All through the 1st of July our guns bombarded their chosen front with the object of cutting, not too ostentatiously, the wire where our raid was going to take place, and of preparing the way on the right for an attack by the 3rd Guards Brigade on a small German salient that had to be reduced. The enemy answered with a new type of trench-mortar shell, nine inches in diameter, fired from a rifled mortar of high trajectory at a thousand yards’ range. The shock and smash of it were worse than a 5.9, and did much damage to Nile Trench, but caused no casualties. The 2nd July was the day for the raid itself, and just as Battalion Headquarters were discussing the very last details, an urgent message from Brigade Headquarters came in to them—“Please hasten your report on pork and bean rations.”
The notion was that our 18-pounders and 4.5 hows. with a couple of trench-mortars, would open heavily at twenty minutes to ten. Ten minutes later, the Stokes mortars were to join in. At ten the guns would lift and make a barrage while the Stokes mortars attended to the flanks of the attack. It was a clear evening, so light, indeed, that at the last minute the men were told to keep their jackets on lest their shirts should betray them. (It was then, men said later, that the raid should have been postponed.) Everything was quite quiet, and hardly a shot was being fired anywhere, when the party lined up under Lieutenant F. Pym. Our bombardment opened punctually, but drew no answer from the enemy for ten minutes. Then they put down a barrage behind our front line, which was the origin of all the trouble to come. At the last minute, one single unrelated private, appearing from nowhere in particular, was seen to push his way down the trench, climbing over the raiders where they crouched waiting for the life-or-death word. Said an officer, who assumed that at the least he must bear vital messages: “Who are you?” “R.F.A. trench-mortar man, sir,” was the reply. Then, “Where the devil are you going?”—“Going to get my tea, sir.” He passed on, mess-tin in hand, noticing nothing that was outside of his own immediate show; for of such, mercifully, were the armies of England.
Meantime the enemy barrage increased on Nile Trench, and the front trenches began to gap badly. There was still light enough to give a good view of the German parapets when our raiders went over the top, and several machine-guns opened on them from the enemy second line. This was a bad kick-off, for, with our leading raiders out in the open, it would have been murder to have held the rest back. They all went on into the barrage and the machine-gun fire, and from that point the account of what actually, or supposedly, happened must, as usual, be collected from survivors. The whole attack seems to have reached the German wire which was “well cut in places.” Here our men were checked by machine-gun fire (they probably ran up to the muzzles of them) and some bombing. They stopped and began to bomb back. Pym rushed forward through the leading men, jumped into the trench, landed in an empty German bay, shouting to them to follow, turned left with a few men, reached the door of a machine-gun dug-out with its gun in full blast, broke in, found two men at work, knocked one of them off the gun and, with the help of Private Walshe, made him prisoner. Our bombers, meantime, had spread left and right, as laid down, to hold each end of the captured section, but had further to block a communication-trench which entered it about the middle, where the enemy was trying to force his way in. It is difficult to say whether there was not an attack on both flanks as well. At any rate, a general bomb-scuffle followed, in which our men held up the enemy and tried to collect prisoners. The captured section of trench only contained one dead and five living. One of these “proved unmanageable and had to be killed.” Four were hurried back under escort for samples, but two of these were killed by their own shell-fire on the road. The R.E. officer looked round, as his duty was, to find things to demolish, but the trench was clean and empty. He was hit twice, but managed to get back. Three gas-experts had also been attached to the expedition. Two of them were wounded on the outward run. The third searched the trench but found no trace of gas engines. Some papers and documents were snatched up from the dug-outs, but he who took charge of them did not live to hand over. The barrage grew heavier; the machine-gun fire from the enemy second line never ceased; and the raiders could see the home-parapet going up in lumps. It was an exquisitely balanced choice of evils when, at about ten past ten, Lieutenant Pym blew his horn for the withdrawal. A minute or two later, men began to trickle over our parapet through the barrage, and here the bulk of the casualties occurred. Our guns ceased fire at twenty past ten, but the enemy battered savagely at our front line with heavies and trench-mortars till eleven. The result was that “the front line, never very good, became chaotic, and the wounded had to be collected in undamaged bays.” It was hopeless to attempt to call the roll there, so what raiders could stand, with the two surviving prisoners, were sent up to Brigade Headquarters while the wounded were got across the open to Lancashire Farm and the trolley-line there. Pym was nowhere to be found, and though some men said, and honestly believed, that they had seen him re-enter our lines, he was not of the breed which would have done this till he had seen the last of his command out of the German trenches. He may have got as far as the German wire on his way back and there, or in that neighbourhood, have been killed; but he was never in our trench again after he left it. Others, too, of that luckless party bore themselves not without credit. For example, a signaller, name not recorded, who laid his telephone wire up to the trench across No Man’s Land and had it cut by a shell while he was seeking for Lieutenant Pym. On his return he came across a man shot in the legs, and bore him, under heavy shell and machine-gun fire, to our wire which was not constructed for helpless wounded to get through. The signaller dropped into the trench, calling on Sergeant O’Hagan, a busy man that night, for stretcher-bearers, but these had all been hit. The Sergeant suggested that he should telephone to Battalion Headquarters and draw some from there. The telephonist—perhaps because a doctor rarely uses his own drugs—preferred to put the case directly to a couple of men in No. 2 Company, at the same time indicating the position of the wounded man, and those three handed him down into the very moderate safety that our front line then offered. And again, when Sergeant Austen, the sergeant of the raid, was hit and fell in German wire, one of the raiders stayed with him awhile, and finally dragged him to our line, with the usual demand for bearers. This time they were all busy, but he found Lieutenant F. Greer and that officer’s servant, whom he had led forth, and “in spite of heavy machine-gun fire,” they brought in the Sergeant. Unluckily, just at the end of the German bombardment, Lieutenant Synge was very badly hit while in the front line. The raid had been a fair, flat, but heroic failure, due, as most men said, to its being loosed in broad daylight at a fully prepared enemy. Outside the two prisoners, nothing, not even a scrap of paper, was gained except the knowledge that the Battalion could handle such affairs as these in their day’s work, put it all equably behind them, and draw fresh lessons for fresh to-morrows. (“We lost one dam’ good officer, and more good men than was worth a thousand Jerries, but, mark you, we might have lost just that same number any morning in the front line, as we have lost them again and again, under the expenditure of half a dozen, maybe one, shell the devil happened to be riding that time. And them that it took would never have had even the exercise, let alone the glory, of all them great doings of ours. So, ye see, everything in war is good luck or bad.”)
Their brigadier had a little talk with the raiding-party next day on the Canal Bank, when he made much of them, and told them that he was very pleased with “their gallant behaviour under adverse circumstances.” It was gratifying, because they had done all that they could. But after every raid, as indeed after every action, there follows interminable discussion from every point of view of every rank, as to the “might-have-beens”—what would have happened had you been there, or they been here, and whether the bay where the raid wrecked itself against the barricade none suspected might have been turned by a dash across the top, in the pauses of the shifting and returning overhead machine-gun fire. The messes discuss it, the estaminets where the men talk pick up those verdicts from the mess-waiters and go over them again and again; the front line scratches diagrams on the flank of sand-bags with bits of burned stick, and the more they explain, argue, and asseverate, the deeper grows the confusion out of which the historian in due time weaves the accepted version—at which all who were concerned scoff.
