only in the front line, were three officers and forty-seven other
ranks killed and wounded. Some of the credit of this must go to the
German snipers, who, working without noise or display, gave the
Battalion the idea there was nothing much doing. The brutal outcry of
artillery, its visible effect on the ground--above all, the deadly
accuracy of the single aimed shells on the well-registered trench
from which none must move--upset men sometimes more than repeated
single casualties in the front line, which can be hurried off round
the traverses without rousing more than a few companions.
They lay for a week beneath the trees near Poperinghe and started
inter-platoon bombing competitions to “accustom the men to throw
overarm without jerking.” These little events forbade monotony, and
were sometimes rather like real warfare, for not every one can be
trusted to deliver a ball accurately when he is throwing in against
time.
THE SOMME
Meanwhile, Verdun had been in the fire since February, there was no
sign of the attacks on it weakening, and France and the world looked
uneasily at that dread point of contact where men and stuff consumed
as the carbon of arc-lights consumes in the current. It was time
that England should take the strain, even though her troops were not
fully trained or her guns yet free to spend shells as the needs of
the War demanded. What had gone before was merely the initial deposit
on the price of national unpreparedness; what was to come, no more
than a first instalment. It was vital to save Verdun; to so hold the
enemy on the western front that he could not send too much help to
his eastern line or his Austrian allies, who lay heavy on the Italian
Army: most vital, to kill as many Germans as possible.
The main strength, the actual spine of the position, so far as the
British front was concerned, was some twenty-five miles of high
ground forming the water-shed between the Somme and the rivers of
southern Belgium, which ran, roughly, from Maricourt in the south,
where our line joined the French, to Gomiecourt in the north. Here
the enemy had sat untroubled for two years, looking down upon
France and daily strengthening himself. His trebled and quadrupled
lines of defence, worked for him by his prisoners, ran below and
along the flanks and on the tops of five-hundred-foot downs. Some
of these were studded with close woods, deadlier even than the
fortified villages between them; some cut with narrowing valleys
that drew machine-gun fire as chimneys draw drafts; some opening
into broad, seemingly smooth slopes, whose every haunch and hollow
covered sunk forts, carefully placed mine-fields, machine-gun pits,
gigantic quarries, enlarged in the chalk, connecting with systems
of catacomb-like dug-outs and subterranean works at all depths, in
which brigades could lie till the fitting moment. Belt upon belt of
fifty-yard-deep wire protected these points, either directly or at
such angles as should herd and hold up attacking infantry to the fire
of veiled guns. Nothing in the entire system had been neglected or
unforeseen, except knowledge of the nature of the men, who in due
time, should wear their red way through every yard of it.
Neither side attempted to conceal their plans. The work of our airmen
would have been enough to have warned the enemy what was intended,
even had his own men overlooked the immense assembly of troops and
guns in a breadth of country that had been remodelled for their
needs, above ground and below. Our battalions in the Salient, where
the unmolested German aeroplanes bombed them, knew well enough that,
in the phrase of the moment, “everything had gone south,” and our
listening-posts in the front line round Ypres could tell very fairly
when a German “demonstration” was prompted by natural vice or orders
to cover a noisy withdrawal of their guns in the same direction. It
did not need placards in English, “Come on, we are ready for you!”
which were hoisted in some of the German trenches on that Somme front
to make men wiser than they had been for weeks past.
Side by side with this elaborate and particular knowledge, plus a
multitude of camp-rumours, even more circumstantial, was the immense
incuriousness that always exists in veteran armies. Fresh drafts
would pour out from England filled with vain questions and the
hope of that immediate “open warfare,” so widely advertised, to be
told they would know all about it when their turn came, and that,
meantime, deep trenches were not bad things after all. When they
had looked for a little on the full face of war, they were content
to copy their elders and ask no questions. They understood it was
to be a wearing-out battle. Very many men had already been worn out
and cast aside in the mere detail of preparation, in building the
light and broad-gauge railways of supply and the roads beside them;
in fetching up and installing timber, hutments, hangars, telephones,
hospitals, pipe-lines for water, and the thousand other necessities
of mechanical war. As it happened to individuals, so, they knew,
would it be with the battalions, brigades and divisions of all the
armies which General Rawlinson on the 1st of July moved up against
that fortress of a whole countryside, called in history “The Somme.”
