high-velocity shells. They exploded with an echoing crash in the wood
below, near where my horse and the colonel's had been taken to water. A
team came up the incline toward the chateau at the trot, and I looked
rather anxiously for our grooms. They rode up within two minutes,
collectedly, but each with a strained look. "Did those come anywhere
near you?" I inquired. "We just missed 'em, sir," replied Laneridge.
"One of them dropped right among the horses at one trough."
By the colonel's orders I rode back to the waggon lines soon
afterwards, bearing instructions to the battery commanders to join the
colonel at half-past one. The Brigade might expect to move up that
evening.
The battery commanders came back by tea-time with plans for that
evening's move-up completed. The waggon lines during the afternoon were
full of sleeping gunners; a sensible course, as it proved, for at 6.45
P.M. an orderly brought the adjutant a pencilled message from the
colonel who was still with the C.R.A. It ran--
Warn batteries that they must have gun limbers and firing
battery waggons within 1000 yards of their positions by 3.30
A.M., as we shall probably move at dawn. Headquarters will be
ready to start after an early dinner. I am returning by car.
"Hallo! they're expecting a big advance to-morrow," said the adjutant.
The note also decided a discussion in which the adjutant, the
signalling officer, and the cook had joined as to whether we should
dine early and pack up ready to go, or pack up and have dinner when we
got to the new position behind Mametz Wood.
It was a dark night again; other brigades of artillery were taking the
same route as ourselves, and, apart from the congestion, our own guns
had shelled this part so consistently since August 8 that the going was
heavy and hazardous. We passed one team with two horses down; at
another point an 18-pdr. had slipped into a shell-hole, and the air
rang with staccato shouts of "Heave!" while two lines of men strained
on the drag-ropes. We reached a damp valley that lay west of a stretch
of tree-stumps and scrubby undergrowth--remnants of what was a thick
leafy wood before the hurricane bombardments of July 1916. D Battery
had pulled their six hows. into the valley; the three 18-pdr. batteries
were taking up positions on top of the eastern slope. Before long it
became clear that the Boche 5.9 gunners had marked the place down.
"I'm going farther along to X 30 A.M. as zero hour, and I circulated
the news to the batteries. Some time later the telephone bell aroused
me, and the adjutant said he wanted to give me the time. Some one had
knocked over my stub of candle, and after vainly groping for it on the
floor, I kicked Wilde, and succeeded in making him understand that if
he would light a candle and check his watch, I would hang on to the
telephone. Dazed with sleep, Wilde clambered to his feet, trod once or
twice on the doctor, and lighted a candle.
"Are you ready?" asked the voice at the other end of the telephone.
"Ready, Wilde?" said I in my turn.
"I'll give it you when it's four minutes to one ... thirty seconds to
go," went on the adjutant.
Now Wilde always says that the first thing he heard was my calling
"thirty seconds to go!" and that I did not give him the "four minutes
to one" part of the ceremony. I always tell him he must have been half
asleep, and didn't hear me. At any rate, the dialogue continued like
this--
Adjutant (over the telephone to me): "Twenty seconds to go."
Me (to Wilde): "Twenty seconds to go."
Wilde: "Twenty seconds."
Adjutant: "Ten seconds to go."
Me: "Ten seconds."
Wilde: "Ten seconds."
Adjutant: "Five seconds."
Me: "Five."
Wilde: "Five."
Adjutant: "Now! Four minutes to one."
Me: "NOW! Four minutes to one."
Wilde (blankly): "But you didn't tell me what time it was going to be."
It was useless arguing, and I had to ring up the adjutant again. As a
matter of fact it was the colonel who answered, and supplied me with
the "five seconds to go" information; so there was no doubt about the
correctness of the time-taking on this occasion, and after I had gone
out and roused an officer of each battery, and made him check his
watch, I turned in again and sought sleep.
VIII. TRONES WOOD AGAIN
For three hours after zero hour our guns spat fire, fining down from
four rounds a gun a minute to the slow rate of one round each minute.