The 4th July was a quiet day after a bombardment the night before that had further enlarged the gap of untenable trench which the furious reprisals for the raid had created. They spent their hours repairing damage as much as possible till they were relieved by the 1st Coldstream, and a half of them got into billets at Elverdinghe Château, and the rest in Canal Bank. By this time the enemy had begun to turn their attention to the château, in spite of its screening trees, and were in the habit of giving it a daily ration of whizz-bangs, which disturb drill-formations. Troops of the Division being fairly thick on the ground, one morning’s work (July 7) managed to wound two machine-gunners of the 1st Coldstream and another of the 1st Irish Guards.
On the 5th July Major C. A. Rocke arrived and took over the duties of Second in Command. On the 7th Captain R. McNeill left the Battalion sick, and Lieutenant R. Nutting took over command of No. 2 Company.
On the 8th they moved up to their old position, relieving the 1st Coldstream across the canal without casualties, three companies in the front line that had been a little repaired since their raid, and the fourth (No. 2) in support in Nile Trench. Three quiet days and nights followed, when they could work undisturbed. On the 11th July a happy party was chosen to attend the 14th July celebrations at Paris. The adjutant, Captain J. S. N. FitzGerald, commanded them, all six, and their names were: Drill-Sergeant Harradine, Sergeants Reid, Glennon, and Halpin, and Privates Towland and Dunne. Rumour, which respects naught, said that they were chosen with an eye to the credit of the Battalion at any inter-allied banquets that might be obligatory, and that they did not fail. On the 12th, after a quiet night, forty large-size shells were sent into Canal Bank, as retaliation, they presumed, for some attentions on the part of our 9.2’s, the afternoon before. The Battalion was unhurt, but the 1st Scots Guards had several casualties. Their tour ended next day without trouble, and they were back by Elverdinghe Château for two days’ light and mostly ineffective shelling preparatory to their move on the 15th July to Camp P. some three miles north of Poperinghe. During this time, 2nd Lieutenant Mylne arrived and was posted to No. 4 Company, and 2nd Lieutenants C. Hyne and Denson to No. 2 Company. Second Lieutenant Hordern also rejoined and was posted to No. 1. Every one understood, without too much being said, that that sector would see them no more till after the great “spring meeting,” now set for the autumn, which many believed would settle the war. It was a small interlude of “fattening up” before the Somme, which included Battalion sports and company-drill competitions. There was, too, a dinner on the anniversary of the raising of the Battalion, 16th of July, when General Ponsonby dined with the Battalion. (In those ancient days men expected everything in the world except its disbandment as soon as war should be over.)
On the 18th July Captain J. S. N. FitzGerald and his detachment returned from Paris after one joyous week, and took over the adjutancy again from the second in command; and Captain Greer, who had sprained his ankle badly during the raid, was sent down to the base for cure.
It is noted that on the 21st Captain Lord Castlerosse, wounded in the far-off days at Villers-Cotterêts with the 1st Battalion, joined the Battalion from G.S. Ninth Corps. The wild geese were being called in preparatory to their flight for the Somme.
It began in the usual way, by definite orders to relieve a battalion in the front line. These were countermanded next day and, the day after, changed to orders to move to Bollezeele, where on the 25th they “received a great welcome from the inhabitants,” doubtless for old sakes’ sake. Then came the joining up of the last subalterns, and three days’ steady route-marching to toughen tender feet. Lieutenant Montgomery rejoined, and was posted to No. 2 Company, and, with him, 2nd Lieutenant Budd; Lieutenant Brew, not without experience in raiding, also arrived and was posted to No. 4 Company. This finished the tale, and on the 29th, the last Sunday of the month, they cleared personal accounts at mass and Church of England services; and on the 30th marched out to Esquelbecq, where they entrained all together, with their first-line transport, and were shifted, via Hazebrouck, Berguette, and St. Pol, to Petit Houvain five miles south of the latter town, or, broadly speaking, from the left to the right of the British line. That small trip lasted till evening, after which they marched fourteen miles to Lucheux on the Grouches River above Doullens, into a new world of camps and hutments, at midnight. The Diary says—on such points diaries are always particular, because it touches the honour of company officers—“the Battalion marched splendidly, only six men having to be carried for the last few miles. These were mostly old or previously wounded men.” And the month of July ends with the words, “There is nothing to record.”
There was, perhaps, not so very much after all.
The battle of the Somme had been in full blaze now from Maricourt to Hébuterne and Gomiecourt, for one month; and after the expenditure of no one had time to count how many men, our front from Ovillers-la-Boisselle to Fricourt and below Montauban had been advanced in places to the depth of three miles on a front of ten. It was magnificent, for the whole of the Press said so; and it was also extensively advertised as war.
From Ovillers-la-Boisselle to the north the German line, thanks to its clouds of machine-guns, had not been shifted by our attack, and the Battalion came, for the time being, under the orders of the Twenty-fifth Division (7th Brigade) which lay against the southern shoulder of the Gomiecourt salient just where the sweeping bare uplands break back to the valley of the Authies. They were turned in to dig trenches on the sector, four or five miles from their bivouac in the little wood to the south of Mailly-Maillet. They left the crowded Lucheux camp in lorries at three on the afternoon of the 1st August (“In those days we knew we were for it, but we did not know what the Somme was going to be”), reached bivouac at eight, marched to their trenches and came back at daybreak with one N.C.O. and four men wounded. It was a most gentle introduction to the scenes of their labours. The enemy were using shrapnel mostly part of the 3rd August; 2nd Lieutenant Hordern was dangerously and eight men were slightly wounded by one shell while at work. Second Lieutenant Vaughan joined on this date and was posted to No. 2 Company. Whether, as some said, the authorities did not know what to do with them for a few days, or whether they were part of a definite scheme of attack, no one cared. The machine had taken possession of their lives and fates, and as they went from trench to bivouac and back again they could both see and hear how extremely little a battalion, or for that matter a brigade, mattered in the present inferno. The fortnight’s battle that had opened on the 14th of July had finished itself among erased villages and woods that were already all but stumpage, while the big guns were pounding the camps and bivouacs that held our reserves, and one stumbled on old and fresh dead in the most unlikely and absurd places.
On the 6th August their turn ended, and they came back, for a couple of days, to the 2nd Guards Brigade in the Bois du Warnimont hutments—none too good—outside Authie. Here His Majesty the King visited them on the 9th August, and, after three “quiet” days spent in reconnoitring the trenches in front of Mailly-Maillet and Auchonvillers, the Battalion on the 13th relieved the 1st Coldstream in the front line.
