weather (December 3-8) gave them a breathing space for a general
wash-up and those “steady drills” necessary to mankind. The new
stretch that they took over from their own 2nd Battalion was about
two miles north of their previous one and south-east of Laventie,
running parallel to the Rue Tilleloy, that endless road, flanked,
like all others hereabouts, with farm-houses, which joins Armentières
to Neuve Chapelle. The ground was, of course, sop, the parapets were
perforable breastworks, but reliefs could arrive unobserved within
five hundred yards of the front, and the enemy’s line lay in most
places nearly a quarter of a mile from ours. More important still,
there was reasonable accommodation for Battalion Headquarters in a
farm-house (one of the many “Red Houses” of the war) which, by some
accident, had been untouched so far, though it stood less than a mile
from the front line. Where Headquarters are comfortable, Headquarters
are happy, and by so much the more placable. Only very young soldiers
grudge them protection and warmth.
For a few days it was a peaceful stretch of the great line that
buttressed on Switzerland and the sea. Christmas was coming, and,
even had the weather allowed it, neither side was looking too
earnestly for trouble.
A company of Welsh Fusiliers with their C.O. and Adjutant came up for
eight days’ instruction, and were distributed through the Battalion.
The system in the front line at that moment was one of gangs of
three, a digger, an armed man, and a bomber, relieving each other by
shifts; and to each of these trios one Welshman was allotted.
The Welsh were small, keen and inquisitive. The large Irish praised
their Saints aloud for sending them new boys to talk to through the
long watches. It is related of one Welshman that, among a thousand
questions, he demanded if his tutor had ever gone over the top. The
Irishman admitted that he had. “And how often _does_ one go over?”
the Welshman continued. “I’ll show you. Come with me,” replied
the other Celt, and, moving to a gap in the parapet, lifted the
Welshman in his arms that he might the better see what remained,
hung up in German wire, of a private of some ancient fight--withered
wreckage, perhaps, of Neuve Chapelle. “_He_ went over wanst,” said
the Irishman. The working-party resumed their labours and, men say,
that that new boy put no more questions “for the full of the half an
hour--an’ that’s as long as a week to a Welshman.”
All four companies were held in the first line except for three
posts--Picantin, Dead End, and Hougoumont--a few hundred yards behind
that were manned with a platoon apiece, but on the 12th December
rumours of a mine made it wise to evacuate a part of the right
flank till one of our 9.2’s should have searched for the suspected
mine-shaft. Its investigations roused the enemy to mild retaliation,
which ended next day in one of our men being wounded by our own 9.2,
and three by the enemy’s shrapnel--the first casualties in four days.
The wet kept the peace along the line, but it did not altogether damp
the energies of our patrols. For a reason, not explained officially,
Lieutenant S. E. F. Christy was moved to go out with a patrol
and to hurl into the German lines a printed message (was it the
earliest workings of propaganda?) demanding that the Germans “should
surrender.” There is no indication whether the summons was to the
German army at large or merely to as many of them as lay before the
Battalion; but, the invitation being disregarded, Lieutenants Christy
and Law made themselves offensive in patrol-work to the best of their
means. On one excursion the latter officer discovered (December 15)
a water-logged concrete-built loop-hole dug-out occupied by Germans.
Being a hardened souvenir-hunter, he is reported to have removed the
official German name-board of the establishment ere he went back for
reinforcements with a view of capturing it complete. On his return
he found it abandoned. The water had driven the enemy to a drier
post, and the cutting-out expedition had to be postponed. Too long
in the line without incident wears on every one’s temper, but luck
was against them and an attempt on the 20th December by a “selected
party” under some R.E.’s and Lieutenants Law and Christy was ruined
by the moonlight and the fact that the enemy had returned to their
concrete hutch and were more than on the alert. By the light of later
knowledge the Battalion was inclined to believe that the dug-out had
been left as bait and that there were too many spies in our lines
before Laventie.
On the 21st December the Battalion came out for Christmas and
billeted at Laventie, as their next turn would be in the old sector
that they had handed over to the 4th Grenadiers three weeks ago. The
same Battalion relieved them on this day, and, as before, were an
hour late in turning up--a thing inexcusable except on one’s own part.
