The site “had been under severe shell-fire all the winter, so little burying could be done. Before we could pitch the camp we had to get rid of several dead men, and all the country between Lesbœufs and Le Transloy, as well as towards Morval, was dotted with corpses. In one morning, No. 4 Company, incidental to its work on the roads, buried no less than seventy Germans, English, and French. On Ginchy crest we found the body of Lieutenant Montgomery. He had been killed commanding No. 2 Company on September 13 of last year” (that was when No. 2 was wiped out on the eve of the battle of the 15th), “but we had never been able to find him. He was buried on the crest.”
The desolation struck them with continuous horror. Most of the troops had been moved on into the comparatively unspoiled country to the eastward, but the Battalion was forced to sit down among the dead in “mile on mile of tumbled earth, collapsing trenches with their fringe of rotting sand-bags, tangles of rusted wire, and everywhere little crosses. For variety, an occasional wood, in which the trees were mere skeletons, shattered stumps with charred branches.” It is a perfect etching of the Somme. They were impressed, too, by the fiendish forethought and thoroughness with which all signs of civil life and work, and, as far as might be, all means of reviving them, had been wiped out, burned up, blasted off, cut down, or removed by the Hun. Details of destruction and defilement, such as would only occur to malignant apes, had been attended to as painstaking and lovingly in the most unlikely corner of some poor village, as in the fields and among the orchards and factories. They had to fill all shell-holes in camp to make even standing ground for themselves, and, of course, a football “field” came next. Every man returning from work brought back his load of timber or iron out of the pitiful old trenches, not to mention flowers from wrecked gardens, and “we built a regular village.” Their road-mending consisted in digging out the shell-holes till they reached firm ground, filling up with timber and brick (“easy to find).” By this time specialisation had run its course by rail. And thus they worked till the 9th May. But this was the last that was required of them in that form.
They were turned down to training camp at Curlu, almost on the banks of the Somme, in a clean and cleaned-up country where “dead men, even, were hard to find.” By this time specialization had run its course through our armies till the latest platoon-organisation acknowledged but one section that was known as a “rifle” section. The others, although behung with the ancient and honourable weapons of their trade, were bomb, Lewis-gun, and rifle (sniper) sections. But the Battle of Arras had proved what angry company commanders had been saying for months past—that infantry lived or died by their knowledge of the rifle. These Somme officers were accordingly told that most of their time should be given to platoon-training, fire direction, and musketry. (“We did what we were told, but we always found out when it came to a pinch—suppressing machine-guns in a pill-box and stuff of that kind—if you could rush your men into proper position, good shooting did the rest.”) And just as they were buckling down to the new orders, word came, on Sunday, May 13, that they had better prepare for an inspection by the King of the Belgians on Tuesday, May 15. The Brigade put up one long “agony” of rehearsal, and to its own surprise managed to achieve a creditable parade. Unlimited British generals attended the royal visitor, and for the first time in the Battalion’s history their pipers in their Celtic kilts were present. These had arrived about a fortnight before, when the Battalion solemnly invited Captain Hugh Ross of the Scots Guards to tea in his capacity of a “pipe expert” to pronounce on their merits. And civil war did not follow!
On the 17th May they set out via Billon Farm camp to Méricourt l’Abbé, where for the first time in six months, barring a few days at Corbie in January, they were billeted in real houses such as human beings use. Méricourt in summer is quite different from the cramped, windy, damp Méricourt of winter. All the land smiled with the young crops that the old, indefatigable French women and men were cramming it with. Here, while the Guards Division was concentrating preparatory to their move into war again, the battalions were trained hard but not as specialists.
General Ivor Maxse, commanding the Sixteenth Corps (none but corps generals can say certain things in public), lectured on some of the teachings of the Battle of Arras. He gave instances of what comes of divorcing the soldier from his rifle. On one occasion, said he, men were met sidling down a road with the simple statement that the Germans were advancing to counter-attack them, and that they were retiring “because their own supply of bombs had run out.” Patrols sent up to verify, found the counter-attack was being made by four Huns furiously trying to surrender to some one. Again, a company was heavily fired on from a wood about two hundred yards off. Not a man returned the fire. They simply shouted down the trench, “Pass the word for the snipers.” All of which proves what every company commander knows, that the human mind under stress of excitement holds but one idea at a time, or, as the drill books of forty years ago laid down, “men will instinctively act in war as they have been trained to act in peace.”
In spite of the growing crops and intense agriculture, the Battalion found rifle ranges and did “a great deal of much-needed musketry.”