The enemy artillery barked back furiously for the first two hours, but
got very few shells into our valley; and after a time we paid little
heed to the 5.9's and 4.2's that dropped persistently on the top of the
western slope. An 8-inch that had landed in the valley about midnight
had wrought frightful execution, however. Another brigade lay next to
us; in fact one of their batteries had occupied a position intended for
our C Battery. The shell fell with a blinding crash among their horses,
which they had kept near the guns in readiness for the morning; and for
half an hour the darkness was pierced by the cries and groans of
wounded men, and the sound of revolvers putting horses out of their
pain. Four drivers had been killed and twenty-nine horses knocked out.
"A lucky escape for us," was the grim, not unsympathetic comment of C
Battery.
All through the morning the messages telephoned to me indicated that
the fighting up forward had been hard and relentless. Our infantry had
advanced, but twice before eleven o'clock I had to dash out with S.O.S.
calls; and at intervals I turned each battery on to enemy points for
which special artillery treatment was demanded.
The colonel ordered Wilde and myself to join the forward Headquarters
party after lunch. We found them in a small square hut, built at the
foot of a range of hills that rose almost sheer 200 feet up, and curled
round north-east to Catterpillar Valley in which our batteries had
spent a bitter punishing time during the third week of July 1916. The
hut contained four wire beds and a five-foot shaft in one corner, where
a solitary telephonist crouched uncomfortably at his task. The hut was
so cramped for space that one had to shift the table--a map-board laid
upon a couple of boxes--in order to move round it.
The winding road outside presented a moving war panorama that
afternoon. Two Infantry brigades and their staffs, and some of the
battalion commanders, had huts under the hillside, and by four o'clock
battalions returned from the battle were digging themselves sheltering
holes higher up the hillside. Boche prisoners in slow marching twenties
and thirties kept coming along also; some of them used as
stretcher-bearers to carry their own and our wounded; others were
turned on to the odd jobs that the Army call fatigues. I found one
long-haired, red-eyed fellow chopping wood for our cook; my appearance
caused a signaller, noted for his Hyde Park Corner method of oratory,
to cease abruptly a turgid denunciation of the Hun and all his works.
The talk was all of a counter-attack by which a battalion of Prussian
Guards had won back the eastern corner of Trones Wood, one of the day's
objectives. One of the Infantry brigadiers, a tall, tireless, fighting
soldier, who started the war as a captain, had come round to discuss
with the colonel artillery support for the fresh attack his Brigade
were to make at 5.45 P.M. This brigadier was rather apt to regard
18-pounders as machine-guns; and it was sometimes instructive to note
the cool good-humoured way in which the colonel guided his enthusiasm
into other channels. "You're giving me one forward section of
18-pounders there," began the brigadier, marking the map.
"Now,"--placing a long lean forefinger on a point 150 yards behind our
most advanced infantry post,--"couldn't I have another little fellow
there?--that would tickle him up."
The colonel smiled through his glasses. "I don't think we should be
helping you more, sir, by doing that.... I can shoot on that point with
observed fire as well from where the batteries are as from up there;
and think of the difficulty of getting ammunition up."
"Right!" responded the General, and turned immediately to the subject
of the 4.5 how. targets.
I went outside, and saw Judd at the head of the two guns of B Battery,
that were to be the forward section in the attack, going by at the
trot. As he passed he gave me an "I'm for it" grin. I knew that he was
trotting his teams because the corner of the valley was still under
enemy observation, and had been shelled all day. Bob Pottinger was
following in rear.
Five minutes after the two guns passed, the Boche began a hellish
strafe upon a battery that had perched itself under the crest of the
hill. A couple of hundred 5.9's came over, and we had a view of rapid
awe-inspiring bursts, and of men rushing for cover. "Good shooting
that," remarked the colonel, who had come to the doorway.
The brigadier paid us another visit late that night. He was almost
boyish in his glee. "A perfect little show," he told the colonel. "Your
forward guns did very fine work indeed. And the 6-inch hows. gave the
wood an awful pasting. From the reports that have come in we only took
seven Boche prisoners; practically all the rest were killed."
So we took our rest that night, content in the knowledge that things
were going well. There being only four beds, one of us would have to
doss down on the floor. The colonel insisted on coming into our "odd
man out" gamble. The bare boards fell to me; but I slept well. The
canvas bag containing my spare socks fitted perfectly into the hollow
of my hip--the chief recipe for securing comfort on hard ground.