And while that storm gathered and broke, the Battalion went on with
its horrible necessary work in the Salient till the hour should come
for it and its Division to be cast into the furnace and used up with
the rest.
On the 7th July they moved as a support to the broken and filthy
banks of the Canal north of Ypres and sat in dug-outs connected by
a tunnel and begirt with water and mud. Except for a mere nightly
fatigue of a couple of hundred men, the Diary noted that “there
was no training possible but there was little shelling.” The 2nd
Grenadiers were in the line which the Battalion relieved (11th July)
on a broken and marshy front, between Buffs Road and Forward Cottage
with Battalion Headquarters near St. Jean and the 3rd Coldstream on
their left. They were shelled during relief, when Lieutenant Christy,
who, but a little while before, had just escaped a sniper’s bullet
through the loophole, was killed.
That same morning four Germans wormed their way through the rank
grass and broken ground and for a while almost captured an isolated
post of six men of No. 1 Company. They tried, indeed, to march them
off as prisoners, but the Irish edged away under cover of the next
platoon’s fire, and all got back safely. The day closed with heavy
bombardments from 5.9’s. An officer and three other ranks killed and
seventeen wounded were counted as a light casualty-list “considering
the bad cover.” No man could stand upright for an instant, and all
repairs, parapets, and drainage work were done at night, stooping and
crawling between spurts of machine-gun hose-work.
The 13th July was another “light” day with but seven men wounded.
Second Lieutenant G. V. Williams joined from the base and Major C. F.
Fleming went sick on the 14th. The sector being rather too active and
noisy of nights just then, a patrol under Lieutenant J. N. Marshall
went out to see what the enemy might intend in the way of digging a
sap across “No Man’s Land.” The Lieutenant was wounded in the side
as he left the trench, but insisted on doing his work and was out
two hours; for which he paid by having to go into hospital a month
later. Their casualties on the 15th, when they were relieved by the
2nd Grenadiers and went back to their dug-outs by the Canal, were
five wounded, one of whom died. Out of this tense life were suddenly
chosen an officer and twenty men to form part of the contingent
representing our armies at the French review in Paris on the 14th
July. They were chiefly veterans of 1914, and under Captain J. S. N.
FitzGerald, then of the 2nd Battalion, repaired to a bright clean
city where a man could hold up his head, walking in unchoked streets
between roofed and glazed houses: and the day after the glittering
affair was over they returned to their brick-heaps and burrows in the
Flanders mire.
On the Battalion’s next turn (July 18-22), suspecting that the enemy
might be newly relieved, our patrols worked hard night after night
to catch prisoners for identification purposes. 2346 Lance-Corporal
Hennigan, a regimental “character” and a man of strong powers of
leadership, with 5743 Private O’Brien, of whom, too, many tales are
told, were marked as “very prominent in the work.” But the Germans
took great care not to leave men or corpses about, and they got
nothing for their toil.
On the 23rd July orders came that their expected term of rest was to
be cancelled as the Division would go “elsewhere,” which all knew
meant towards the Somme. There were five days yet ere the Battalion
drew clear of the Salient, each day with its almost unnoticed
casualty that in the long run makes the bulk of the bills of war, and
brings home the fact that the life-blood of the Battalion is dripping
away. The support platoons were reckoned lucky to have only one man
killed on the 23rd after bombardment by a six-inch high-explosive
gun. Captain Pollok, who took over command of No. 1 Company on
the same day, was wounded two days later, just after relief, by a
machine-gun bullet; and their last “normal” day in the trenches gave
one sergeant killed and three other ranks wounded.
They were relieved on the 27th July, after dark as usual, by the
1st Royal Warwicks, “recently come from the south, having been in
the fighting there.” The Warwicks knew “The Somme.” They looked on
the clean, creosoted, deep-bayed, high-parapeted trenches they were
to hold and announced that they would feel “cushy” in such a line.