They wound up their stay at Méricourt in great glory at the Brigade sports, sweeping off everything in sight—flat races, steeple-chase, tug-of-war, and the rest, and winning their brigadier’s trophy to the corps with the greatest number of firsts by a clear “possible” against the whole Guards Division. (“’Tis this way. A good battalion will do what is wanted; but a happy battalion, mark you, takes on from that. Did we work at the Sports? Remember, we was all in the pink, trained on that dam’ railway an’ fatted up for Boesinghe. What chance had the rest of the Division against us at all?”)
They entrained on the 30th May as part of the vast concentration that was crystallising itself for the Third Battle of Ypres, and, after twelve hours, breakfasted at Arques, near St. Omer, and marched all day to their crowded billets, which, like the rest of the landscape, were loaded up with crops and difficult to train in. They knew nothing of what was expected of them till 11th June, when C.O.’s were told at Brigade Headquarters that they were to practise assaults from trench to trench instead of “open warfare.” A battle, including earthquakes, had taken place at Messines which had unkeyed the situation to a certain extent, and the Guards Division would be needed to develop it.
The screw would be applied next in the Salient, and they would go up to Elverdinghe, on a sector that had long been notoriously quiet. But they were assured that as soon as “Jerry” had word of their arrival they would not feel neglected. All this on the top of their open-warfare exercise was disappointing. They knew more than they wanted to about the Ypres areas, and had hoped that something was going to crack on the high and windy Somme and let them triumphantly into Cambrai. “Fatted troops” are ever optimistic.
Their march towards their new ground was a hot and villainously dusty one, with packs and steel helmets, of eleven miles and the wind at their backs, so they moved in a sweating pillar of cloud. Not a man of theirs fell out, and the Brigade knew it, for the C.O. of the 3rd Grenadiers, who were bringing up the rear, sent along written congratulations with word that he had not seen one single Irish guardsman panting by the wayside. To have won that little record had meant the hardest sort of work for officers and N.C.O.’s.
On the 15th June they lay at Cardoen Farm, in shelters and huts round the place on which the enemy had no direct observation, though it was not four miles behind the line. Brigade Headquarters was more or less underground at Elverdinghe Château, and the enemy attended to it the instant the Guards Division relieved the Thirty-eighth Division. The front lines, as usual hereabouts, were too close together for unrestricted artillery work; but supports, communications, railways, and battery positions were open to him, and he dosed them by day and night. The divisional sector had a frontage of about twelve hundred yards, which ran from the point where our line bending back from the Ypres salient, turned across the Yser Canal some five thousand yards north-north-west of Ypres itself, and thence straight along the canal bank to where the Belgians took on. The Battalion relieved the 1st Coldstream on the 18th June, and found their front, which was on top of the canal embankment and within fifty yards of the enemy’s, fairly good. Owing to water showing at two feet, trenches were protected by breast-works and well revetted, but liable, from their make, to be badly blown by direct hits when, since it crowned the breast-works, their own wire would hamper the occupants. The canal bed, empty and overgrown with high grass and weeds, was all dead ground. The most that could be said for the position was that it gave fair protection against shell, but might be awkward to hold, as support and back-lines were much too much under direct observation. Battalion Headquarters were regularly shelled, and in Boesinghe village itself, the most dangerous area of all, there was no cover, and one had to skirmish about in the open, with both eyes and ears on what might be coming next. The front, as usual, under these conditions was the safest. They were so close to the enemy that they were not shelled at all. What little stuff fell near them was the enemy’s own shorts, upon receipt of which the German front line would loose protesting rockets. Support and reserve companies were regularly shelled, with the ration and water parties pushing supplies up the railway in trucks from Elverdinghe to B.H.Q. The Battalion’s normal work was repairing blown head-cover and breast-work, and reporting, with oaths, that it was impossible to dig on account of subsoil water. They indulged the enemy every early morning with five minutes’ “rapid” of Lewis-guns or rifles, and their Stokes mortars were busy day and night. Machine-guns (nothing can keep a machine-gunner quiet long) sprayed enemy dumps intermittently all night long. It was an intimate, uneasy dog’s life of dodging and ducking; yet with reliefs and all it only cost them twenty-four casualties, mostly slight, in the four days’ turn. Their rest at Cardoen Farm afterwards meant fatigues of carrying sand-bags and six casualties to show for it; a brisk shelling of the camp; and a brawl between their Lewis-gun battery and one of the wandering Hun planes with which the camps were so infested that they were hardly noticed in reports or letters.
Their next tour, June 27 to 29, was in support behind the canal, in dug-outs round Bleuet Farm; Battalion Headquarters in the remnants of the farm itself. Our own artillery seemed, from the infantry point of view, to be devoting its attention to building up dumps and bringing in more guns; so the enemy had it rather their own way in shelling working-parties and communications. The relief was a bad one, and that tour worked out at nineteen casualties, of whom six were dead.
