BEFORE THE FIRST BATTLE.
(_March and April 1917._)
In the first months of 1917 we were confident that the last year of
the war had come. The Battle of the Somme had shown that the strongest
German lines were not impregnable. We had learned much: the enemy had
received a tremendous hammering; and the success of General Gough's
operations in the Ancre valley promised well for the future. The
French, it was rumoured, were undertaking a grand attack in the early
spring. We were first to support them by an offensive near Arras, and
then we would attack ourselves on a large scale somewhere in the north.
We hoped, too, that the Russians and Italians would come to our help.
We were told that the discipline of the German Army was loosening, that
our blockade was proving increasingly effective, and we were encouraged
by stories of many novel inventions. We possessed unbounded confidence
in our Tanks.
Late in February the colonel held a battalion conference. He explained
the situation to his company commanders and the plan of forthcoming
operations.
As the result of our successes in the Ancre valley, the German position
between the Ancre and Arras formed a pronounced salient. It was
determined to attack simultaneously at Arras and from the Ancre valley,
with the object of breaking through at both points and cutting off the
German inside the salient.
Colonel Elles had offered two battalions of tanks. He was taking a
risk. Officers and crews were only half-trained. Right through the
period of training real tanks had been too scarce. Improved tanks were
expected from England, but none had arrived, and he decided to employ
again the old Mark I. tank which had been used in the operations on the
Somme in the previous year. The two battalions selected were "C" and
"D."
When we examined the orders for the attack in detail, I found that my
company was destined to go through with the troops allotted to the
second objective and take Mercatel and Neuville Vitasse. It should
have been a simple enough operation, as two conspicuous main roads
penetrated the German lines parallel with the direction of my proposed
attack.
On March 9th I drove to Arras in my car with Haigh, my
second-in-command, and Jumbo, my reconnaissance officer. We went by
St Pol and the great Arras road. The Arras road is a friend of mine.
First it was almost empty except for the lorry park near Savy, and,
short of Arras, it was screened because the Germans still held the
Vimy Ridge. Then before the Arras battle it became more and more
crowded--numberless lorries, convoys of huge guns and howitzers,
smiling men in buses and tired men marching, staff-cars and motor
ambulances, rarely, a waggon with slow horses, an old Frenchman in
charge, quite bewildered by the traffic. When the battle had begun,
whole Divisions, stretching for ten miles or more, came marching along
it, and the ambulances streamed back to the big hospital at St Pol. I
saw it for the last time after the Armistice had been signed, deserted
and unimportant, with just a solitary soldier here and there standing
at the door of a cottage. It is an exposed and windy road. The surface
of it was never good, but I have always felt that the Arras road was
proud to help us. It seemed ever to be saying: "Deliver Arras from
shell and bomb; then leave me, and I shall be content to dream
again."...
We drove into Arras a little nervously, but it was not being shelled,
and, hungry after a freezing ride, we lunched at the Hôtel de Commerce.
This gallant hotel was less than 2500 yards from the German trenches.
Across the street was a field battery in action. The glass of the
restaurant had been broken, the upper stories had been badly damaged,
the ceiling of the dining-room showed marks of shrapnel. Arras was
being shelled and bombed every night, and often by day; German
aeroplanes flew low over the town and fired down the streets. The
hotel had still carried on ever since the British had been in Arras
and before. The proprietress, a little pinched and drawn, with the
inevitable scrap of fur flung over her shoulders, presided at the
desk. Women dressed in the usual black waited on us. The lunch was
cheap, excellently cooked, and well served--within easy range of the
enemy field-guns. After the battle the hotel was put out of bounds,
for serving drinks in forbidden hours. Indeed, A.P.M.'s have no souls.
It reopened later, and continued to flourish until the German attack
of April 1918, when the enemy shelling became too insistent. The hotel
has not been badly hit, and, if it be rebuilt, I beseech all those who
visit the battlefields of Arras to lunch at the Hôtel de Commerce--in
gratitude. It is in the main street just by the station.
We motored out of Arras along a road that was lined with newly-made
gun-pits, and, arriving at a dilapidated village, introduced ourselves
to the Divisional staff. We discussed operations, and found that much
was expected of the tanks. After a cheery tea we drove home in the
bitter cold.