Their Adjutant’s preoccupations with officers sick and wounded;
N.C.O.’s promoted to commissions in line battalions, and the catching
and training of their substitutes; and with all the housekeeping
work of a battalion in the field, had not prevented him from making
strict and accurate inquiries at Headquarters as to “what exactly is
being sent out for Christmas Day. Is it plum-pudding only or sausages
alone? Last year we had both, but I should like to know for certain.”
All things considered (and there was no shelling), Christmas dinner
at La Gorgue 1915 was a success, and “the C.O. and other officers
went round the dinners as at home” in merciful ignorance that those
of them who survived would attend three more such festivals.
Major-General Lord Cavan, commanding the Guards Division, who had
been appointed to command the newly formed Fourteenth Corps,[7]
addressed the officers after dinner and half-promised them the
Christmas present they most desired. He spoke well of the Battalion,
as one who had seen and shared their work had right to do, saying
that “there might be as good, but there were none better,” and added
that “there was just a hope that the Guards Division might eventually
go to his corps.” They cheered.
The quiet that fell about Christmastide held till the birth of the
New Year, which the inscrutable Hun mind celebrated punctually on
the hour (German time) with twenty minutes’ heavy machine-gun and
rifle-fire in the darkness. One killed and one wounded were all their
casualties.
Here is the roll of the Officers and Staff of the Battalion as the
year ended in mud, among rotten parapets and water-logged trenches,
with nothing to show for all that had gone before save time gained
and ground held to allow of preparation for the real struggle, on
the edge of which these thousand soldiers and all their world stood
ignorant but unshaken:
HEADQUARTERS
Lieut.-Colonel R. C. A. McCalmont Commanding Officer.
Major Lord Desmond FitzGerald Adjutant.
Lieut. T. E. G. Nugent a./Adjutant.
Hon. Lieut. H. Hickie Quartermaster.
Capt. P. H. Antrobus Transport.
Lieut. C. Pease Brigade Company.
Lieut. L. C. Whitefoord “
Lieut. J. Grayling-Major Depot.
Capt. Rev. A. H. A. Knapp, O.P. Chaplain.
Capt. P. R. Woodhouse, R.A.M.C. Medical Officer.
No. 108 Sgt. Major Kirk Sgt. Major.
No. 176 Q.M.S. J. M. Payne Q.M.S.
No. 918 Drill-Sgt. T. Cahill Senior Drill Sgt.
No. 2666 Drill-Sgt. G. Weeks Junior Drill Sgt.
No. 1134 O.R.Cr. Sgt. P. Matthews Orderly-Room Sgt. at Base.
No. 3933 Sgt. Dr. W. Cherry Sgt. Drummer.
No. 1119 Sgt. R. Nugent a./Pioneer Sgt.
No. 837 Armr. Q.M.S. S. Bradley Armr. Q.M.S.
No. 3874 Sgt. M. Greaney Transport Sgt.
No. 4166 Sgt. J. Fawcett Signalling Sgt.
No. 2900 Sgt. P. J. Curtis Orderly-Room Clerk.
_No. 1 Company._
Capt. R. G. C. Yerburgh.
Lieut. D. J. B. FitzGerald.
2562 C.S.M. P. A. Carroll.
(3726 C.Q.M.S. P. M’Goldrick.)
3303 a./C.Q.M.S. J. Glynn.
_No. 2 Company._
Capt. V. C. J. Blake.
Lieut. C. E. R. Hanbury.
3949 C.S.M. D. Voyles.
999 C.Q.M.S. H. Payne.
_No. 3 Company._
Capt. T. M. D. Bailie.
Capt. A. F. L. Gordon.
Lieut. S. E. F. Christy.
Lieut. K. E. Dormer.
(2112 C.S.M. H. M’Veigh.)
3972 C.Q.M.S. R. Grady.
2922 a./C.S.M. J. Donolly.
_No. 4 Company._
Capt. P. S. Long-Innes.
Lieut. Hon. H. B. O’Brien (Bombing Officer).
Lieut. R. J. P. Rodakowski.
2nd Lieut. M. B. Levy.
3632 C.S.M. M. Moran.
(2122 C.Q.M.S. T. Murphy.)
798 a./C.Q.M.S. J. Scanlon.
1916
THE SALIENT TO THE SOMME
Brigadier-General G. Feilding, D.S.O., as we know, succeeded Lord
Cavan in the command of the Guards Division, and the enemy woke up
to a little more regular shelling and sniping for a few days till
(January 4) the 1st Guards Brigade was unexpectedly relieved by a
fresh brigade (the 114th), and the Battalion moved to billets in St.