They ended June in wet bivouacs at a camp near International Corner, which had an unsavoury reputation for being shelled, and under the shadow of a specially heavy fatigue of burying a cable in a forward area. But—army fashion—nothing happened. No shells arrived; it was too wet even for parades, and some other lucky battalion had that cable-picnic all to itself.
On the 2nd July they were marched off twelve miles to Herzeele, where as no billets were ready they dined in a field, and shook down afterwards among a crowd of gunners. Many tales have been told of happy Herzeele, for it boasted at that time no less than three town majors, every one of them a colonel! Hence some small muddle as to billets.
The immense preparations for what was to be the Third Battle of the Ypres included, for the Guards Division, ten days’ special training over trenches such as they would have to deal with when their turn came. These were duly dug by fatigue-parties in an open stretch of country near the town, and “the whole model was on the same scale as the actual German front-line system.” Although the existing features of the ground were puzzling at first, the model proved to be extremely useful as teaching all ranks the lie of the land.
The only features not included were the hidden concrete “pill-boxes” supporting each other behind his line, on which the enemy was basing his new and unpleasant system of elastic defence. But, allowing for inevitable unrealities, there is no doubt that training “on the model” supplies and brings a battalion to hand better than any other device. The men grow keen as they realise by eye what is to be expected; talk it over afterwards (there are certain analogies between trench-to-trench attack and “soccer”); the N.C.O.’s discuss with the officers, and the battalion commander can check some preventable errors before the real thing is loosed.
His Majesty the King came on the 6th July to watch a brigade attack in the new formation. It was a perfect success, but the next week saw them sweated through it again and again in every detail, till “as far as the Battalion was concerned the drill of the attack was reduced almost to perfection.” In their rare leisure came conferences, map- and aeroplane-study, and, most vital of all, “explaining things to the N.C.O.’s and men.” They wound up with a model of a foot to a hundred yards, giving all the features in the Battalion’s battle-area. The men naturally understood this better than a map, but it was too small. (“’Twas like a doll’s-house garden, and it looked you would be across and over it all in five minutes. But we was not! We was not!”)
On the 14th, in hot weather, the move towards the cockpit began. They bivouacked in certain selected woods that gave cover against searching planes, who knew as much about it as the enemy staff did, and bombed all movements on principle.
On the 17th they went into line “for a tour which proved to be one of the most unpleasant and most expensive” since the Battalion came to France. They held the whole of the 2nd Guards Brigade frontage, with a battalion of the 3rd Guards Brigade on their left, so the companies were necessarily broken up, as their platoons were detached to the separate trenches. All No. 4 Company and two platoons of No. 3 were in the front line, and a platoon of No. 3 and Company H.Q. in the support-line near Hunter Street. In Walkrantz Trench was another platoon of No. 3; No. 1 Company was in an unwholesome support-trench; and working with it, one platoon of No. 2. In Bleuet Farm were the remaining three platoons of No. 2 Company; and Battalion Headquarters were in Chasseur Farm, about a hundred and fifty yards behind No. 1 Company. Altogether, it might fairly be called a “hurrah’s nest” to relieve, hold, or get away from. The enemy, even without being stirred up by our first series of preliminary bombardments, which had opened on the 15th, were thoroughly abreast of things. They began by catching No. 2 Company coming up to Bleuet Farm in a barrage of gas-shells, which meant putting on box-respirators in the dark and going ahead blind. Only one man was knocked out, however. The transport was gassed late at night on the Elverdinghe road, and held up for two hours under fumes of lachrymatory and phosgene. But transport is expected to get in, whatever happens, and the fact that Lieutenant R. Nutting, its officer, was badly gassed, too, was an incident. From the official point of view he should have put on his respirator at the first, which is notoriously easy when rounding up hooded men and panicky horses. So he suffered. But as he was the only person who knew where Bleuet Farm might be in that poisonous blackness, he lay on the mess-cart, and between upheavals, guided the convoy thither. Next morn, after spending the night in a dug-out, he had to be carried back to the dressing-station. That same night 2nd Lieutenant Lofting, while on patrol along the canal bank, was slightly wounded in the leg.
The next three days were one nightmare of stores of all kinds for the battle-dumps pouring into the front line while the platoons there stacked and sorted them out, under continuous fire. Our hourly increasing force of heavies (the field-guns were not yet called upon) took as much of the burden off our men as they could, but the enemy were well set and knew just what they had to bowl at. The front-line companies’ work was to repair a very great deal of trench damage; make assembly-trenches for the coming attack; pile up the dumps, praying that the next salvo would not send them all sky-high, and keep the crawling communication-lines clear of corpses, wreckage, wounded and traffic blocks.