It was a featureless turn of duty, barring some minenwerfer work by the enemy once or twice in the dawns, which affected nothing.
They were relieved by a battalion of the K.O.Y.L.I. on the 15th, and hutted in the wood near Mailly-Maillet. Here began their more specialised training for the work that lay ahead of them. It included everything that modern warfare of that date could imagine, from following up drum-barrages at twenty-five yards’ distance, to the unlovely business of unloading ammunition at railheads.
Domestically, there were not many incidents. Captain E. B. Greer rejoined from the base on the 15th August. The Second in Command and the Adjutant went sick on the 18th and 19th respectively. (These ranks are not in the habit of noticing their personal complaints when regimental life is crowded. They were back in ten days.) Second Lieutenants Lysaght and Tomkins arrived from the base on the 30th, and 2nd Lieutenant Zigomala on the 31st August.
One little horror of a life where men had not far to look for such things stands out in the record of preparations that went on through the clangour and fury of the Somme around them. On a windy Sunday evening at Couin, in the valley north of Bus-les-Artois, they saw an observation-balloon, tethered near their bivouacs, break loose while being hauled down. It drifted towards the enemy line. First they watched maps and books being heaved overboard, then a man in a parachute jumping for his life, who landed safely. “Soon after, something black, which had been hanging below the basket, detached itself and fell some three thousand feet. We heard later that it was Captain Radford (Basil Hallam). His parachute apparently caught in the rigging and in some way he slipped out of the belt which attached him to it. He fell near Brigade Headquarters.” Of those who watched, there was not one that had not seen him at the “Halls” in the immensely remote days of “Gilbert the Filbert, the Colonel of the Nuts.”
Before the end of the month, they had shifted from their congested camp near Bus-les-Artois to Méricourt under Albert, which they reached circuitously by train, and there lay in Corps Reserve. The weather was against drills. It rained almost every day, and they slipped and swore through their rehearsals, wave-attacks, and barrage-huntings across the deepening mud.
On the 9th September, at Happy Valley, they had their first sight of the tanks, some thirty of which were parked, trumpeting and clanking, near their camp. At that date the creatures were known as “creepy-crawlies” or “hush-hush birds” and were not as useful as they learned to become later. Then came the Battalion’s last dispositions as to the reserve of officers, who were to be held till needed with the first-line transport. The C.O., Lieut.-Colonel Reid, was down in hospital with pukka trench-fever and a temperature to match, and Lieutenant Nutting, sick with dysentery, had to be sent to England. Lieutenant Dollar, who had rejoined a few days before on recovery of the same disease, Captain Greer, and Lieutenant Brew represented the Reserve, and even so (for the Somme was merciless throughout) Captain Witts, who had fallen ill at Carnoy, had to change places with Lieutenant Brew. Captain Alexander had rejoined the Battalion after two days’ (jealously noted as “three nights”) Paris leave.
The field-wastage began at once. They relieved the 4th Grenadiers on the evening of the 12th September in the new, poor, and shallow trenches dug a few days before, as our troops had worked their way into the German system, in the salient east of Ginchy; but ere that relief was completed, 2nd Lieutenant Zigomala and ten men had been wounded. Next day saw forty casualties from shrapnel and snipers, and 2nd Lieutenant Vaughan and several men in No. 1 Company were killed by a single shell. The enemy, well aware of what was intended, did all that they could to cripple, delay, and confuse, and waste the men and material on our side. Their chief reliance was their “pocketed” machine-guns with which the whole ground was peppered; and their gunners’ instructions, most gallantly obeyed, were, on the withdrawal of any force, to remain and continue killing till they themselves were killed. Consequently it was necessary at frequent intervals to hunt up these pests by hand rather as one digs out wasps’ nests after dark.
On the night of the 13th September, it fell to the lot of the Battalion to send out No. 2 Company upon a business of this nature—machine-guns in a strong trench on their right. After a bombardment supposed to have cut the wire, the company had to file across a stretch of the open Ginchy-Morval road, and there were enfiladed by machine-gun fire which killed 2nd Lieutenant Tomkins, who had joined less than a fortnight before, and wounded a good many of the men. This was while merely getting into position among the cramped trenches. Next, it was discovered that our bombardment had by no means cut enough wire, and when the attack was launched, in waves of two platoons each, undisturbed machine-guns in a few dreadful minutes accounted for more than three quarters of the little host. Almost at the outset, Lieutenant Montgomery was killed close to our own parapet, and those who were left, under 2nd Lieutenant Hely-Hutchinson, lay down till they might crawl back after dark. That wiped out No. 2 Company, and next day, its thirty survivors were sent back to the first-line transport—a bleak prelude to the battle ahead. But it passed almost unnoticed in the failure of an attack launched at the same time by the 71st and 16th Infantry Brigades in the direction of Leuze Wood. Names of villages and salient points existed beautifully on such maps as were issued to the officers, and there is no doubt that the distances on these maps were entirely correct. The drawback was that the whole landscape happened to be one pitted, clodded, brown and white wilderness of aching uniformity, on which to pick up any given detail was like identifying one plover’s nest in a hundred-acre bog.
But the idea of the battle of the 15th September was, as usual, immensely definite. Rawlinson’s Fourth Army was to attack between Combles and Martinpuich and seize Morval, Lesbœufs, Gueudecourt, and Flers; the French attacking at the same time on the right, and the Reserve Army on the left. Immediately after our objective had been won the cavalry would advance and, apparently, seize the high ground all round the Department, culminating at Bapaume. The work of the Guards Division, whose views of cavalry at that particular moment are not worth reproducing, was to support the cavalry “on the above lines.” The 2nd Guards Brigade would take the right of the attack on Lesbœufs; the 1st the left, with the 3rd Brigade in Reserve, and the 71st Infantry Brigade on the right of the 2nd Guards Brigade. The 3rd Grenadiers and 1st Coldstream were respectively right and left leading battalions, with the 1st Scots Guards and the 2nd Irish Guards as right and left supporting battalions; each advancing in four waves of single rank; two machine-guns accompanying each leading battalion and four each the supporting ones. Three other machine-guns were to bring up the rear flanked, on either side, by two Stokes mortar-guns. The Brigade’s allotted front was five hundred yards to the north-east of Ginchy, and since the normal enemy barrage between Guillemont and Ginchy was a thing to be avoided if possible, they were assembled east of the latter village and not behind it. Their objectives were duly laid down for them in green, brown, blue, and red lines on the maps, or as one young gentleman observed, “just like a game of snooker except that every one played with the nearest ball as soon as the game began.” But every one understood perfectly the outlines of the game. Their predecessors had been playing it by hundreds of thousands since the 1st of July. They knew they would all go on till they were dropped, or blown off the face of the earth.
They dug themselves in on the night of the 14th in shallow trenches about ten paces apart, a trench to each wave which was made up of two half companies. The 2nd Irish Guards having expended one (No. 2) company on the 13th September, their No. 3 Company was distributed between Nos. 1 and 4 who accordingly went over in two enlarged waves.