Floris which, as usual, were “in a very filthy condition.” There they
stayed, under strong training at bombing and Lewis gunnery, till
the 12th. Thence to Merville till the 23rd, when Lieutenant Hon. H.
B. O’Brien, a specialist in these matters, as may have been noticed
before, was appointed Brigade Bombing Officer. The bomb was to be the
dominant factor of the day’s work for the next year or so, and the
number of students made the country round billets unwholesome and
varied. There is a true tale of a bombing school on a foggy morning
who, hurling with zeal over a bank into the mist, found themselves
presently being cursed from a safe distance by a repairing party
who had been sent out to discover why one whole system of big-gun
telephone-wires was dumb. They complained that the school had “cut it
into vermicelli.”
The instruction bore fruit; for, so soon as they were back in the
trenches at Ebenezer farm, which they had quitted on the 4th, bombing
seems to have been forced wherever practicable. A weak, or it might
be more accurate to say, a sore point had developed on the front in
a crater thrown up by one of our own mines, which it was necessary
to sap out to and protect by intermittent bombing. This brought
retaliation and a few casualties nightly. A trench-mortar battery
was imported to deal with the nuisance and, as might be expected,
drew the enemy’s artillery.
On the 28th January a single stray bullet in the dark found and
killed Captain V. C. J. Blake, No. 2 Company, while he was laying out
some work in wire for his company, and a bombing attack round the
mine-crater ended in three other ranks killed and one wounded.
On February 1 our mine-shaft in the same locality flooded without
warning and drowned a couple of men in a listening-post. Our pumps
could make no impression on the water; it was difficult to put up
any head-cover for the men in the forward sap, and the enemy’s wire
was being strengthened nightly and needed clearing away. This was
routine-work undertaken by our artillery who blew gaps in it in three
places, which the Battalion covered with machine-gun fire. It kept
the enemy reasonably quiet, and H.R.H. Prince Albert, who was out on
a tour from England, breakfasted with Battalion Headquarters the same
morning (February 5). Once again the enemy’s information must have
been inaccurate or delayed since there is no mention of any shelling
or aeroplane work on Headquarters.
They came out of the line on the 7th and billeted near Merville.
Reckoned by their standards it had been an uneventful stretch of
duty, and those officers who could be spared had gone on short leave;
for there was a rumour that leave would be stopped after the 20th of
the month. The French and their English allies knew well that the
great German attack on Verdun was ripening (it opened in the third
week of February) and the world had no doubt of the issues that
depended upon that gate to the heart of France holding fast. The
whole long line stiffened to take the weight of any sudden side-issue
or main catastrophe that the chance of war might bring about. But a
battalion among hundreds of battalions knows as little what its own
movements mean as a single truck in a goods yard knows of the import
and export trade of Great Britain. The young officers snatched their
few hours’ leave at home, loyally told their people that all was
going well, returned--“to a most interesting lecture on the Battle
of Neuve Chapelle,” delivered at La Gorgue by a Divisional Staff
Officer, and to an inspection of the 1st Guards Brigade by Lord
Kitchener on a vile wet day when they were all soaked to the skin
(February 10), and “to the usual routine in very poor weather.”
Lord Desmond FitzGerald, being now second in command by seniority,
resigned his adjutancy and was succeeded by Lieutenant T. E. G.
Nugent; No. 2, Captain Blake’s, Company was commanded by Major the
Hon. A. C. S. Chichester, fresh from home, and Father S. Knapp,
their priest, who had been transferred to the 1st London Irish,
was followed by Father J. Lane-Fox from the same Battalion. Of the
six Fathers who served the two battalions, two--Fathers Gwynne and
S. Knapp, D.S.O., M.C.--were killed, one--Father F. M. Browne,
M.C.--wounded twice, and one--Father F. S. Browne, M.C.--wounded once.
On the face of it nothing could have been quieter and more domestic
than their daily life round Merville, and after a week of it they
were moved (February 16) north towards Steenvoorde, in a hurricane
of wind and rain, to the neighbourhood of Poperinghe, on the
Ypres-Poperinghe-Dunkirk road, and a camp of tents, mostly blown
down, and huts connected, for which small ease they were grateful,
by duck-boards. This brought them into the Second Army area and into
the Fourteenth Corps under Lord Cavan, precisely as that officer had
hoped. He explained to them there was “a small German offensive” on
the left of the line here, and that “if it came to anything” the
Brigade might be wanted.