The Diary puts it all in these cold words: “Some of the carrying-parties under N.C.O.’s did very fine work under fire. In no case did any party fail to perform the work set it.” Other pens have described that tour as “house-moving in Hell.” They lost men in the dark who were not missed till morning. On the night of the 18th, probably through a misreading of the many lights which were going up everywhere and might have been read as SOS’s, our big guns suddenly put down a bitter barrage just behind the German front line. They replied by one just behind ours, and a searching bombardment round our wretched Battalion Headquarters. One shell went through the roof of an officer’s dug-out in No. 1 Company trench and killed Lieutenant James (he had joined the Battalion, for the second time, not a month ago) and 2nd Lieutenant Wilson, only a few weeks joined. Lieutenant Paget was also wounded in the knee. The casualties among the men were heavy also; and next night, as our field-guns came into play, a “short” from one of them killed an irreplaceable C.S.M.—Grimwood of No. 4 Company—which on the eve of engagement is equivalent to losing an officer.
On the morning of the 20th, No. 4 Company sent out four raiding parties across the canal bank to see how strongly the enemy was holding things, and, quaintly enough, to “accustom them to our temporary occupation of their front line.” The inventive Hun had managed to raise the water level of the canal, and two of the parties had to abandon the attempt altogether. The others, led by their sergeants, floundered across, sometimes up to their chins, found the enemy line held, and came back with useful news and no casualties, for which their corps commander and their brigadier congratulated them. On the afternoon of the same day, the C.O. (Byng-Hopwood) and Second in Command (Stephen Bruton) of the 1st Coldstream came up to look at the line, and were both killed by the same shell in a communication-trench.
On the 21st, at the discomfortable hour before earliest dawn, our R.E. Company began to send over gas from four-inch Stokes mortars and projectors, and our own two-inch Stokes in the front line strove to cover the noise by separate rapid fire. Thanks to past practice with the box-respirators, in which our perspiring men had at last learned to work, there were no casualties when a gas “short” burst just behind the front line. It was their first acquaintance with gas-shells but, all told, only one officer and five men were gassed, nearly all of whom returned to duty in a few days. The relief was a small action in itself, for the companies had to be extricated one by one, and “the dispositions of the relieving battalions were different from ours.” Nor was it a clean departure, since the back-lines were more and more crowded with fatigue-parties, each claiming right of way, and the Battalion was held up in Hunter Street, which at its widest was perhaps four feet and a half, by a couple of hundred men shifting trifles such as mats and bridges towards the firing-line. When they were getting away between Bleuet and Marguerite Farms, Lieutenant Keenan was hit in the thigh by a splinter of shell.
That tour cost the Battalion six officers killed or wounded and sixty casualties in other ranks. Considering the shelling, the heavy traffic and the back-line “furniture removals,” the wonder was that they had not suffered thrice as much; but for the eve of a first-class engagement it was ample.
Their last preparations for the attack were put in in bivouac in the wooded area about half a mile north-west of De Wippe Cabaret, where half the Battalion was requisitioned for long, heavy, and unpleasant fatigues across shelled ground into forward areas, which led to a small group of casualties. Accommodation in the woods was insufficient, and many slept where they could under the trees (no bad thing with wandering planes at large); but the weather held fine and hot. And then, with everything ready to loose off, the attack was delayed. The reason given was that the French were to spend a few days more in making sure of success before carrying out their end of it. A battalion takes the smallest interest in its neighbours at any time, and on the edge of battle less than usual. All that the men knew was that the French were on their left, where the Belgians had been, and they hoped that they were strong in .75’s. (“Ye can hear the French long before ye can see them. They dish out their field-gun fire the way you’d say it was machine-guns. A well-spoken, quiet crowd, the French, but their rations are nothing at all.”)
There is pathetic interest on the entry of the 26th July that the C.O. (Eric Greer) “wrote out Operation Orders for Father Knapp”—a dead man, as the Fates were to decree it, for a dead man. Those orders were as simple as the problem before the Battalion. They had to advance straight to their front, with the 1st Scots Guards on their right, the latter Battalion’s right being neatly bounded by the Langemarck-Staden railway which again was the dividing line between the Guards and the Thirty-eighth Division. If luck held, and pill-boxes did not turn out to be too numerous, they would all fetch up eventually on the banks of the Steenbeek River, three thousand five hundred yards north-east by east from their starting-point.
A happy mixture of chance and design had shown that the enemy were in the habit of abandoning their front line along the canal during daylight, and of manning it lightly at night. General Feilding, commanding the Guards Division, promptly took advantage of the knowledge to throw the 3rd Coldstream across and establish them on the far bank. The coup was entirely successful, and it saved the Division the very heavy casualties that would have followed a forcing of the canal had that been held in strength.