The Brigade lost hardly a man from enemy bombardment during the long hours that passed while waiting for the dawn. At six o’clock on the 15th our heavies opened; and, as far as the 2nd Brigade was concerned, brought down the German barrage exactly where it was expected, between Guillemont and Ginchy, which, by German logic, should have been crowded with our waiting troops. Thanks, however, to the advice of Major Rocke and Captain Alexander as to the massing-point, that blast fell behind our men, who thus lived to progress into the well-laid and unbroken machine-gun fire that met them the instant they advanced. Their first objective (green line) was six hundred yards away through the mists of the morning and the dust and flying clods of the shells. A couple of hundred yards out, the 3rd Grenadiers and 1st Coldstream came upon a string of shell-holes which might or might not have started life as a trench, filled with fighting Germans, insufficiently dealt with by our guns. This checked the waves for a little and brought the Irish storming into the heels of the leading line, and as the trench lay obliquely across the advance, swung the whole of the 2nd Brigade towards the left, and into the 1st Brigade, who had already met a reasonable share of trouble of their own. Indeed, during this first advance, one party of the 2nd Irish Guards, under Major Rocke and Lieutenant G. Bambridge and 2nd Lieutenant Mylne found themselves mixed up among the men of the 1st Battalion. Moreover, the attack of the Sixth Division which was taking place on the right of the 2nd Guards Brigade had been held up, and it seemed as though the whole of the machine-gun fire from the low fortified quadrilateral dominating that end of the line was sweeping like hail into the right of the 2nd Guards Brigade. This still further, though they were not aware of it at the time, turned them towards the left.
The Battalion, without landmarks to guide, did what they could. Under Captain Alexander and 2nd Lieutenant Greer, the Germans in the first unexpected trench were all accounted for. Greer also shot down and put out of action an enemy machine-gun, and the thinned line went on. There had been instructions, in Brigade Orders, as to the co-operation of nine tanks that were to assist the Guards Division that day and would, probably, “start from each successive line well in advance of the attacking troops.” Infantry were warned, however, that their work “would be carried out whether the tanks are held up or not.” It was. The tanks were not much more in evidence on that sector than the cavalry which, cantering gaily across the shell-holes, should have captured Bapaume; and long before the Brigade were anywhere near their first objective, companies and battalions were mixed up, in what with other troops would have been hopeless confusion; but the Guards are accustomed to carry on without worrying whether with their own units or not. In due time, and no man can say what actually happened outside his own range of action, for no man saw anything coherently, their general advance reached the German trench which was their first objective. Its wire had not been cut properly by our guns, and little gasping, sweating parties dodged in and out and round the wings of it, bombing enemies where they sighted them. There were many Germans, too, in the shell-holes that they overpassed who fired into their backs, and all the while from their right flank, now wholly in the air, came the lashing machine-gun fire of the quadrilateral which was so effectively holding the Sixth Division. So the wrecked trench of the first objective was, as one man said, “none too bad a refuge even if we had to bomb ourselves into it.”
They tumbled in, as they arrived, about a hundred and twenty of all units of the Brigade with Captain Alexander of the Battalion, Captain F. J. Hopley, 3rd Grenadiers, Lieutenant Boyd-Rochfort, Scots Guards, Lieutenant M. Tennant, Scots Guards, attached to the machine-guns, and 2nd Lieutenants Greer and Lysaght, of the Battalion. A few minutes later Colonel Claude de Crespigny of the 2nd Grenadiers of the 1st Brigade arrived with about fifty men. They had fairly lost the rest of their Brigade in the dust and smoke, and had fetched up, fragmentarily, among the 2nd Brigade, at what was fast becoming a general rendezvous. Finding that the first objective still needed a great deal more combing out, the mixed parties of officers and men divided and began to bomb left and right along the trench. Then Colonel Godman of the Scots Guards appeared (it was all one whirling vision of breathless men and quickly passing faces), and took over general command of the Brigade. With him were Lieutenant Mackenzie and Captain the Hon. K. Digby, the adjutants of the 1st Scots Guards and 1st Coldstream; while Captain FitzGerald, Lieutenant Keenan, and 2nd Lieutenant Close of the Battalion were bombing and taking prisoners up an offshoot of the trench in the direction of Lesbœufs. The Germans who had fought so well among the shell-holes did not seem to be represented here for they surrendered with ease. Their own people machine-gunned them so purposefully as they scuttled towards our lines that sometimes they bolted back to the comparative decency of the trench whence they had been digged.
Meantime the situation did not clear itself. The uncut wire of the first objective and the general drift of the whole attack to the left had made a gap between the two front battalions of the 2nd Brigade’s attack, that is to say, the 3rd Grenadiers and the 1st Coldstream. A party of a hundred of the former battalion were pushed up into it, and seem to have disappeared into the general maelstrom. At the same time, the 3rd Grenadiers were trying to get touch with the Sixth Division, on their sorely hammered right. Major Rocke, Lieutenant Bambridge, and 2nd Lieutenant Mylne and their party of the 2nd Irish Guards, were far out towards the left where the 2nd Brigade’s advance had outrun that of the 1st, so much that the 1st Coldstream’s left flank was in the air and there was a gap between the two brigades. Here Major Rocke’s party found Colonel Guy Baring (he was killed a little later) commanding the 1st Coldstream, and at his suggestion formed a defensive flank on the left of the Coldstream until the 1st Brigade drew level. This precaution was rewarded by a satisfactory bag estimated at over two hundred Huns who, being incommoded by the 2nd Brigade’s action, were trying to slip through the gap between the two brigades and escape round the rear of the 2nd Brigade, and who were mostly killed by small-arm fire.