On the 13th March we again visited the Division. I picked up the G.S.O.
III. of the Division, called on a brigadier, with whom I expected to
work, and then drove to the neighbourhood of the disreputable village
of Agny. We peeped at the very little there was to be seen of the
enemy front line through observation posts in cottages and returned to
Arras, where we lunched excellently with the colonel of an infantry
battalion. I left Jumbo with him, to make a detailed reconnaissance of
the Front....
The Arras battle would have been fought according to plan, we should
have won a famous victory, and hundreds of thousands of Germans might
well have been entrapped in the Arras salient, if the enemy in his
wisdom had not retired. Unfortunately, at the beginning of March he
commenced his withdrawal from the unpleasant heights to the north
of the Ancre valley, and, once the movement was under way, it was
predicted that the whole of the Arras salient would be evacuated.
This actually occurred in the following weeks; the very sector I was
detailed to attack was occupied by our troops without fighting. Whether
the German had wind of the great attack that we had planned, I do not
know. He certainly made it impossible for us to carry it out.
As soon as the extent of the German withdrawal became clear, my company
was placed in reserve. I was instructed to make arrangements to support
any attack at any point on the Arras front.
The Arras sector was still suitable for offensive operations. The
Germans had fallen back on the Hindenburg Line, and this complicated
system of defences rejoined the old German line opposite Arras.
Obviously the most practical way of attacking the Hindenburg Line was
to turn it--to fight down it, and not against it. Our preparations for
an attack in the Arras sector and on the Vimy Ridge to the north of
it were far advanced. It was decided in consequence to carry out with
modifications the attack on the German trench system opposite Arras
and on the Vimy Ridge. Operations from the Ancre valley, the southern
re-entrant of the old Arras salient, were out of the question. The
Fifth Army was fully occupied in keeping touch with the enemy.
On the 27th March my company was suddenly transferred from the Third
Army to the Fifth Army. I was informed that my company would be
attached to the Vth Corps for any operations that might occur. Jumbo
was recalled from Arras, fuming at his wasted work, and an advance
party was immediately sent to my proposed detraining station at
Achiet-le-Grand.
On the 29th March I left Blangy. My car was a little unsightly. The
body was loaded with Haigh's kit and my kit and a collapsible table.
On top, like a mahout, sat Spencer, my servant. It was sleeting, and
there was a cold wind. We drove through St Pol and along the Arras
road, cut south through Habarcq to Beaumetz, and plunged over appalling
roads towards Bucquoy. The roads became worse and worse. Spencer was
just able to cling on, groaning at every bump. Soon we arrived at our
old rear defences, from which we had gone forward only ten days before.
It was joyous to read the notices, so newly obsolete--"This road is
subject to shell-fire"--and when we passed over our old support and
front trenches, and drove across No Man's Land, and saw the green
crosses of the Germans, the litter of their trenches, their signboards
and their derelict equipment, then we were triumphant indeed. Since
March 1917 we have advanced many a mile, but never with more joy.
Remember that from October 1914 to March 1917 we had never really
advanced. At Neuve Chapelle we took a village and four fields, Loos was
a fiasco, and the Somme was too horrible for a smile.
On the farther side of the old German trenches was desolation. We
came to a village and found the houses lying like slaughtered animals.
Mostly they had been pulled down, like card houses, but some had been
blown in. It was so pitiful that I wanted to stop and comfort them. The
trees along the roads had been cut down. The little fruit-trees had
been felled, or lay half-fallen with gashes in their sides. The ploughs
rusted in the fields. The rain was falling monotonously. It was getting
dark, and there was nobody to be seen except a few forlorn soldiers.
We crept with caution round the vast funnel-shaped craters that had
been blown at each cross-road, and, running through Logeast Wood,
which had mocked us for so many weeks on the Somme, we came to
Achiet-le-Grand.
Ridger, the town commandant, had secured the only standing house, and
he was afraid that it had been left intact for some devilish purpose.
Haigh and Grant of my advance party were established in a dug-out.
So little was it possible in those days to realise the meaning of an
advance, that we discovered we had only two mugs, two plates, and one
knife between us.