“Cushy!” said the Brigade. “Wait till you’ve had to live in ’em!”
“But,” said the Warwicks, “you see, _we_’ve been fighting.” The large
Guardsmen looked at the little worn Linesmen and swallowed it in
silence. The 4th Division, to which the Warwicks belonged, had been
part of that terrible northern attack along the line from Serre to
Fricourt, which had spent itself in vain against the German defence
a month before, and had been ground and milled day by day since. But
all that the Diary notices is that that last relief was “carried out
smoothly and quietly” in what to the Warwicks, after such experience,
must have been grateful peace.
After their three weeks in dug-outs, the Battalion rested and washed
south of merry Poperinghe which had been heavily shelled and for
some days completely evacuated.
Between March 18 and July 18, excluding four weeks in rest, they had
lost four officers and thirty other ranks killed; five officers and a
hundred and fifty-three other ranks wounded--a total of one hundred
and ninety-two, in the mere routine of the slow days.
There was a saying of the war, “no one notices weather in the front
line”; and it is curious that, so soon as the Battalion was above
ground, walking under naked skies with light and air all round
it, men dwelt on weather as almost a new discovery. They found it
hot when the Division entrained at Proven for St. Pol. Forty-two
trains took the Division and forty-seven lorries bore the Battalion
itself from St. Pol to Bouque-Maison on the Doullens road. There,
Headquarters were in an orchard beneath unbarked trees with leaves on
the branches and a background of gun-voices from the Somme, to remind
the men who laughed and talked in that shadow and sun what waited for
them after this short return to real life.
They moved on the 4th August to Vauchelles-les-Authies, the
matchboard huts of which, on the trampled ground, have been likened
to a “demobbed poultry show.” It lay just off the well-worn
Doullens-Albert road, now flooded with a steady current of troops
and material. They waited there for ten days. During that time 2nd
Lieutenant Cook (4th Connaught Rangers), Lieutenant T. Butler-Stoney
from the Entrenching Battalion, and Lieutenant N. Butler from
Hospital joined them.
The Regimental Band arrived from England for a three months’ tour.
The officer who accompanied it wore a wound-stripe--the very first
which the Battalion collectively had ever seen--and men wondered
whether wound-stripes would become common, and how many one might
accumulate. It was removed from the officer by laughing friends, as
a matter something too suggestive in present company, and the band
played in the still warm evenings, while the dust of feet going
Sommeward rose and stretched unbroken along the Doullens-Albert
pavé. Here the very tree-boles, before they began to be stripped and
splintered by shell-fire, were worn and rubbed beneath the touch of
men’s shoulders and gnawed by the halted horses.
The King came on the 9th August to visit the Division. Special
arrangements were impossible, so bombing-assault practice went
on, while the officers of the Battalion were presented to him “in
the orchard where the messes were pitched.” He made no orations,
uttered no threats against his enemies, nor guaranteed the personal
assistance of any tribal God. His regiments merely turned out and
cheered the inconspicuous car as long as they could see it. But there
is a story that a Frenchman, an old Royalist, in whose wood some
officers had rigged a temporary hut of which he highly disapproved,
withdrew every claim and complaint on the promise that the chair in
which the King of England had sat should be handed over to him, duly
certificated. Which was done.
On the 11th the Brigade moved over the open country _via_ Louvencourt
and Bertrancourt to the woods south of Mailly-Maillet, a six-mile
march in hot and dusty weather, and the Brigade (2nd Grenadiers,
3rd Coldstream, 2nd Coldstream in reserve and 1st Irish Guards in
support) took over trenches east of Englebelmer and “well within the
shell area.” Thiepval and the Schwaben redoubt across the Ancre were
only a thousand yards away and unsubdued; and, for a while, it looked
as though that weary corner of death was to be the Guards’ objective.