_Reveille_ was provided by the bursting of an 8-inch shell on the other
side of the road. It removed part of the roof of our hut, and smothered
the rest with a ponderous shower of earth. We shaved and washed by the
roadside, and Major Mallaby-Kelby contrived a rapid and complete change
of underclothing, also in the open air.
By 8.30 A.M. the colonel, Major Mallaby-Kelby, and the battery
commanders were walking briskly through the valley and on to the
rolling country beyond, reconnoitring for positions to which the
batteries would move in the afternoon. Wilde and myself accompanied
them, and as Judd and Bob Pottinger were also of the party I heard more
details of what B Battery's forward section had done the evening
before.
"I saw you turn into the valley at the trot," I said to Judd.
"Yes, by Gad," he replied; "and when we got into the valley we made it
a canter. Those dead horses will show you what the valley has been
like."
We were striding through the valley now--a death-trap passage, two
hundred yards across at its widest point, and less than three-quarters
of a mile long. I counted twenty-seven dead horses, lying in grotesque
attitudes, some of them cruelly mangled. The narrow-gauge railway had
become scattered bits of scrap-iron, the ground a churned waste of
shell-holes.
"And the worst of it was that the traces of the second team broke,"
Pottinger chimed in. "Judd had gone on ahead, and we hadn't any spare
traces. So I sent that team back out of the way, followed the first
gun, and brought the team back to take up the second gun. Damned good
team that, E sub-section. You remember the team we were training for
the 'Alarm Race' when we were out at St Saveur? That's the one.... And
the old Boche was peppering the valley all the time."
"Did the Boche shell much during the attack?" I asked.
"Well," continued Pottinger, "he gave the guns most of the shelling
----. I was shooting the battery and Judd was doing F.O.O. with the
infantry,--and where Judd was it was mostly machine-guns."
"Yes," said Judd, "I got the wind-up with those machine-guns. I
couldn't find the battalion headquarters at first, and it was 150 yards
from the wood. The first lot of machine-gun bullets went in front of
me; one plopped into a bank just past my foot. It was dam funny. I spun
right round.... But the infantry colonel, the colonel of the ----s, was
a brave man. We only had a tiny dug-out, and every time you got out the
machine-gun started. But he didn't mind; he got out and saw for himself
everything that was going on. Didn't seem to worry him at all.... And I
shall never forget the way the heavies lammed it into the wood. They
had half an hour, six batteries of 6-inch howitzers, before the
18-pounders put in a five minutes' burst of shrapnel.... They say the
wood is choked with German dead."
It was this self-same colonel who wrote to his brigadier commending the
fine work of Judd and Pottinger on that day. Before October was out
each was wearing the M.C. ribbon.
Battery positions being selected, the colonel, Major Mallaby-Kelby, and
myself cast round for a headquarters. Some machine-gunners had taken
possession of the only possible dug-outs. However, there were numerous
huts, abandoned by the Hun, and I was chalking our claim on a neat
building with a latched door and glass windows, and a garden-seat
outside, when the colonel, who was gazing through his binoculars at the
long, dense, hillside wood that marked the eastern edge of the valley,
said in his decisive way, "What's that Swiss chalet at the top of the
gully in the centre of wood?... Looks a proper sort of place for
headquarters!... Let's go and inspect it."
The view through the binoculars was not deceptive; indeed, when we
plunged into the wood and made the steep climb up to the chalet, we
passed five or six beautifully built huts hidden among the trees. The
chalet was equipped with a most attractive verandah; a hundred feet
below stood a larger wooden building, covered with black felt and lined
with match-boarding. The main room possessed tables obviously made by
expert carpenters, and a roomy bench, with a sloping back, that went
round two sides of the apartment. An inner bedroom contained a
wood-framed bed with a steel spring-mattress and a number of
plush-bottomed chairs. The Boche had extended his craftsmanship to the
neat slats that covered the joinings of the wall-planks and kept out
draughts. All the wood used was new and speckless, and smelt sweet and
clean. The other huts were constructed with similar attention to
detail. Also, one came across tables and benches in shady nooks, and
arbours of the kind found in German beer-gardens.
"Jehoshaphat," gasped Major Mallaby-Kelby, "this is indeed the height
of war luxury." The colonel, who was going on leave next day, not
having been in England since the early part of January, smiled in his
turn, and jested upon the desirability of delaying his departure until
we vacated this delightful retreat. Wilde and myself nosed about
joyously, chalking the name of our unit on every door within reach.