In the morning we got to work. A supply of water was arranged for the
men; there was only one well in the village that had not been polluted.
We inspected the ramp by which the tanks would detrain, selected a
tankodrome near the station, wired in a potential dump, found good
cellars for the men, and began the construction of a mess in the
remains of a small brick stable. Then Haigh and I motored past the
derelict factory of Bihucourt and through the outskirts of Bapaume to
the ruins of Behagnies, on the Bapaume-Arras road. After choosing sites
for an advanced camp and tankodrome, we walked back to Achiet-le-Grand
across country, in order to reconnoitre the route for tanks from the
station to Behagnies. After lunch, Haigh, Jumbo, and I motored to
Ervillers, which is beyond Behagnies, and, leaving the car there,
tramped to Mory. Jumbo had discovered in the morning an old quarry,
hidden by trees, that he recommended as a half-way house for the tanks,
if we were ordered to move forward; but the enemy was a little lively,
and we determined to investigate further on a less noisy occasion.
That night we dined in our new mess. We had stretched one tarpaulin
over what had been the roof, and another tarpaulin took the place of
an absent wall. The main beam was cracked, and we feared rain, but a
huge blazing fire comforted us--until one or two slates fell off with
a clatter. We rushed out, fearing the whole building was about to
collapse. It was cold and drizzling. We stood it for five minutes, and
then, as nothing further happened, we returned to our fire....
In some general instructions I had received from the colonel, it was
suggested that my company would be used by the Vth Corps for an attack
on Bullecourt and the Hindenburg Line to the east and west of the
village. It will be remembered that the attack at Arras was designed
to roll up the Hindenburg Line, starting from the point at which the
Hindenburg Line joined the old German trench system. General Gough's
Fifth Army, consisting of General Fanshawe's Vth Corps and General
Birdwood's Corps of Australians, lay south-east of Arras and on the
right of the Third Army. The Fifth Army faced the Hindenburg Line, and,
if it attacked, it would be compelled to attack frontally.
[Illustration]
The disadvantages of a frontal attack on an immensely strong series of
entrenchments were balanced by the fact that a successful penetration
would bring the Fifth Army on the left rear of that German Army, which
would be fully occupied at the time in repelling the onset of our Third
Army.
The key to that sector of the Hindenburg Line which lay opposite the
Fifth Army front was the village of Bullecourt.
In the last week of March the Germans had not taken refuge in their
main line of defence, and were still holding out in the villages of
Croisilles, Ecoust, and Noreuil.
We were attacking them vigorously, but with no success and heavy
casualties. On the morning of the 31st March Jumbo and I drove again to
Ervillers and walked to Mory, pushing forward down the slope towards
Ecoust. There was a quaint feeling of insecurity, quite unjustified,
in strolling about "on top." We had an excellent view of our shells
bursting on the wire in front of Ecoust, but we saw nothing of the
country we wanted to reconnoitre--the approaches to Bullecourt. Ecoust
was finally captured at the sixth or seventh attempt by the 9th
Division on April 1st.
In the afternoon I paid my first visit to the Vth Corps, then at
Acheux, twenty miles back. I motored by Bapaume and Albert over the
Somme battlefield. The nakedness of it is now hidden by coarse grass
and rough weeds, but in March of 1917 it was bare. There was dark-brown
mud for mile after mile as far as the eye could see--mud churned and
tortured until the whole surface of the earth was pitted with craters.
Mud overwhelmed the landscape. Trees showed only against the sky; dead
men, old equipment, derelict tanks blended with the mud. At Le Sars
bits of walls and smashed beams lay embedded in the mud. At Pozières
the mud held a few mud-coloured bricks. I was glad when I came to
Albert.
We took the Doullens road and found the Corps well housed in the
chateau at Acheux. I announced the imminent arrival of my tanks,
but the news did not kindle the enthusiasm I had expected. The Vth
Corps had already used tanks and knew their little ways. After
tea I consulted with the lesser lights of the staff. Satisfactory
arrangements were made for supplies, rations, and accommodation, and
I demanded and obtained the use of a troop of Glasgow Yeomanry, on the
plea that they were required to cover the tracks of my tanks. I wanted
a horse to ride.