On the 27th, at a conference of C.O.’s, they were told that the enemy had further withdrawn on that sector, about five hundred yards up the stage, so to speak, and were resting their front line on a system known to us as Cariboo and Cannon trenches. One of our scouting-aeroplanes had been searching the ground at two or three hundred feet level, and was of opinion there was nobody there who cared to shoot back. It was a curious situation, for though the Battalion had rehearsed and rehearsed what they were to do till, as men said, they could have done it in their sleep, nobody was at ease. (This, by the way, disproves the legend that battalions know by instinct whether they are going to win or lose.) Late that night a hostile plane came over the forest area and woke them up with bombs. Lieutenant Arthur Paget, attached to the M.G.C., was slightly wounded. On the same day a draft of ninety men arrived as reinforcements. Their position was that of supers, for in a corps trained as the 2nd Irish Guards had been to carry out this one affair in a certain way, no amateurs were allowed. Greer had seen to it that every soul over whom he had authority should study the glass, sand, tin, and twig model of the ground till he knew it by heart, and had issued, moreover, slips of paper with a few printed sentences (“like home post cards”) to serve for unit commanders’ reports in action. On the back of these was a map of the sector itself, and “every one was instructed to mark his position with an X.” The results were superb, though Greer did not survive to see them.
The Division had its battle-patrols out and across the canal on the night of the 28th July, pressing forward gingerly, digging themselves in or improving existing “slits” in the ground against shell-fire. The Battalion did much the same thing at the back, for all the world where they walked with cautious shoulders was very unwholesome, and the barrages clanged to and fro everlastingly. Yet, had they been asked, they would have said, “Our guns were doing nothing out of the way.” Men were so broke to the uproar they hardly noticed it.
On the 29th July two companies (1 and 2) of the Battalion moved out to relieve the leading companies of the 3rd Coldstream, who had been for some time on the far side of the canal. All went well in the summer afternoon till a hostile aeroplane saw them filing across, and signalled a barrage which killed or wounded forty men, wounded Lieutenant Hannay of No. 2 Company, and killed Captain Synge in command of No. 1. Synge was perhaps one of the best company commanders that the Battalion had ever known, and as popular as he was brave.
Colonel Greer went up into the line directly afterwards with Captain D. Gunston as his second in command, and Lieutenant Hanbury as adjutant. They were cruelly short of combatant officers—past casualties had reduced the number to ten; and the only ones left in reserve were Major Ferguson and Lieutenant Hely-Hutchinson. The day and night were spent by the two companies in digging in where they were, while Nos. 3 and 4 waited on.
Early on the morning of the 30th July the French on their left and the whole of the Fifth Army put down a half-hour barrage to find out where the enemy would pitch his reply. He retaliated on the outskirts of Boesinghe village and the east bank of the canal, not realising to what an extent we were across that obstacle. In the evening dusk the remaining two companies of the Battalion slipped over and took up battle positions, in artillery (“pigtail”) formation of half-platoons, behind Nos. 1 and 2 Companies, who had shifted from their previous night’s cover, and now lay out in two waves east of the Yper Lea. By ten o’clock the whole of the Guards Division was in place. The 2nd and 3rd Guards Brigades were to launch the attack, and the 1st, going through them, was to carry it home. A concrete dug-out in the abandoned German front line just north of the railway was used as a Battalion Headquarters. It was fairly impervious to anything smaller than a 5.9, but naturally its one door faced towards the enemy and had no blind in front of it—a lack which was to cost us dear.
July 31st opened, at 3.30 A. M., with a barrage of full diapason along the army front, followed on the Guards sector by three minutes of “a carefully prepared hate,” during which two special companies projected oil-drums throwing flame a hundred yards around, with thermit that burned everything it touched. The enemy had first shown us how to employ these scientific aids, and we had bettered the instruction.
His barrage in reply fell for nearly an hour on the east bank of the canal. Our creeping barrage was supposed to lift at 4 A. M. and let the two leading battalions (2nd Irish Guards and 1st Scots Guards) get away; but it was not till nearly a quarter of an hour later that the attack moved forward in waves behind it. Twelve minutes later, Nos. 1 and 2 Companies of the Battalion had reached the first objective (Cariboo and Cannon trenches) “with only one dead German encountered”; for the enemy’s withdrawal to his selected line had been thorough. The remaining companies followed, and behind them came the 1st Coldstream, all according to schedule; till by 5.20 A. M. the whole of the first objective had been taken and was being consolidated, with very small loss. They were pushing on to the second objective, six hundred yards ahead, when some of our own guns put a stationary barrage on the first objective—Cariboo trenches and the rest. Mercifully, a good many of the men of the first and second waves had gone on with the later ones, where they were of the greatest possible service in the annoying fights and checks round the concreted machine-gun posts. Moreover, our barrage was mainly shrapnel—morally but not physically effective. No. 2 Company and No. 4 Company, for example, lay out under it for a half and three quarters of an hour respectively without a single casualty. But no troops are really grateful for their own fire on their own tin hats.