More men kept dribbling in to the first objective trench from time to time (“Like lost hounds, only they’d been fighting every yard of their way home”), and the remnants of the battalions of the Brigade were sorted out and apportioned lengths of trench to hold. Thus: “Grenadier Guards, 60 on the right; Scots Guards, 60 next; Irish Guards, 40 next; Coldstream Guards, 10, on the left in touch with the 1st Brigade,” or, at least, as far as any touch could be made. The fighting, of course, continued all round them, and various parties devoted themselves to this as need arose. Everything was in the air now, left and right flanks together, but the Guards Division, as an extremely mixed whole, had pushed forward and taken the ground it had been ordered to take, while the enemy, attacking here, bombing there, and bolting across the shell-holes elsewhere, seemed to be desirous to pull out of action and break away towards Bapaume. Our guns, of which the fighting infantry were unconscious at the time, had helped them towards this decision. There was some question and discussion in the trench as to whether they should now push on to their second objective or whether our artillery would, as originally laid down, bombard that before a fresh move. But signs of German withdrawal across the bare down and the sight of some of their field-guns trotting back suggested a sporting chance of pushing on towards Lesbœufs, which Captain Ian Colquhoun of the Scots Guards and Captain Lyttelton of the 3rd Grenadiers thought worth taking. Their view was shared by Major Rocke, Captain Alexander, and Lieutenant Mylne of the Battalion, so between them they amassed some hundred men and went out nearly half a mile into an unoccupied trench in a hollow, with standing crops in front. Here they halted and sent back demands for reinforcements. As they were utterly detached from an already detached force, they might as well have indented for elephants. The day went on, and the enemy, realising that our push had come to an end, began to steal forward in small bodies which first outflanked and then practically surrounded the detachment. At last a whole company, hidden in the tall crops, made a rush which should have killed or captured every one in the position. Somehow or other—and again no coherent account was ever rendered, but it was probably due to our controlled rapid fire—they failed. Our men fought their way out and back to the main body with surprisingly few casualties; and the enemy excitedly following them, came under a limited but well-directed machine-gun fire from the main trench. The Diary enters it as “a weak attack from Lesbœufs easily driven off, Lieutenant M. Tennant doing good work with his machine-gun which was well placed on the right.” But nothing is more difficult than to dissect and sift out the times and the values of linked or over-lapping episodes throughout one desperate day, where half a dozen separated detachments are each profoundly certain that they, and they alone, bear the weight or turn the tide of the local war. The minuteness of the field of action adds to the confusion, when one remembers that the distance from Ginchy to Lesbœufs was about the extreme range of a service rifle and that the whole of that day’s work had won them about eight hundred yards. For that advance they had paid three hundred casualties among the men, and the following officers: Captain Parsons, Lieutenants Purcell and Walters, both the latter attached to the machine-gun company, killed; Major Rocke, Lieutenant Brew (seriously), and 2nd Lieutenants M. R. FitzGerald, Mylne, and Cutcliffe Hyne wounded. In addition 2nd Lieutenants Vaughan and Tomkins, and Lieutenant Montgomery had been killed in the preliminary work on the 13th September. A total of six officers dead and five wounded.
A partially successful attempt on a German trench ahead of them by a battalion of the Durham Light Infantry a little after dark brought the very long day to an end. The night was quiet, while some units of the Twentieth Division came up and dug themselves in outside their parapet in readiness for the fresh attack which was to begin the next morning. Men could not help admiring, even at the time, the immense and ordered inhumanity of the system that, taking no count of aught except the end, pushed forward through the dead and the débris of war the fresh organisations which were to be spent next day as their predecessors had been. (“Atop of it all, when a man was done with he felt that he was in the road of the others. The same with the battalions. When they was used they was heaved out of the road like a broke lorry, and only too glad of it. But, as I was saying, when we was expended, we all felt ashamed of blocking the traffic with our wounds and our carcases. The only fun for us afterwards was telling them that came up what was awaiting them. But they knew—they knew it already!”)
The 16th September was an almost continuous bombardment of whizz-bangs and 5.9’s on the trench where they still lay; but in the intervals of the shelling men kept turning up and reporting themselves with tales of adventure and extremity among the shell-holes outside. They were relieved a little before midnight and left their battered lair eighty-eight strong, via Ginchy, Guillemont, and Trônes Wood for the Citadel, which, when they reached their total, had been increased by strays to one hundred and six. Lieutenant Bainbridge, eminently capable of looking after himself and his party, turned up later with another sixty. Next day, the weary work of re-making the Battalion began. Lieutenant Dollar had to be sent down to hospital with a return of the dysentery from which he had reported himself recovered. This further reduced the few available officers on their feet. A draft of a hundred and fifty men came in. By absorbing the still effective digging-platoon into the active line, a battalion of four companies of a hundred each was put together and turned out for the next week in the Carnoy mud to drill under new company commanders.
The second move of the Guards Division opened on the 25th September, and this time the ball was with the 1st Battalion. The work on the 15th of the month had carried the Fourteenth Division’s front on to the naked ridge towards Morval and Lesbœufs where it had been held, but without advance, for the past ten days. Now brigade orders came “to renew the attacks” over what remained untaken of the ground. “The Guards Division will capture Lesbœufs. The 1st Guards Brigade will attack on the right, the 3rd on the left,” while the Fifth Division was to attack Morval on the right of the Guards Division and the Twenty-First Division (62nd Brigade) would take Gueudecourt on the left. The 2nd Guards Brigade would be in reserve; and the Battalion hoped, as men may who know what war means, that they would not be needed. Nor were they till the evening of the 26th September, when they moved from Trônes Wood and its dead, to relieve the 1st Battalion, used and broken for the second time in ten days, the day before, with the 2nd Grenadiers who “after the attack on Lesbœufs had dug themselves in to the east of that town.” Cæsar himself does not equal the sublime terseness of the Diary. All their world from the King downwards was to crown them with praise later on, but in the meantime reliefs must be orderly conducted and touch must be kept through the shell-tormented darkness with the battalions on either side, while they themselves settled in the reeking front line under certainty of vicious bombardment and the possibility of suddenly launched counter-attack. They were shelled all that night from their relief on and throughout the next day (the 27th) “by every type of shell, but mostly by 5.9’s.” In the afternoon when it became necessary to help an attack on their left by launching a creeping barrage from in front of Lesbœufs towards Le Transloy, the enemy retaliated with a barrage on the Battalion’s front that blew the line in in several places. They received the same attentions on the 28th, and this in an uptorn isolated land where water was scarce; but, on their demand, retaliation arrived in the shape of heavies and some aeroplanes. “This had the effect of stopping the enemy’s fire completely except for a few whizz-bangs.” For the rest of the day they merely took their share of the general necessary shellings on a vast and disputed front. Men grow quick to differentiate between the punishment they should accept without complaint, and the personal direct “hate” which sets the newly strung telephones buzzing to Brigade Headquarters for the guns. But, even so, it is said, a hypnotic sense of helplessness comes over troops which are being shelled continuously, till sometimes they will sit and suffer, the telephone under their hand, while parapets fly up and fall down on them. Yet, one single small casualty may break that spell as suddenly as it was cast, and the whole line, grumbling and uneasy, wants to know whether their artillery are dead too.
The 1st Coldstream relieved them late at night and without one single casualty on the 28th September, and they lay up in bivouac in Trônes Wood on the 30th, their old C.O., Colonel, now General, Butler lunched with them in the Headquarters dug-out, where they compared experiences. The 3rd Londons relieved them, and an enemy aeroplane bombed them, but without effect, on their way back to camp in Carnoy Valley; and four officers, Lieutenant Gunstone and 2nd Lieutenants Heard, Crawford, and Black, arrived on that uneventful day. Naturally, in a district alive with troops, German aeroplanes did all the harm they could in our back-areas, and nothing will persuade harried infantry on the ground that our aircraft are properly protecting them. A draft of fifty men came in on the 1st October, a Sunday, and on the 2nd they withdrew altogether with the Division out of the battle for intensive training. Their own camp was Méricourt-en-Vimeux west of Amiens, but—more important than all else—the leave-season opened.