I decided to return by Puisieux-le-Mont. It was apparent that the
Albert-Bapaume road would soon become uncomfortably crowded. I wanted
to reconnoitre the only alternative route, and at the same time to
inspect the village of Serre, which, on paper, I had so often and so
violently attacked.
Never have I endured a more ghastly ride. In comparison with the
country on either side of the Puisieux road, the Somme battlefield
from the highway between Albert and Bapaume was serenely monotonous.
After Mailly-Mailly the road became a rough track, narrow and full
of unfilled shell-holes. Crazy bridges had been thrown across the
trenches. The sun was setting in a fiery sky, and a reddish light
tinged the pitiful tumbled earth, and glittered for a moment on the
desolate water of the shell-holes. The crumbling trenches were manned
with restless dead. In the doubtful light I thought a dead German
moved. He lay on his back, half-sunken in the slimy mud, with knees
drawn up, and blackened hand gripping a rusty rifle. Mercifully I could
not see his face, but I thought his arms twitched.
It grew darker, and so narrow was the track that I might have been
driving over the black mud of the battlefield. A derelict limber
half-blocked the road, and, swerving to avoid it, we barely missed
the carcass of a horse, dead a few days. Our progress was slow. Soon
we lit the lamps. The track was full of horrible shadows, and big dark
things seemed to come down the road to meet us--shattered transport or
old heaps of shells. On either side of the car was the desert of mud
and water-logged holes and corpses, face downward under the water, and
broken guns and mortars, and little graves, and mile-long strands of
rusty wire. Everywhere maimed ghosts were rustling, and the plump rats
were pattering along the trenches.
It is unwise to go through a battlefield at night. If they make the
Somme battlefield a forest, no man will be brave enough to cross it in
the dark.
We came to lights in the ruins of a village, and I stopped for a pipe
and a word with my driver....
My tanks arrived at Achiet-le-Grand just after dawn on April 1st. We
had taken them over from the central workshops at Erin, and had drawn
there a vast variety of equipment. The tanks had been driven on to the
train by an Engineer officer. The railway journey had been delayed as
usual, and the usual expert--this time a doctor--had walked along the
train, when shunted at Doullens, and had pointed out to his companion
the "new monster tanks."
In the morning we hauled off the sponson-trolleys--their use will be
explained later--but we thought it wiser to wait until dusk before we
detrained the tanks.
Tanks travel on flat trucks, such as are employed to carry rails.
They are driven on and off the train under their own power, but this
performance requires care, skill, and experience. A Mk. I. or a Mk.
IV. tank is not too easy to steer, while the space between the track
and the edge of the truck is alarmingly small. With two exceptions, my
officers had neither experience nor skill.
It was an anxious time--not only for the company commander. The office
of the R.T.O., at the edge of the ramp, was narrowly missed on two
occasions. Very slowly and with infinite care the tanks were persuaded
to leave the train and move down the road to the tankodrome we had
selected. Then it began first to sleet and then to snow, while an icy
wind rose, until a blizzard was lashing our faces.
In the old Mark I. tank it was necessary to detach the sponsons, or
armoured "bow-windows," on either side before the tank could be moved
by rail. This was no easy matter. The tank was driven into two shallow
trenches. A stout four-wheeled trolley was run alongside, and a sort of
crane was fitted, to which slings were secured. The sponson was girt
about with these slings, the bolts which secured the sponson to the
body of the tank were taken out, and the sponson was lowered on to the
trolley.
My men, of whom the majority were inexperienced, carried out the
reverse process on a dark night in a blizzard. Their fingers were so
blue with cold that they could scarcely handle their tools. The climax
was reached when we discovered that we should be compelled to drill new
holes in several of the sponsons, because in certain cases the holes in
the sponsons did not correspond with the holes in the tanks.
If the men never had a harder night's work, they certainly never worked
better. Half the tanks fitted their sponsons and reached Behagnies by
dawn. The remainder, less one lame duck, were hidden in Achiet-le-Grand
until darkness once more allowed them to move.