But, next day, orders came to move out of the line again, back to
high and breezy Louvencourt in warm rain, taking over billets from
the 2nd Sherwood Foresters and, by immense good luck, coming across
a heaven-sent Expeditionary Force Canteen, a thing not often found
in front-line billets. Upon this, pay was at once arranged for, and
every one shopped at large. The incident stayed in their minds long
after the details of mere battles were forgotten, and “that canteen
at Louvencourt” is a landmark of old memories.
By this date the battle of the Somme was six weeks old, and our
troops had eaten several--in some places as much as five or
six--thousand yards deep into the area. Two main attacks had been
delivered--that of the 1st July, which had lasted till the 14th,
and that of the 14th, which went on till the end of the month.
From Serre to Ovillers-la-Boiselle the Germans’ front stood fast;
from Ovillers-la-Boiselle to the junction with the French armies
at Hardecourt, the first tremendous system of their defence had
been taken literally a few score yards at a time, trench by trench,
village by village, quarry by quarry, and copse by copse, lost, won,
and held again from three to eight or nine times. A surge forward
on some part of the line might succeed in making good a few hundred
yards of gain without too heavy loss. An isolated attack, necessary
to clear a flank or to struggle towards some point of larger command,
withered under enormous far concentrations of enemy guns, even as
the woods withered to snapped, charred stickage. At every step and
turn, hosts of machine-guns at ground-level swept and shaved the
forlorn landscapes; and when the utmost had been done for the day,
the displaced Germans seemed always to occupy the crest of some yet
higher down. Villages and woods vanished in the taking; were stamped
into, or blown out of, the ground, leaving only their imperishable
names. So, in the course of inconceivable weeks fell Mametz and the
ranked woods behind it, Contalmaison, Montauban, and Caterpillar
Wood, Bernafay, Trônes Wood, Longueval, and the fringe of Delville
(even then a charnel-house among shattered stumps), both Bazentins,
and Pozières of the Australians. The few decencies and accommodations
of the old settled trench-life were gone; men lived as best they
could in the open among eternal shell-holes and mounds of heaped
rubbish that were liable at any moment to be dispersed afresh; under
constant menace of gas, blinded with the smoke-screens of local
attacks, and beaten down from every point of the compass either
by enemy fire, suddenly gathered and loosed, or that of their own
heavies searching, from miles off, some newly cleared hollow or
skyline of the uplands where our troops lay indistinguishable from
the skinned earth.
Battalions, brigades, and divisions went into the fight, were worn
down in more or in less time, precisely as the chances of the ground
either screened or exposed them for a while to the fire-blasts.
Sometimes it was only a matter of hours before what had been a
brigade ceased to exist--had soaked horribly into the ground. The
wastage was brought down and back across the shell-holes as well
as might be, losses were made good, and with a half, two thirds,
or three quarters, new drafts, the original Battalion climbed
back to its task. While some development behind the next fold of
land was in progress or brought to a standstill, they would be
concerned only with the life-and-death geography of the few hundred
yards immediately about them, or those few score yards over which
profitable advances could be made. A day, even an hour, later, the
use and value of their own hollow or ridge might be altogether
abolished. What had been a hardly won foothold would become the very
pivot of a central attack, or subside into a sheltered haven of
refuge, as the next dominating ridge or lap of the large-boned French
landscape was cleared. Equally suddenly, even while the men thanked
God for their respite, German batteries or a suddenly pushed-forth
chain of German machine-guns would pound or spray their shelter into
exposed torment once more.
As one philosopher of that unearthly epoch put it some time
afterwards: “We was like fleas in a blanket, ye’ll understand, seein’
no more than the next nearest wrinkle. But Jerry and our Generals,
ye’ll understand, they kept us hoppin’.”