It was an ordinary month of the ordinary work demanded by the war conditions of the age. Steady drill was the background of it, and specialist classes for Lewis-gunners, bombers, intelligence, and gas filled the hours, varied by night and day outpost and wire work as well as map-reading for officers. Company commanders, whose men were taken from lawfully ordained parade, swore and complained, and not without justification; for the suave, un-get-at-able shirker has a much better chance of evading the burdens of mere battalion routine when every one is a “specialist,” than when, as a marching unit, he is under the direct eye of his own unimaginative N.C.O.’s. (“There was times, if you will believe me, when we was sorry for platoon sergeants. What with this and that and the other special trick, every mother’s son of us Micks had the excuses of his life to his hands all the time.”) Hence the disgraceful story of the sergeant who demanded whether “those somethinged spe-shy-lists” could “lend him as much as three wet-nurses, just to make a show with the platoon.”
Rewards began to come in. Captain Harvey, their M.O., was awarded the Military Cross for a little more than the usual bravery that a doctor has to exhibit in the ordinary course of his duty, and 2nd Lieutenant Greer received the same honour for, incidentally, dealing with enemy machine-guns in the advance of the 15th. General Feilding, on the 6th, also distributed ribbons of medals won, and said what he thought of the work of the Guards Division during the previous month. The formal acknowledgment of the commander of the Fourth Army (General Rawlinson) arrived on October 17. He said that the “gallantry and perseverance of the Guards Division in the battles of the 15th and 25th were paramount factors in the success of the operations of the Fourth Army on those days.” Of the 15th September, specially, he observed, “The vigorous attacks of the Guards in circumstances of great difficulty, with both flanks exposed to the enfilade fire of the enemy, reflect the highest credit on all concerned, and I desire to tender to every officer, N.C.O., and man, my congratulations and best thanks for their exemplary valour on that occasion.” They knew that they had not done so badly, though every one above the rank of drummer could say now how it could have been done much better; but the official word was grateful to those who had lived, and cheering for those about to die.
On the 23rd October they route-marched to a fair field south of Aumont with their cookers and their water-carts (all the Division more or less was being trained in that neighbourhood), met their 1st Battalion, dined well together, and embarked on a football match which the 1st won by two goals to nothing. “The men thoroughly enjoyed meeting each other, and spent a very happy day.” It might be a Sunday-school that the Diary describes, instead of two war-used battalions drawing breath between engagements.
H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught was to inspect the Division on the 1st of November, which meant rehearsals for the ceremonial—a ritual of value for retaining a hold on “specialists,” and taken advantage of by company officers and N.C.O.’s who held that it did men no harm to disport themselves occasionally in slow time with a properly pointed foot. The rain and break-up of autumn made training very difficult, but, the Diary notes, though many denied it at the time, “We endeavoured to make every man a bomber rather than to concentrate on the production of a number of specialists.” The inspection rewarded the trouble taken—there was nothing their sternest critics could lay a finger on—and at the end of it, those officers and men who had won decorations in the war lined up before the Duke who addressed them. Méricourt days ended with a Battalion dinner in the 1st Battalion billets at Hornoy to General Butler, their old commandant whose brigade was in rest near by. Somehow the memory of such dinners remains with the survivors long after more serious affairs, as it seemed then, have faded. (“It’s a curious thing that, on those occasions, one was drunk before one sat down—out of sheer good-fellowship, I suppose, and the knowledge that we were all for it, and had all come through it so far. The amount of liquor actually consumed has nothing to do with the results. I’ve put away four times as much since Armistice and only got the deuce of a head.”)
On the 10th and 11th of November the Division returned to school. They were to take over a stretch of the Fourteenth Corps’ front near Gueudecourt and Lesbœufs. For tactical purposes the Division was now divided into two “groups” of six battalions each. The right group was made up of the 1st Guards Brigade as a whole, with the 1st Coldstream and the 2nd Irish Guards additional. The left was the 3rd Guards Brigade plus the 3rd Grenadiers and the 1st Scots Guards, so that the 2nd Brigade was absorbed for the while. The Battalion left Méricourt-en-Vimeux “with considerable regret” for it was good billets and was packed into a large fleet of French motor-buses, many of which were driven by Senegalese—“an example of the Frenchman’s ability in saving up their men. A particularly engaging ape was the conductor of the officers’ bus. He was fed by the adjutant on chicken legs which he greatly appreciated and entirely devoured. He appeared to speak no word of any human language.” Medals should have been awarded for this affair; to be driven forty miles by Senegalese chauffeurs is an experience deadly almost as warfare. Méaulte, their destination, was then an “entirely unattractive town.” Gangs of Hun prisoners shovelled mud from roads a foot deep in grey reeking slime. Every road was blocked with limbers and lorries that offered no way to the disgusted infantry wedged up impatiently behind them. Their billets were crowded and bad, and they regretted the flesh-pots of Méricourt while they cleaned them or froze in tents beside the Carnoy-Fricourt road where they kept warm by trying to make roads out of frosty mud.
Mud, filth, cold, exposure, and the murderous hard work necessary to mere existence, were their daily and nightly fare from now on. It must be duly set down for that reason, and that the generations to come may judge for themselves what the war of a people unprepared, against a race that had made provision for war, cost in the mere stage-setting and scene-shifting of actual warfare.
On the 18th November they were shifted from their chill tents at “Mansell Camp” to Camp A, only four miles off, at Trônes Wood. The roads which were not roads and the traffic that was trying to treat them as such, made this a matter of three and a half hours’ continuous marching, mainly in single file. They found themselves at last in dark and pouring rain, hunting across a morass for holes in the ground inadequately covered with pieces of tarpaulin and five hundred yards away from any firm foothold. This was the “camp.” The cookers frankly dared not leave the road and the men had to flounder across the bog to get their teas. For that reason, the next day being fine and all hands, “thoroughly wet and uncomfortable,” they “sang loudly as they slopped about in the mud.”
Their wholly unspeakable front line was five miles distant from this local paradise. You followed a duck-board track of sorts through Trônes Wood, between ghastly Delville and the black ruins of Ginchy, and across the Ginchy ridge where the chances of trouble thickened, through a communication-trench, and thereafter into a duck-boarded landscape where, if you were not very careful, the engulfing mud would add you to its increasing and matured collection of “officers and other ranks.” These accidents overcome, you would discover that the front line was mud with holes in it. If the holes were roundish they were called posts; if oblong they were trenches with names, such as Gusty Trench and Spectrum Trench. They connected with nothing except more mud. Wiring peered up in places, but whether it was your own or the enemy’s was a matter of chance and luck. The only certainty was that, beyond a point which no one could locate, because all points were wiped out by a carpet-like pattern of closely set holes, you would be shelled continuously from over the bleak horizon. Nor could you escape, because you could never move faster than a man in a nightmare. Nor dared you take cover, because the mud-holes that offered it swallowed you up.