About half-past five, Colonel Greer, while standing outside advanced Battalion Headquarters dug-out in the first objective line, was killed instantly by shrapnel or bullet. It was his devoted work, his arrangement and foresight that had brought every man to his proper place so far without waste of time or direction. He had literally made the Battalion for this battle as a steeple-chaser is made for a given line of country. Men and officers together adored him for his justice, which was exemplary and swift; for the human natural fun of the man; for his knowledge of war and the material under his hand, and for his gift of making hard life a thing delightful. He fell on the threshold of the day ere he could see how amply his work had been rewarded. Captain Gunston took command of the Battalion, for, of the seniors, Captain Alexander was out ahead with No. 4 Company, and Major Ferguson was in Regimental Reserve. Headquarters were moved up into Cariboo trench, and by six o’clock the second objective had been reached, in the face of bad machine-gun fire from Hey Wood that had opened on us through a break in our barrage.
No. 3 Company on the right of our line, next to the Scots Guards, found themselves at one point of this advance held up by our own barrage, and had the pleasure of seeing a battery of German field-guns limber up and “go off laughing at them.” Then they came under oblique machine-gun fire from the right.
Lieutenant Sassoon,[2] commanding No. 3, got his Lewis-gun to cover a flank attack on the machine-gun that was doing the damage, took it with seven German dead and five wounded prisoners, and so freed the advance for the Scots Guards and his own company. As the latter moved forward they caught it in the rear from another machine-gun which had been overlooked, or hidden itself in the cleaning-up of Hey Wood.
Sassoon sent back a couple of sections to put this thing out of action (which they did) and pushed on No. 4 Company, which was getting much the same allowance from concrete emplacements covering machine-guns outside Artillery Wood. Captain Alexander launched an attack at these through a gap in our barrage, outflanked them and accounted for three machine-guns and fourteen Germans. There was some slight difficulty at this point in distinguishing between our barrage, which seemed to have halted, and the enemy’s, which seemed to be lifting back. So Captain Alexander had to conduct his advance by a series of short rushes in and out of this double barrage, but somehow or other contrived to consolidate his position without undue delays. (“Consolidatin’ positions at Boesinghe meant being able to lie down and get your breath while the rest of ye ran about the country hammerin’ machine-gun posts an’ damnin’ our barrages.”) Thus occupied, he sent back word to Captain Gunston that in the circumstances he waived his seniority and placed himself under the latter’s command. “The pace was too good to inquire.”
This was in the interval before Ferguson, acting Second in Command, who by regulation had been left behind, could get word of Greer’s death, reach Battalion Headquarters and take over, which he did a little later. On his way up, their brigadier (Ponsonby) told him that “he could not find words strong enough to express his appreciation of the way in which the Battalion had behaved, and for its dash and devotion to duty.” Indeed, they admitted among themselves—which is where criticism is fiercest—that they had pulled the scheme off rather neatly, in spite of their own barrages, and that the map and model study had done the trick. By ten o’clock of the morning their work was substantially complete. They had made and occupied the strong points linking up between their advanced companies and the final objectives, which it was the business of the other brigades to secure. As they put it, “everything had clicked”; and, for a small reward, Fate sent to Battalion Headquarters the commanding officer and adjutant of the 73rd Hanoverian Fusiliers who had been captured near the second objective, and who wore in gold braid on their left sleeve the word “Gibraltar” in commemoration of the siege when that regiment, as Hanoverian, fought on the English side. The adjutant spoke English well, and thought that the U.S.A., coming into the war at last, would be bad for Germany. When they asked him if he wanted peace he replied: “The country wants peace. The men want peace, but I am an officer, and an officer never wants peace.” Herein he spoke more truly concerning his own caste than was ever realised by the British politician.
He was immensely interested, too, in our “Zero” hour and its arrangements, but seemed unable to grasp the system. “How,” he asked, “do you manage your—love hour, your nought hour—how do you call it?” He appeared to think it was something like lawn-tennis, and they explained to him in the wet-floored dug-out, which had already received two direct high-explosive souvenirs, that there was, as he might have observed, very little of “love” about a British Zero.
Then there fell, most naturally, a great thirst upon all the world, for bottles had been drained long ago, and a carrying-party of the 3rd Grenadiers had gone astray in that wilderness, and word had come in from Brigade Headquarters that the pontoon bridge over the canal was not yet finished, so they would have to draw on the water-dump on its west bank. Fatigue parties were sent off at once from the two companies panting there. The other two in the second objective further on would ... but orders had scarcely been issued when Lieutenant Nutting pushed up with a string of pack-beasts and made a forward water-dump just behind the first objective, which saved trouble and that exposure which means men’s lives. (“All that time, of course, the battle was ragin’—that is to say, we was being shelled and shot over as usual—but, ye’ll understand, we wanted water more than we minded the shells. Thirst is stronger than death with the need on ye.”)