From a Boche artillery map picked up in the chalet we concluded that
the place must have been the summer quarters of a Hun artillery group
commander.
And then without warning our satisfaction was changed to
disappointment. Major Mallaby-Kelby had just called out that the place
was so complete that even a funk-hole had been provided, when a gunner
emerged.
"What are you doing here?" inquired the major in surprise.
"I'm left here until our brigade headquarters come in, sir," the gunner
replied promptly.
"What brigade?"
"The --rd, sir," said the gunner, naming our companion Artillery
Brigade.
"When did Colonel ---- take over?" asked the colonel.
"About an hour ago, sir. He left me to look after the place until
Brigade Headquarters came in this afternoon."
We looked solemnly at one another. "We've been forestalled," said the
colonel with mock despair. Then with brisk decision, "Well, there are
plenty more huts about here. We'll hurry up and get settled before
other people come along."
* * * * *
The colonel left us during the afternoon. The C.R.A.'s car was to come
for him at headquarters waggon line early next morning. The doctor, who
was now living with the veterinary officer and the French interpreter
at the waggon line, had visited our new quarters in the wood, and
hoicked off our last but one bottle of whisky. I had despatched a
frantic S.O.S., coupled with 100 francs in cash, to the colonel,
begging him take the interpreter to Boulogne so as to replenish our
mess supplies. Our good friends of the --rd Brigade had occupied the
chalet, and received one sharp reminder that the Boche gunner was still
a nasty animal. A high-velocity shell had hit the edge of the gully not
ten yards from them, and their adjutant and their intelligence officer
had described to me their acrobatic plunge into the funk-hole. Major
Mallaby-Kelby was commanding our Brigade in the absence of the colonel,
and already our signal-wires buzzed with reports that indicated a very
short sojourn in our new home in the wood.
I am making this narrative a plain matter-of-fact record of incidents
and episodes in the career of our Brigade--which, let it be noted, was
in action from August 1, before the British advance commenced, until
November 4, the day of the final decisive thrust--because such an
account, however poorly told, offers a picture of real war: the war
that is by no means one continuous stretch of heroism and martyrdom _in
excelsis_, of guns galloping to death or glory, of bayonets dripping
with enemy blood, of "our gallant lads" meeting danger and destruction
with "characteristic British humour and cheerfulness," when they are
not "seeing red." On that 29th of August, when Major Mallaby-Kelby
assumed command, we knew that the campaign had taken a definite turn in
our favour, but none of us expected the Boche to be so harried and
battered that by November he would be suing for peace. And I am stating
bald unimaginative facts if I say that one of the main aspirations
among officers and men was to continue the advance in such a way as to
make sure of decent quarters o' nights, and to drive the Germans so
hard that when winter set in we should be clear of the foul mud tracts
and the rat-infested trenches that had formed the battlefields of 1915,
'16, and '17. Major Mallaby-Kelby was a keen pushful officer, immensely
eager to maintain the well-known efficiency of the Brigade while the
colonel was away; but he took me into his confidence on another matter.
"Look here!" he began, jocularly and with a sweeping gesture. "I'm
going to ask you to make sure that the mess never runs out of white
wine. It's most important. Unless I get white wine my efficiency will
be impaired." I replied with due solemnity, and said that in this
important matter our interpreter should be specially commissioned to
scour the countryside.
By 1 P.M. it became so certain that the enemy had inaugurated a retreat
that the major issued orders for the Brigade to move forward three
miles. We marched steadily down the valley through which Judd and
Pottinger had passed on their forward-section adventure, skirted the
wood that they had assisted the Divisional Infantry to recapture, and
halted for further instructions west of a deserted colony of battered
Nissen huts, gaping holes and broken bricks shovelled into piles, still
entered on the maps as the village of Guillemont. It would have been a
truer description to paint on the sign-boards, "This was Villers
Carbonnel," as has been done at one desolate spot between Peronne and
Villers Bretonneux. Along the valley we had passed were row after row
of solidly-built stables left uncleaned and smelly by the fleeing Hun;
rotting horses smothered with flies; abandoned trucks marooned on the
few stretches of the narrow-gauge railway left whole by our shell-fire.