“Our Generals,” who, it may be presumed, knew all the wrinkles of
the blanket, shifted the Brigade on the 16th August opposite Serre
on the far left of the line, which was not destined to be pierced
till the next year. It was a fleeting transfer to another Army Corps;
their own, the Fourteenth, under Lord Cavan, having joined the Fourth
Army. They took over from the Somerset L.I. (61st Brigade) a set of
trenches which, after their experiences in the Salient, struck them
as dry, deep and good, but odd and unhomely. They had been French,
were from six to nine feet deep, paved in places with stone, which
our men had never seen in trenches before, and revetted with strange
French stickwork. The dug-outs, too, were not of their standard
patterns. The front line was badly battered, but reliefs could be
effected in broad daylight without casualties. The activities and
comforting presence of our aeroplanes impressed them also as a great
contrast to Ypres, where, naturally, our troops for the moment held
only a watching-brief and every machine that could be spared had gone
to the Somme. The dead of the opening battles lay thick about the
place. The Irish buried two hundred of a division that had passed
that way, five weeks or so before, and salved, with amazement at
its plenty, the wreckage of their equipment. “There’s the world
and all out there, Sorr,” said a man returning from his work. “The
very world an’ all! Machine-guns and”--his voice dropping in sheer
awe--“rum-jars!” They were unmolested, save by a few minenwerfers.
Undertaker’s work does not hearten any troops, and they were glad to
get back to hutments in the untouched woods behind Authie, near their
old “poultry-show.” During these days 2nd Lieutenants J. N. Ward
and T. Gibson joined from home, the latter going to the first-line
transport and Captain L. R. Hargreaves took over No. 2 Company on
joining from home on the 20th.
On the 23rd August they moved with the Brigade across to Beauval on
the Doullens-Amiens road (where camps and hutments almost touched
each other), and on the 25th embarked at Canaples in a horror called
a “tactical train,” which was stuffed with two thousand of their
brigade. After slow and spasmodic efforts it bore them quite fifty
kilometres in seven hours to Méricourt l’Abbé, whence they marched to
Méaulte in a green hollow under the downs, and found themselves once
more in their own Fourteenth Corps under Lord Cavan. More immediately
to the point, and a thing long remembered, their billets were damp,
dirty, and full of fleas; the weather that was destined to ruin the
campaign broke in torrents of rain, and the continuous traffic of
stuff had knocked the very bowels out of all the hard-worked roads.
This was the first time they realised what the grey clinging Somme
mud meant.
They trained in that wet at bombing, at assaulting from trenches, at
visual signalling to aeroplanes, and at marking out trenches by night
with white tapes, as scores of thousands had done before them, while
the roar of the guns rose and dropped without explanation, like the
tumult of unseen crowds; and rumours and contradictory orders for
standing fast or leaving on the instant kept them in tension for ten
days. But, most wonderful of all to the men from The Salient, where
silence and guarded movement were automatic, was the loud life of
this open-air world of troops around them--men and guns spread over
the breadth of counties--horses in the open by thousands ranked in
endless horse-lines--processions of roaring lorries and deep-rumbling
heavy guns; and, only a few miles away--the war in full blast. It was
possible to catch a ride in a lorry and go up and see “The War,” as
the saying ran. Yonder, but a very little way, stretched horizons,
downs, and tablelands as far as imagination could range. All the
firmament groaned to the artillery hidden and striving within them;
and statelily, and regularly and unceasingly, the vast spaces of
open were plumed with vertical columns of changeful shell-smoke.
Men perceived that everything they had known, till then, had been a
field-day. Here was The War!
A story that a wonderful new weapon would soon appear was very
general. Some one had half-seen or been told about the tanks in their
well-screened shelters; one or two over-zealous English journals had
been industriously hinting at the developments of science; the enemy
was uneasy, and, German-fashion, had issued portentous instruction to
his men to be on their guard against something. But, however short
his training, the British infantryman is a born scoffer. “We had
heard about moving forts that weighed thirty ton,” said one of them.
“Whatever it might be, we knew we’d have to take the thick o’ the
coffee.”
The local battles and operations on the southern stretch of the
front, now immediately in front of the Battalion, were almost as
indistinguishable as waves on a beach that melt into or rise out of
each other in the main flood. But there was a fresh tidal movement
at the beginning of September, when our whole line attacked again,
in conjunction with the French. We gained nothing of any account in
the north, but in the south Guillemont fell, and, after desperate
attack and counter-attack, almost all of Ginchy and the whole
thousand-yard-square of Delville Wood and the south end of High Wood.