They disposed themselves for the afternoon, Nos. 1 and 2 Companies taking over from the 1st Scots Guards in the first objective, and Nos. 3 and 4 in the second, with linked strong posts connecting both lines. They also withdrew a couple of platoons sent forward from Nos. 1 and 2 Companies to the final objective (all objectives had now been reached) to rejoin their companies. At three o’clock Father Knapp appeared at Battalion Headquarters—that most insanitary place—and proposed to stay there. It was pointed out to him that the shelling was heavy, accommodation, as he could see, limited, and he had better go to the safer advanced dressing-station outside Boesinghe and deal with the spiritual needs of his wounded as they were sent in. The request had to be changed to a reasonably direct order ere he managed to catch it; for, where his office was concerned, the good Father lacked something of that obedience he preached. And a few hours after he had gone down to what, with any other man, would have been reasonable security, news arrived that he had been mortally wounded while tending cases “as they came out” of the dressing-station. He must have noticed that the accommodation there was cramped, too, and have exposed himself to make shelter for others. Captain David Lees, the Battalion M.O., seems to have been equally careless, but luckier. He walked through what is described as “an intensely hostile” barrage (there were not very many friendly ones falling that day) to the corner of Artillery Wood, where he found a batch of wounded exposed to barrages and machine-guns. He was shelled all the time he was dressing them, and when he had finished, he carried, in turn, Lieutenant Buller, Sergeant McNally, and Private Donoghue to a safe trench just outside the barrage zone. To do this he had to go four times through the barrage before he could continue his round of professional visits which took him through it yet a fifth time.
During the afternoon, though there was a general bombardment by the enemy of the first and second objectives for ten minutes every half-hour, the bulk of the shelling was aimless and wandering, as though the gunners could not hang on to any target. Men were killed, but not with intention, and the living could feel that the sting had gone out of the affair. They finished the interminable day under a barrage of gas-shells and H.E., which suggested at first a counter-attack behind it. At that moment, Nos. 2 and 4 Companies were holding an advanced position near Captain’s Farm towards the last objective; and it looked as though they would have to be left there all night, but by eleven o’clock the shelling had died out, the mopping-up companies of the 1st Coldstream relieved our outlying two, and a quarter of an hour later, dripping and muddy, the whole Battalion got away to a low, wet, and uncomfortable camp in the Roussel area, whose single mitigation was a rum-issue.
They had lost in the past three days three officers (Greer, their C.O.; Synge, by shrapnel, on the 29th; and Lieutenant Armfield, found shot on the 31st, not far from the dug-out they had converted into Battalion Headquarters). Lieutenants Crawford, Buller, and Vaughan-Morgan were the wounded. Casualties in other ranks came to 280, a large part due to machine-gun fire. It was a steadying balance-sheet and, after an undecided action, would have been fair excuse for a little pause and reconstruction. But a clean-cut all-out affair, such as Boesinghe, was different, though it had been saddened by the loss of an unselfish priest who feared nothing created, and a commanding officer as unselfish and as fearless as he. The elder and the younger man had both given all they had to the Battalion, and their indomitable souls stayed with it when, next day (August 1), the authorities inquired whether it felt equal to going into the line again for what would certainly be an unusually abominable “sit and be hit” tour. The Battalion replied that it was ready, and spent the day cleaning up and putting in recommendations for awards for the battle. Among these were Lieutenant Black, the intelligence officer who in the course of his duties had had to wander for eighteen hours over the whole position captured by the Battalion, reporting situations, meeting crises as they arose, and keeping his head and his notes under continuous barrages. His right-hand man had been Sergeant Milligan, who “succeeded in establishing advanced Battalion Headquarters in the first objective five minutes after it had been captured, in spite of the fact that the barrage fell on that line for the next half-hour.” He then found a company, all of whose officers, save one, had been wounded, helped to “reorganise it” with a strong hand and a firm voice, went on with it, assisted in outflanking three machine-gun positions, and kept communication unbroken between the front and back of their attack. Be it remembered that the right sector over which the 2nd Irish Guards and the Scots Guards moved was much more blinded with houses, woods, and the like than the left; and there was room for every sort of trouble if the sectors did not work together. But Greer’s insistence that the men should know the model of the ground, and their officers the aeroplane maps of it, and his arrangements whereby all units could report lucidly at any moment where they were, had brought them success. So, with 50 per cent. of their strength gone, and the dismal wet soaking the stiff survivors to the bone, they hobbled about, saying, “If he were only here now to see how he has pulled this off!”