The “small offensive” had opened on the 13th with a furious
bombardment of the extreme southern end of the Ypres Salient between
the Ypres-Comines Canal and Ypres-Comines railway, a little to the
south of Hill 60, followed by the springing of five mines under
the British front line and an infantry attack, which ended in the
capture by the enemy of four or five hundred yards of trench and
the low ridge called “The Bluff,” over which they ran. The affair
bulked big in the newspaper-press of the day; for a battalion,
the 10th Lancashire Fusiliers, was literally buried by one of the
mine explosions. The German gain was well held, but prevented from
extending by a concentration of our artillery, and later on (March 2)
the whole position was recaptured after desperate fighting and the
line there came to rest.
For the first time the Battalion seems impressed by the hostile
aircraft with which the Salient was filled. Poperinghe and Hazebrouck
were bombed almost as soon as they came in, and their camp was
visited by four aeroplanes at high noon, after a snow-fall, which
showed up everything below. They had been attending a demonstration
to prove the harmlessness of a Flammenwerfer if only one lay flat
on the ground and let the roaring blast hiss over. Ribald men have
explained, since, that these demonstrations were more demoralising
than the actual machine in action, especially when, as occasionally
happened, the nozzle of the flame-shooter carried away and, in the
attempts to recontrol the thing, the class, bombed from above and
chased by fire below, broke and fled.
But the whole Salient was a death-trap throughout. The great shells
crossed each other’s path at every angle, back and forth, single
or in flights. For no certain cause that our side could guess,
fire would concentrate itself on some half-obliterated feature of
the landscape--a bank, the poor stumpage of a wood, a remnant of a
village or the angle of a road, that went out in smoke, dust, and
flying clods, as though devils were flinging it up with invisible
spades. The concentrated clamours would die down and cease; the
single shells would resume their aimless falling over a line of
fields, with the monotony of drips from a tap, till, again, it seemed
as though one of them had found something worthy of attention and
shouted back the news to its fellows who, crowding altogether in one
spot, roared, overturned, and set alight for five or ten wild minutes
or through a methodical half-hour. If the storm fell on bare ground,
that was churned and torn afresh into smoking clods; if upon men in
trenches, on relief, or with the transport, no eye could judge what
harm had been done; for often where it had seemed as though nothing
could live, dispersed units picked themselves up and reformed, almost
untouched, after inconceivable escapes. Elsewhere, a few spurts of
stinking smoke in a corner might cover all that remained of a platoon
or have ripped the heart out of a silent, waiting company. By night,
fantastic traceries of crossing fire-lines ran along the shoulder of
a ridge; shrapnel, bursting high, jetted a trail of swift sparks,
as it might be steel striking flint; dropping flares outlined some
tortured farm-house among its willow-stumps, or the intolerable glare
of a big shell framed itself behind a naked doorway; and coloured
lights dyed the bellies of the low clouds till all sense of distance
and direction was lost, and the bewildered troops stumbled and
crawled from pavé to pot-hole, treading upon the old dead.
Dawn brought dirty white desolation across yellow mud pitted with
slate-coloured water-holes, and confused by senseless grey and
black lines and curled tangles of mire. There was nothing to see,
except--almost pearl-coloured under their mud-dyed helmets--the
tense, preoccupied faces of men moving with wide spaces between their
platoons, to water-floored cellars and shelters chillier even than
the grave-like trenches they had left, always with the consciousness
that they were watched by invisible eyes which presently would choose
certain of them to be killed. Those who came through it, say that the
sense of this brooding Death more affected every phase of life in the
Salient than in any other portion of the great war-field.
The German offensive on the Bluff and the necessary measures of
retaliation did not concern the Battalion for the moment. After a
few days’ aimless waiting they were sent, in bitter cold and snow,
to rest-camp at Calais for a week. They were seven hours slipping
and sliding along the snow-covered roads ere they could entrain at
Bavichore Street, and untold hours detraining at the other end;
all of which annoyed them more than any bombing, even though the
C.O. himself complimented them on their march “under very trying
circumstances.” The Irish, particularly in their own battalions, have
not the relief of swearing as other races do. Their temperament runs
to extravagant comparisons and appeals to the Saints, and ordinary
foul language, even on night-reliefs in muddy trenches choked with
loose wires and corpses, is checked by the priests. But, as one said:
“What we felt on that cruel Calais road, skatin’ into each other,
an’--an’ apologisin’, would have melted all the snows of Europe that
winter.”