Every precaution was taken to conceal the tanks from the enemy. My
troop of Glasgow Yeomanry, under the direction of Talbot, who had been
a sergeant-major in the Dragoons, rode twice over the tracks which the
tanks had made in order to obliterate them by hoof-marks. At Behagnies
the tanks were drawn up against convenient hedges and enveloped in
tarpaulins and camouflage nets. In spite of our efforts they appeared
terribly obvious as we surveyed them anxiously from one point after
another. Our subtle devices were soon tested. An enterprising German
airman flew down out of the clouds and darted upon two luckless
observation balloons to right and left of us. He set them both on fire
with tracer bullets, came low over our camp, fired down the streets of
Bapaume, and disappeared into the east. The sporting instinct of my men
responded to the audacity of the exploit, and they cheered him; but
for the next twenty-four hours I was wondering if the camouflage of my
tanks had been successful, or if the attention of the airman had been
concentrated solely on the balloons. Presumably we were not spotted,
for while at Behagnies we were neither shelled nor bombed.
The preparations for my first essay in tank-fighting were beginning
to bear fruit. Eleven tanks lay within two short marches of any
point from which they were likely to attack, and my crews were busy
overhauling them. One crippled tank was hidden at Achiet-le-Grand, but
the mechanical defect which had developed in her must have escaped the
notice of central workshops. Cooper[6] was engaged night and day in
taking up supplies and making forward dumps. The Corps had provided us
with a convoy of limbered waggons drawn by mules--the forward roads
were not passable for lorries--and the wretched animals had little
rest. We were ordered to be ready by the 6th, and the order meant a
fight against time. Tanks consume an incredible quantity of petrol,
oil, grease, and water, and it was necessary to form dumps of these
supplies and of ammunition at Mory Copse, our half-way house, and at
Noreuil and Ecoust. Night and day the convoy trekked backwards and
forwards under Cooper or Talbot. Mules cast their shoes, the drivers
were dog-tired, the dumps at Noreuil and Ecoust were shelled, both
roads to Mory were blocked by the explosion of delayed mines,--in spite
of all difficulties the dumps were made, and on the morning of the
battle the convoy stood by loaded, ready to follow the tanks in the
expected break through.
Haigh had ridden forward to Ecoust with a handful of Glasgow yeomen in
order to keep an eye on the dump and reconnoitre the country between
Ecoust and the Hindenburg Line. He started in the afternoon, joining an
ammunition column on the way. They approached the village at dusk. The
enemy was shelling the road and suspected battery positions short of
the first houses. The column made a dash for it at full gallop, but a
couple of shells found the column, killing a team and the drivers.
Haigh and his men wandered into a smithy and lit a small fire, for it
was bitterly cold. The shelling continued, but the smithy was not hit.
They passed a wretched night, and at dawn discovered a cellar, where
they made themselves comfortable after they had removed the bodies of
two Germans.
The reconnaissances were carried out with Haigh's usual thoroughness.
Tank routes and observation posts were selected--"lying-up" places for
the tanks were chosen. Everything was ready if the tanks should be
ordered to attack Bullecourt from the direction of Ecoust.
On April 4th I was introduced to the Higher Command. The Vth Corps had
moved forward from Acheux to the ruined chateau at Bihucourt. There I
lunched with the General, and drove with him in the afternoon to an
army conference at Fifth Army Headquarters in Albert. The block of
traffic on the road made us an hour late, and it was interesting to
see how an Army commander dealt with such pronounced, if excusable,
unpunctuality in a Corps commander.
The conference consisted of an awe-inspiring collection of generals
seated round a table in a stuffy room decorated with maps. The details
of the attack had apparently been settled before we arrived, but I
understood from the Army commander's vigorous summary of the situation
that the Third Army would not attack until the 7th. The greatest
results were expected, and the Fifth Army would join in the fray
immediately the attack of the Third Army was well launched. As far
as I was concerned, my tanks were to be distributed along the fronts
of the Australian and Vth Corps. The conference broke up, and the
colonel and I were asked to tea at the chateau. It was a most nervous
proceeding, to drink tea in the company of a bevy of generals; but
the major-general on my right was hospitality itself, and the colonel
improved the occasion by obtaining the promise of some more huts from
the major-general, who was engineer-in-chief of the Army. Eventually we
escaped, and the colonel[7] drove me back to Behagnies, where battalion
headquarters lay close by my camp.