Their work on the 2nd August was to take over from a 1st Brigade Battalion on the left of the divisional front next to the French. The latter’s front here ran several hundred yards in rear of the Guards, and since their centre was well forward again, the re-entrant angle was an awkward and unsafe pocket, which necessitated any battalion that lay on the French right spending men and trouble in making a defensive left flank. The advance at this point had been carried forward to within a few hundred yards of the Steenbeek River. Indeed, on the right of the divisional front the 2nd Grenadiers were across and established. The Battalion moved up in rain across the water-logged, shell-pitted ground at dusk, to be welcomed by news that the enemy were massing. The enemy would surely have stuck in the mud had they attempted any counter-attack, but the Thirty-eighth Division on the right seemed to see them advancing in battle-array and sent up urgent demands for a barrage, which at once brought the hostile barrage down all along the line. Under this quite uncalled-for demonstration the companies floundered to their shallow trenches, which were a foot deep in mud. They had no particular idea where they or their rendezvous might be, but, obviously, the first thing was to get into touch with the French and beg them to straighten up their line where it nicked into ours. This was done in the dawn of the 3rd August, and before the end of the day our allies had attended to the matter and advanced up to the line of the Steenbeek. Then they, in turn, asked us to supply a standing-patrol to link up their right to our left at Sentier Farm on the extreme edge of the ground won. It was not a locality, however, where any move could be attempted in daylight. The 3rd Coldstream had some men there, but these, for good reason, were lying low till we could relieve them. Captain Alexander and Lieutenant Hanbury had been sent down for a rest after their heavy work; and the Battalion, under Ferguson, was divided into two wings, the right commanded by Sassoon, with Lieutenants Van der Noot and Kane; the left by Captain Gunston, with Lieutenant Rea and, temporarily, Lieutenant Black. The 1st Coldstream turned up just on the edge of dusk to take over from the Battalion which was to relieve the 3rd Coldstream in the front line. Here, for once, efficiency did not pay. The handing over was completed all too well before the light had gone, and as they moved forward a burst of shrapnel killed one man and seriously wounded Lieutenant Van der Noot and five men. They disposed two companies in snipe-bogs at Signal Farm, and the other two, in like conditions, at Fourché Farm. There was practically no shelter against heavy shelling. Battalion Headquarters was an eight-by-four concrete dug-out with three inches of water on the floor, and the only people who kept warm seem to have been Lieutenant Rea and a couple of platoons who got into touch with the French and spent the night making a strong standing-patrol of two sections and a Lewis-gun at Sentier Farm, which was where the French wanted it. For the rest, “practically no shelter, incessant rain, continuous shell-fire, and mud half-way up the legs, but casualties comparatively few, and the spirit of all ranks excellent.”
The Welsh Guards relieved them on the night of the 4th, and they got hot tea (the adjutant had gone down on purpose to see to that) at Bleuet Farm, entrained at Elverdinghe for Proven, and at Porchester Camp, which they reached on the morning of the 5th, found a dry camp that had been pitched before the rain, more hot tea, a change of clothes, socks, and rum waiting for them. They breakfasted “before retiring to bed.” (“We was dead done, but ye’ll understand, ’twas nothing more than that. Our hearts was light—except for Father Knapp an’ Greer; but if they had not been taken that day ’twould have been later. That sort of men they are not made to live. They do an’ they die.”)
The general impression at Porchester Camp was that the Guards Division would be out of the line for the next two weeks or so, while the Twenty-ninth Division took over their work and secured a jumping-off place on the far side of the Steenbeek, with a new advance, in which the Guards would take part, towards Houthulst Forest. Meantime, sufficient to the day was the camp’s daily small beer—rows, for instance, with company cooks about diet-sheets (this was a matter Greer had been deep in just before his death), an inspection which kept them standing-to for nearly a couple of hours and was then cancelled; a farmer who, meaning to be kind, cut his crops early so that they might have a nice stubbly parade-ground, which no one in the least wanted; a lecture on Boesinghe by the C.O. to Captains Ward and Redmond and Lieutenants FitzGerald and De Moleyns, and all the N.C.O.’s who had come up with the last drafts that were making good the Battalion losses and giving the old hands a deal of trouble. For the enemy had developed at Boesinghe a defensive system of shell-holes filled with a few men and a machine-gun, and further protected by modest flanking machine-gun pill-boxes, over a depth of fifteen hundred or two thousand yards before one got to his main-line system of triple trenches. It was wholly damnable because, as the Guards and the Twentieth and Twenty-ninth Divisions had found out, artillery was not much use against holes in the ground, even when the field-guns could be brought close enough across the morasses to reach them. Warley knew little about the proper forms of attack on such positions, and the new hands had to be taught it under menace of the daring planes. The Hun never threw away an opportunity of doing evil to his enemy, and while they lay at Bedford Camp (August 13) a number of the A.S.C. horses died owing to steel shavings having been cunningly mixed in their baled hay by some pro-Boche agent in the far-off lands where it was purchased.