Here, for instance, is what befell when No. 1 Company went up to relieve a grenadier company on the night of the 19th November. They started at 3 P. M. in continuous mud under steady shelling. Only three out of their four platoon guides turned up. The other had collapsed. Ten men were hit on the way up; a number of others fell out from sheer exhaustion or got stuck in the mud. The first man who set foot in the front-line trench blocked the rest for a quarter of an hour, while four of his comrades were hauling him out. This was five hours after they had begun. The two Lewis-guns and some stragglers, if men hip-deep in mud and water can straggle, were still unaccounted for. Lance-Sergeant Nolan brought them all in by hand at three in the morning under shell-fire. Then they were heavily shelled (there was hardly any rifle-fire), and three men were wounded. Luckily shells do not burst well in soft dirt. It was Private Curran’s business to shift two of them who were stretcher-cases to Battalion Headquarters one mile and a half distant. This took two relays of eight men each, always under shell-fire, and Curran’s round trip was completed in nine hours. When they were relieved by the soft-spoken Australians, on the evening of the 21st, they spent the whole of the night, from 8 P. M. to 6 A. M., getting back to camp, where it is not surprising that they arrived “utterly exhausted.” Owing to an orderly losing his way, one isolated trench or hole held by Sergeant Murphy, Lance-Sergeant Nolan and seven men, was not relieved, and they stayed on for another twenty-four hours. No. 2 Company, a few hundred yards away, were fairly dead to the world by the time they had worked their way to their line, which possessed, nominally, a trench and some posts. The trench was a gutter; their posts had no protection at all from shells, and when they arrived they found that no sand-bags had been sent up, so they had nothing to work with. They also spent their time pulling men out of the mire. Supervision of any sort was impossible. It took the officer three hours to get from the left to the right of his short line. The posts could not be reached by daylight at all, and during bombardments of the trench “it often seemed as though what little there was must disappear, and (the Battalion, as we know, was mostly new hands) the coolness of the young N.C.O.’s was invaluable in keeping up the spirits of the men.” There was one time when a sergeant (Lucas) was buried by a shell, and a brother sergeant (Glennon) “though he knew that it meant almost certain death” went to his aid, and was instantly killed, for the enemy, naturally, had the range of their own old trenches to the inch. To be heroic at a walk is trying enough, as they know who have plowtered behind the Dead March of a dragging barrage, but to struggle, clogged from the waist down, into the white-hot circle of accurately placed destruction, sure that if you are even knocked over by a blast you will be slowly choked by mud, is something more than heroism. Equally, to lie out disabled on an horror of shifting mud is beyond the sting of Death. One of our corporals on patrol heard groaning somewhere outside the line. It proved to be a grenadier, who had lain there twenty-four hours “suffering from frost-bite and unable to move.” They saved him. Their stretcher-bearers were worn out, and what sand-bags at last arrived were inadequate for any serious defence. “We were fighting purely against mud and shells, as the German infantry gave us no trouble.” When No. 2 was relieved at the same time as No. 1 Company, they dribbled into camp by small parties from two till ten in the morning, and three of the men never turned up at all. The Somme mud told no tales till years later when the exhumation parties worked over it. The Australians, of whom it is reported that the mud dragged every national expletive out of them by the boots, relieved the Division as a whole on the 22nd November, and, pending the new arrangements for taking over more of the French line, the Guards were transferred first to a camp between Carnoy and Montauban, which for those parts was fairly comfortable. At all events, the huts though stoveless were water-tight, and could be “frowsted up” to something like warmth. For ten days they worked, two days out of three, on the Carnoy-Montauban road in company with a labour battalion surnamed “The Broody Hens,” owing to their habit of scuttling at the very last moment from under the wheels of the multitudinous lorries. “On off days we made paths through the mud for ourselves.” But these were dry, and by comparison clean.
The trench-line taken over by the Guards Division ran, roughly, from Morval to Sailly-Saillisel (locally “Silly-Sally”) when their groups were split into two (right and left) sections. The right, to which the Battalion was attached, was made up of themselves, their sister battalion, and the 2nd Grenadiers. A spell of hard winter weather had frozen the actual trenches into fairly good condition for the minute, but there were no communications, nor, as they observed, much attempt at fire-steps. The French trusted more to automatic rifles—the battalions the Irish relieved had thirty-two each—and machine-guns than to infantry, and used their linesmen mainly as bombers or bayoneteers. Accommodation was bad. When not on tour, two companies were billeted in old dug-outs that contained the usual proportion of stale offences, on the west side of Combles; one in cellars and dug-outs in the town itself; and one in dug-outs in Haie Wood three thousand yards behind the front. Their front line ran along the east edge of the obliterated village, their support a hundred yards or so behind it through the mounds of brick and earth of the place itself, while the reserve company lay up in mildewy dug-outs in a chalk quarry three quarters of a mile back. (One peculiarity of the Somme was its most modestly inconspicuous cave-dwellings.) For the rest, “The whole area was utterly desolate. West of the village, rolling ground, the valleys running east and west a waste of mud with shell-holes touching one another. Here and there the charred stumps of trees. Equipment, French and German, dotted the ground, and rifles, their muzzles planted in the mud, showed where, in some attack, wounded men had lain. The village was just mounds of earth or mud and mere shell-holes.” Later on even the mounds were not suffered to remain, and the bricks were converted into dull red dust that in summer blew across the dead land.
The Battalion was not in position till the 11th December, when it relieved the 2nd Grenadiers after three or four days’ rain which wiped out what communication-trenches had been attempted, and pulped the front line. As to the back-breaking nature of the work—“Though the first company (on relief) passed Haie Wood about 4 P. M. it was 11.30 before they had floundered the intervening 3000 yards.” One of the grenadiers whom they relieved had been stuck in the mud for forty-three hours. Unless the men in the trenches, already worn out with mud-wrestling to get there, kept moving like hens on hot plates, they sank and stuck. (“It is funny, maybe, to talk about now, that mud-larking of ours; but to sink, sink, sink in the dark and you not sure whether they saw ye or could hear you, puts the wind up a man worse than anything under Heaven. Fear? Fear is not the word. ’Twas the Somme that broke our hearts. Back, knees, loins, acrost your chest—you was dragged to pieces dragging your own carcase out of the mud. ’Twas like red-hot wires afterwards—and all to begin it again.”)
A mystery turned up on the night of the 12th December in the shape of a wild-looking, apparently dumb, Hun prisoner, brought before Captain Young of the Support Company, who could make naught of him, till at last “noticing the likeness between his cap and that affected by Captain Alexander”[1] he hazarded “Russky.” The prisoner at once awoke, and by sign and word revealed himself as from Petrograd. Also he bolted one loaf of bread in two counted minutes. He had been captured at Kovel by the Huns, and brought over to be used by them to dig behind their front line. But how he had escaped across that wilderness that wild-eyed man never told.