On the night of the 5th, as soon as it was dusk, my tanks moved
forward. One by one they slid smoothly past me in the darkness, each
like a patient animal, led by his officer, who flashed directions with
an electric lamp. The stench of petrol in the air, a gentle crackling
as they found their way through the wire, the sweet purr of the engine
changing to a roar when they climbed easily on to the road--and then,
as they followed the white tape into the night, the noise of their
engines died away, and I could hear only the sinister flap-flap of the
tracks, and see only points of light on the hillside.
Tanks in the daytime climbing in and out of trenches like performing
elephants may appeal to the humour of a journalist. Stand with me at
night and listen. There is a little mist, and the dawn will soon
break. Listen carefully, and you will hear a queer rhythmical noise and
the distant song of an engine. The measured flap of the tracks grows
louder, and, if you did not know, you would think an aeroplane was
droning overhead. Then in the half-light comes a tired officer, reading
a map, and behind him another, signalling at intervals to a grey mass
gliding smoothly like a snake. And so they pass, one by one, with the
rattle of tracks and the roar of their exhaust, each mass crammed with
weary men, hot and filthy and choking with the fumes. Nothing is more
inexorable than the slow glide of a tank and the rhythm of her tracks.
Remember that nothing on earth has ever caused more deadly fear at the
terrible hour of dawn than these grey sliding masses crammed with weary
men....
My tanks were safely camouflaged in the old quarry at Mory Copse before
dawn on April 6th. I joined them in the morning, riding up from the
camp at Behagnies on a troop-horse I had commandeered from my troop
of Glasgow Yeomanry. The quarry was not an ideal hiding-place, as it
lay open to direct though distant observation from the German lines;
but the tanks were skilfully concealed by the adroit use of trees,
undergrowth, and nets, the hill surmounted by the copse provided
an excellent background, and we were compelled to make a virtue of
necessity as the open downs in the neighbourhood of Mory gave not the
slightest cover.[8] The village itself was out of the question: the
enemy were shelling it with hearty goodwill.
We lay there comfortably enough, though unnecessary movement by day
and the use of lights at night were forbidden. No enemy aeroplane came
over, but a few shells, dropping just beyond the copse on a suspected
battery position, disturbed our sleep. The tanks were quietly tuned,
the guns were cleaned, and officers were detailed to reconnoitre the
tank routes to Ecoust and Noreuil.
The offensive was postponed from day to day, and we were growing a
little impatient, when at dawn on April 9th the Third Army attacked.
It had been arranged at the last Army Conference that the Fifth Army
would move when the offensive of the Third Army was well launched. My
tanks were to be distributed in pairs along the whole front of the
army, and to each pair a definite objective was allotted. I had always
been averse to this scattering of my command. The Hindenburg Line,
which faced us, was notoriously strong. Bullecourt, the key to the
whole position, looked on the map almost impregnable. The artillery of
the Fifth Army was to the best of my knowledge far from overwhelming,
and gunners had told me that good forward positions for the guns
were difficult to find. I realised, of course, that an officer in my
subordinate position knew little, but I was convinced that a surprise
concentration might prove a success where a formal attack, lightly
supported by a few tanks scattered over a wide front, might reasonably
fail. I planned for my own content an attack in which my tanks,
concentrated on a narrow front of a thousand yards and supported as
strongly as possible by all the infantry and guns available, should
steal up to the Hindenburg Line without a barrage. As they entered the
German trenches down would come the barrage, and under cover of the
barrage and the tanks the infantry would sweep through, while every
gun not used in making the barrage should pound away at the German
batteries.
I was so fascinated by my conception that on the morning of the 9th
I rode down to Behagnies and gave it to the colonel for what it was
worth. He approved of it thoroughly. After a hasty lunch we motored
down to the headquarters of the Fifth Army.
We found General Gough receiving in triumph the reports of our
successes on the Third Army front opposite Arras.
"We want to break the Hindenburg Line with tanks, General," said the
colonel, and very briefly explained the scheme.