In the wood stood numerous Boche-built huts, most of them put up since
the March onslaught. The Boche, dirty cur that he is, had deliberately
fouled them before departing. The undulating waste land east of Trones
Wood, hallowed by memories of fierce battles in 1916, had remained
untroubled until the last few weeks; and the hundreds of shell-holes,
relics of 1916, had become grass-grown. The hummocky greenness reminded
one of nothing so much as a seaside golf-course.
IX. DOWN THE ROAD TO COMBLES
A Battery had been ordered to move about half a mile beyond Guillemont,
and to come into action off the road that led towards the extensive,
low-lying village of Combles, through which the enemy front line now
ran. Major Mallaby-Kelby had gone forward and the three remaining
batteries awaited his return.
I clambered my horse over the shell-holes and rubbish heaps of
Guillemont, a preliminary to a short reconnaissance of the roads and
tracks in the neighbourhood. Old Silvertail, having become a confirmed
wind-sucker, had been deported to the Mobile Veterinary Section; Tommy,
the shapely bay I was now riding, had been transferred to me by our
ex-adjutant, Castle, who had trained him to be well-mannered and
adaptable. "A handy little horse," was Castle's stock description,
until his increasing weight made Tommy too small for him. I had ridden
about six hundred yards past the sunken road in which A Battery's
ammunition waggons were waiting, when half a dozen 5.9's crashed round
and about them. I turned back and saw more shells descend among the
empty Nissen huts in Guillemont. Two drivers of A Battery were being
carried away on stretchers and the waggons were coming towards me at a
trot. They halted four hundred yards from the spot where they had been
shelled, and young Beale said they counted themselves lucky not to have
had more casualties.
The Boche by now had got his guns in position and began a two hours'
bombardment of Guillemont and its cross-roads. It was not until 7 P.M.
that Major Mallaby-Kelby returned. He was tired, but anxious to go
forward. "We are the advanced Brigade for to-morrow's show," he said.
"The battery positions are only 1600 yards from the Boche, but I think
they will be comparatively safe.... I want you all to come along and
we'll arrange a headquarters. I've got my eye on a sunken Nissen hut.
There's a section commander of another brigade in it, but it ought to
be big enough to hold us as well."
So the major, the adjutant, Wilde, and myself walked at a smart pace
along the road to Combles. The Boche shells were mostly going over our
heads, but whizz-bangs now and again hit the ground to left and right
of us; a smashed limber had not been cleared from the road, and fifty
yards short of the railway crossing four decomposing horses emitted a
sickening stench. "We'll have our headquarters waggon line along there
first thing to-morrow," announced the major, stretching a long arm
towards a side-road with a four-foot bank.
At the forsaken railway halt we turned off the roadway and followed the
line, obeying to the letter the major's warning to bend low and creep
along under cover of the low embankment, "Now we'll slip through here,"
said the major, after a six-hundred-yards' crawl. We hurried through
what had been an important German depot. There was one tremendous dump
of eight-gallon, basket-covered wine bottles--empty naturally; a street
of stables and dwelling-huts; a small mountain of mouldy hay; and
several vast barns that had been used for storing clothing and
material. Each building was protected from our bombers by rubble
revetments, fashioned with the usual German carefulness. "They shell
here pretty consistently," added the major encouragingly, and we made
for more open land that sloped up towards a well-timbered wood on the
wide-stretched ridge, a thousand yards away. The sparse-covered slopes
were dotted with living huts, all built since the Boche recovered the
ground in his March push. "A Battery have moved to within two hundred
yards of Leuze Wood now--you can see the guns," resumed the major. "The
other battery positions are on the southern side of the road. The place
I have in my eye for headquarters is close to A Battery."
The German artillery had quite evidently understood the likelihood of
British batteries occupying the slope, and were acting accordingly. Our
party had reached a smashed hut three hundred yards from A Battery,
when the whine of an approaching shell caused us to drop to ground; it
fell fifty yards away, and the air became dense with flying pieces of
shell and earth showers. As we raised ourselves again we saw Beadle
walking at an even pace towards us. "Not a nice spot, sir," he began,
saluting the major. "We picked that place for a mess"--pointing to the
broken hut--"and five minutes later a shell crashed into it. There's a
dead horse round the corner ..."
"Have you been shelled much at the battery?" demanded the major.