Bombing instruction and inter-platoon bombing matches on Calais beach
kept them employed.
On March 3, during practice with live bombs, one exploded
prematurely, as several others of that type had done in other
battalions, and Major Lord Desmond FitzGerald was so severely wounded
that he died within an hour at the Millicent Sutherland (No. 9. Red
Cross) Hospital. Lieutenant T. E. G. Nugent was dangerously wounded
at the same time through the liver, though he did not realise this
at the time, and stayed coolly in charge of a party till help came.
Lieutenant Hanbury, who was conducting the practice, was wounded in
the hand and leg, and Father Lane-Fox lost an eye and some fingers.
Lord Desmond FitzGerald was buried in the public cemetery at Calais
on the 5th. As he himself had expressly desired, there was no formal
parade, but the whole Battalion, of which he was next for the
command, lined the road to his grave. His passion and his loyalty had
been given to the Battalion without thought of self, and among many
sad things few are sadder than to see the record of his unceasing
activities and care since he had been second in command cut across by
the curt announcement of his death. It was a little thing that his
name had been at the time submitted for a well-deserved D.S.O. In a
hard-pressed body of men, death and sickness carry a special sting,
because the victim knows--and in the very articles of death feels
it--what confusion and extra work, rearrangement and adjustments of
responsibilities his enforced defection must lay upon his comrades.
The winter had brought a certain amount of sickness and minor
accidents among the officers, small in themselves, but cumulatively
a burden. Irreplaceable N.C.O.’s had gone, or were going, to take
commissions in the Line; others of unproven capacities had to be
fetched forward in their place. Warley, of course, was not anxious to
send its best N.C.O.’s away from a depot choked with recruits. The
detail of life was hard and cumbersome. It was a lengthy business
even to draw a typewriting machine for use in the trenches. Companies
two thirds full of fresh drafts had to be entrusted to officers who
might or might not have the divine gift of leadership, and, when
all was set, to-morrow’s chance-spun shell might break and bury the
most carefully thought-out combinations. “Things change so quickly
nowadays,” Desmond FitzGerald wrote not long before his death; “it is
impossible to see ahead.” And Death took him on Calais beach in the
full stride of his power.
He had quietly presented the Battalion the year before with service
drums. “No mention need be made of who paid.” They were the only
battalion of the Brigade which lacked them at that time, and they had
been the only battalion to bring them out of the beginning of the
war, when, during the retreat from Mons, “the artillery drove over
the big drum at Landrecies.”
Temporary Captain A. F. L. Gordon followed Lieutenant Nugent as
Adjutant, and the Rev. F. M. Browne from G.H.Q. replaced Father
Lane-Fox. They moved into the Salient again on the 6th March,
billeting at Wormhoudt, and were told several unpleasant things about
the state of the line and the very limited amount of “retaliation”
that they might expect from their own artillery.
The snow stopped all training except a little bombing. Opinion as
to the value of bombs differed even in those early days, but they
were the order of the day, and gave officers the chance to put in
practice their pet theories of bowling. A commanding officer of great
experience wrote, a year later, after the Battle of Arras, thanking
Heaven that that affair had “led to the rediscovery of the rifle as
a suitable weapon for infantry,” adding, “I swear a bomb is of all
weapons the most futile in which to specialize.”
The French were as keen on the bomb as the rest of the world, and
parties of officers visited our bombing competitions at Wormhoudt,
where the Battalion lay till the 16th March, moving to billets
(Brandhoek) near Vlamertinghe for St. Patrick’s Day and the sports
sacred to the occasion. They were played into camp by a naval party
to the tune of “A Life on the Ocean Wave,” not a little to their
astonishment. A little later they were to be even more astonished.
Then the 1st Guards Brigade took over their sector of the Fourteenth
Division’s new front from the Sixth Division and, as usual,
complained that the trenches which ran from the east to the town were
in bad condition. The Brigade Reserve camp near Vlamertinghe was not
much better. It is significant that, at this date, a train, specially
oiled and treated to run noiselessly through the night, used to take
the reliefs up into Ypres--a journey that did not lack excitement.