General Gough received it with favour, and decided to attack at dawn
on the following morning. He asked me when my tanks would require to
start. The idea of an attack within twenty-four hours was a little
startling--there were so many preparations to be made; but I replied
my tanks should move at once, and I suggested air protection. General
Gough immediately rang up the R.F.C., but their General was out,
and, after some discussion, it was decided that my tanks would have
sufficient time to reach the necessary position if they moved off after
dusk. We drove at breakneck speed to the chateau near, which was
occupied by the Australian Corps, and were left by General Gough to
work out the details with the Brigadier-General of the General Staff.
The colonel allowed me to explain the scheme myself. All my suggestions
were accepted; but the concentration of men and guns that I had
imagined in my dreams was made impossible by the fact that General
Gough had ordered the attack for the morrow.
I took the colonel's car and tore back to Behagnies. I wrote out my
orders while Jumbo, helped by two reconnaissance officers who were
attached to us for instruction, rapidly marked and coloured maps for
the tank commanders. My orders reached Swears, who was in charge at
Mory Copse, by 6.30 P.M., and by 8 P.M. the tanks were clear of the
quarry.
After dark I walked down the Bapaume road and presented myself at the
headquarters of the Australian Division, with which my tanks were
operating. It was a pitch-black night. The rain was turning to sleet.
Divisional Headquarters were in "Armstrong" or small canvas huts,
draughty and cold. I discussed the coming battle with the staff of the
Division and Osborne, the G.S.O. II. of the Corps. We turned in for a
snatch of sleep, and I woke with a start--dreaming that my tanks had
fallen over a cliff into the sea. At midnight I went to the door of
the hut and looked out. A gale was blowing, and sleet was mingled with
snow. After midnight I waited anxiously for news of my tanks. It was a
long trek for one night, and, as we had drawn them so recently, I could
not guarantee, from experience, their mechanical condition. There was
no margin of time for any except running repairs.
At one o'clock still no news had come. The tanks had orders to
telephone to me immediately they came to Noreuil, and from Noreuil to
the starting-point was at least a ninety-minutes' run.
By two o'clock everybody was asking me for information. Brigade
Headquarters at Noreuil had neither seen tanks nor heard them, but they
sent out orderlies to look for them in case they had lost their way. At
Noreuil it was snowing hard, and blowing a full gale.
My position was not pleasant. The attack was set for dawn. The
infantry had already gone forward to the railway embankment, from
which they would "jump off." In daylight they could neither remain at
the embankment nor retire over exposed ground without heavy shelling.
It was half-past two. I was penned in a hut with a couple of staff
officers, who, naturally enough, were irritated and gloomy. I could do
nothing.
The attack was postponed for an hour. Still no news of the tanks. The
faintest glimmerings of dawn appeared when the telephone-bell rang. The
Australian handed me the receiver with a smile of relief.
"It's one of your men," he said.
I heard Wyatt's tired voice.
"We are two miles short of Noreuil in the valley. We have been
wandering on the downs in a heavy snowstorm. We never quite lost our
way, but it was almost impossible to keep the tanks together. I will
send in a report. The men are dead-tired."
"How long will it take to get to the starting-point?" I asked.
"An hour and a half at least," he replied wearily.
"Stand by for orders."
It was 1-1/4 hours before zero. The men were dead-tired. The tanks had
been running all night. But the Australians were out on the railway
embankment and dawn was breaking.
I went to see the General, and explained the situation briefly.
"What will happen to your tanks if I put back zero another hour and we
attack in daylight?" he asked.
"My tanks will be useless," I replied. "They will be hit before they
reach the German trenches--particularly against a background of snow."
He looked at his watch and glanced through the window at the growing
light.
"It can't be helped. We must postpone the show. I think there is just
time to get the boys back. Send B. to me."
I called up Wyatt and told him that the men were to be given a little
sleep. The officers, after a short rest, were to reconnoitre forward.
I heard orders given for the Australians to come back from the railway
embankment--later I learned that this was done with practically no
casualties--then I stumbled down the road to tell the colonel.
I found him shaving.
"The tanks lost their way in a snowstorm and arrived late at Noreuil.
The attack was postponed."
He looked grave for a moment, but continued his shaving.
"Go and have some breakfast," he said cheerily. "You must be hungry.
We'll talk it over later."
So I went and had some breakfast....