They got back on the 13th December to a hideous tent-camp near Trônes Wood. Thence, thoroughly wet, they were next day solemnly entrained at Trônes Wood, carted three miles by train to Plateau and thence, again, marched two more to Bronfay. There, done to the last turn, chilled to the marrow, and caked with mud, they found the huttage allotted them already bursting with a brigade of artillery. Short of turning out themselves, the gunners did their kindest to help the men dry and get their food, while the various authorities concerned fought over their weary heads; some brilliant members of the Staff vowing that the camp intended for them had not even been built; which must have been vast consolation to the heavy-eyed, incurious sick, of whom there were not a few after the last tour, as well as to the wrathful and impeded cooks and sergeants. They got their sick away (the Adjutant, Captain, J. S. N. FitzGerald and Lieutenant D. Gunston among them), and somehow squashed in all together through another day of mere hanging about and crowded, cold discomfort, which does men more harm and develops more microbes than a week’s blood and misery.
On the 16th December they returned afoot through eight miles of snow-storm to “some of the most depressing scenery in Europe.” The “men had had but little rest and few of them had got any of their clothes in the least dry.” But they were left alone for one blessed night at Combles and Haie Wood in their cellars and their dug-outs, and they slept where they lay, the stark, corpse-like sleep of men too worn out even to mutter or turn.
Except that shelling was continuous over all back-areas and approaches, the enemy as a fighting force did not enter into their calculations. Or it might be more accurate to say, both sides were fighting ground and distance. The sole problem of the lines was communication; for every stick, wire, and water-tin had to be backed up by brute bodily labour across the mud. All hands were set to laying trench-boards from the support and reserve-lines and Haie Wood. Without these, it had taken two and a half hours to carry a load eight hundred yards. With them, the same party covered the same distance under an equal burden in twenty minutes. The enemy used their prisoners and captives for these ends. Ours were well tended, out of harm’s range, while His Majesty’s Foot Guards took their places. The front line—they relieved the 2nd Grenadiers there on the 17th—was “mere canals of mud and water with here and there a habitable island.” The defences had been literally watered down to a string of isolated posts reached over the top across stinking swamp, and the mounds and middens called parapets spread out dismally and collapsed as they tinkered at them.
All dirt is demoralising. The enemy’s parapets had melted like ours and left their working-parties exposed to the waist. Since the lines were too close to be shelled by either artillery, the opposing infantry on both sides held their hands till there grew up gradually a certain amount of “live and let live,” out of which, but farther down the line, developed attempts at fraternisation, and, in front of the Guards, much too much repair work and “taking notice” on the part of the enemy. The Hun never comprehends unwritten codes. Instead of thanking Heaven and the weather for a few days’ respite, he began to walk out on the top of his mounds and field-glass our wire. Therefore, on the 19th December, the dawn of a still freezing day, two obviously curious Germans were “selected and shot” by a sniper who had been detailed for that job. “The movement then ceased,” and doubtless our action went to swell the wireless accounts of “unparalleled British brutalities.”
Their next tour, December 23, which included Christmas Day, saw them with only seven officers, including the C.O. and the Acting-Adjutant, Lieutenant Denson, fit for duty. Captain Bambridge and Lieutenant Hely-Hutchinson had to be left behind sick at the Q.M. stores in Méricourt, and two officers had been detached for special duties. The M.O. also had gone sick, and those officers who stood up, through the alternations of biting frost and soaking thaw, were fairly fine-drawn. Whether this was the vilest of all their war Christmases for the Battalion is an open question. There was nothing to do except put out chilly wire and carry stuff. A couple of men were killed that day and one wounded by shells, and another laying sand-bags round the shaft of a dug-out tripped on a telephone wire, fell down the shaft and broke his neck. Accidents in the front line always carry more weight than any three legitimate casualties, for the absurd, but quite comprehensible, reason that they might have happened in civilian life—are outrages, as it were, by the Domestic Fates instead of by the God of War.
The growing quiet on the sector for days past had led people to expect attempts at fraternisation on Christmas. Two “short but very severe bombardments” by our artillery on Christmas morning cauterised that idea; but a Hun officer, with the methodical stupidity of his breed, needs must choose the top of his own front-line parapet on Christmas Day whence to sketch our trench, thus combining religious principles with reconnaissance, and—a single stiff figure exposed from head to foot—was shot. So passed Christmas of ’16 for the 2nd Battalion of the Irish Guards. It had opened with Captain Young of No. 1 Company finding, when he woke in his dug-out, “a stocking stuffed with sweets and the like, a present from the N.C.O.’s and the men of his company.”
They were relieved by the 1st Battalion on Christmas night, but returned on the 29th to celebrate New Year’s Day by bailing out flooded trenches and slapping back liquid parapets as they fell in. The enemy had most accurately registered the new duck-board tracks from the support-lines, and shelled the wretched carrying-parties by day and night. (“If you stayed on the track you was like to be killed; if you left it, you had great choice of being smothered.”) The Acting-Adjutant (Lieutenant Denson) and the Bombing Sergeant (Cole) attended a consultation with the Brigade Bombing Officer on the morning of the 30th at Support Company’s Headquarters in the Quarry. Business took them to the observation post in the wreckage of the church; and while there, the enemy opened on the support-line. They tried to get to the support company’s dug-out; but on the way a shell pitched in among them, wounding the Brigade Bombing Officer (Lieutenant Whittaker), the Sergeant and Lieutenant Denson. The other two were able to walk, but Denson was hit all over the body. Hereupon Lieutenant Black and his orderly, Private Savage, who were in the Support dug-out, ran to where he lay, and, as they lifted him, another shell landed almost on them. They did not dare to risk taking Denson down the nearly vertical dug-out stairs, so Private Savage, with a couple more men from No. 3 Company, in case of accidents, carried him on his back six hundred yards to the dressing-station. Thrice in that passage their track was blown up, but luckily none of the devoted little party were hit. To be hunted by shell down interminable lengths of slimy duck-board is worse than any attempt on one’s life in the open, for the reason that one feels between the shoulder-blades that one is personally and individually wanted by each shouting messenger.
Another escaped prisoner, C.S.M. J. B. Wilson of the 13th East Yorks, managed to get into our lines that night. He had been captured at Serre on the 13th November, and had got away from a prisoners’ camp at Honnecourt only the night before. He covered sixteen kilometres in the darkness, steered towards the permanent glare over the front, reached the German line at dawn, lay up in a shell-hole all through the day and, finally, wormed across to us by marking down an N.C.O. of ours who was firing some lights, and crawling straight on to him. Seeing his condition when he arrived, the achievement bears out the Diary’s tantalisingly inadequate comment: “In private life he was a bank accountant, and seemed to be very intelligent as well as a man of the greatest determination. We fed him and warmed him before sending him on to Haie Wood whence an ambulance took him to Brigade H.Q.”
So the year ended in storm and rain, the torn, grey clouds of the Somme dissolving and deluging them as they marched back to Maltz Horn camp, across an insane and upturned world where men of gentle life, unwashen for months at a stretch, were glad to lie up in pigsties, and where ex-bank-accountants might crawl out of shell-holes at any hour of the hideous twenty-four.