establish the centre of our line on the crest of the high ground
from Delville Wood to the road above Mouquet farm (Thiepval and its
outworks still untaken), so that we had observation over the slopes
ahead. From Delville Wood eastward to Leuze--historically known as
“Lousy” Wood--overlooking the little town of Combles on our right
flank, our advance held the main ridge of land there, but had not
gone beyond it. Still farther east, across the valley where Combles
stood, the French were working north along the heights towards
Sailly-Saillisel, three thousand yards away. Their line was pinched
on the right by the big St. Pierre Vaast woods, fortified throughout.
Their left was almost equally constricted by the valley where
Combles, among its quarries and hidden shelters, squatted and dealt
death, which all the heights to the north--Morval, Lesbœufs and Le
Transloy--joined, with Sailly-Saillisel and St. Pierre Vaast in the
east, to make more sure. It was necessary, then, to free the ground
at the junction of the two armies in the direction of Morval, which
commanded far too complete a fire; and also beyond Ginchy towards
Lesbœufs, where the outlying spurs of high land raked “Lousy” Wood.
That clearing-up, a comparatively small detail on a vast front, fell
to the lot of the Fourteenth Army Corps (Lord Cavan commanding),
which lay between Ginchy village and Leuze Wood. The Corps was made
up of the Fifty-sixth London Territorial Division, on the extreme
right or east, next to the French; the Sixth Division, a little north
of Leuze Wood, facing the Quadrilateral, a veiled defensive work as
strong as ample time and the ground could make it, and destined to
turn the fortunes of that day; and on the left of the Sixth, again,
the Guards Division in front of what remained of Ginchy, Ginchy farm
and orchard, all strongly held by the Germans, and some battered
brick-fields hard by.
Lord Cavan did not overstate the case in his message to the Guards
Division just before the attack when he wrote: “The Corps Commander
knows that there are difficulties to be cleared up on the left and in
front of the 1st Guards Brigade and on the right of the 2nd Guards
Brigade, but the Commander-in-Chief is of opinion that the general
situation is so favourable that every effort should be made to take
advantage of it, etc., etc.”
A battalion looks at life from a more limited standpoint. Brigade
Orders issued on the 11th September announced: “The French Army
will attack the enemy defences between Combles Ravine, and
Martinpuich on Z day, with the object of seizing Morval, Lesbœufs,
Gueudecourt and Flers, and breaking through the enemy’s defences.”
But what interested the Irish, who prefer fighting light, even as
the Frenchman can shuffle into action under all his high-piled
possessions, was the amount of weight they would have to carry up
there. It included two days’ rations, a couple of bombs, two extra
bandoliers of ammunition, a pick or a shovel and three sandbags
per man, plus wire-cutters and other fittings. On the other hand,
greatcoats and packs were discarded and cardigan waistcoats worn
beneath their jackets.
On the 10th September the Battalion, with the 1st Brigade, moved in
from Méaulte to the valley behind Carnoy, and, after dark that night,
Nos. 3 and 4 Companies, under Major T. M. D. Bailie, were ordered up
through Bernafay Wood to a line of what passed for trenches behind
Ginchy, and next morning Nos. 1 and 2 (Captain Hargreaves and Captain
Rankin) bivouacked in some old trenches at the north end of Bernafay,
where they were used in carrying-fatigues for the 3rd Guards Brigade,
then in the front line. The other two companies were heavily shelled
in their Ginchy trenches, and lost seven killed and thirteen wounded.
A bombing accident in bivouac the day before had also wounded six men.
On the 12th September No. 1 Company, stationed in a small copse near
Trônes Wood, which was choked with wreckage and dead, had three of
their Lewis-gunners killed and five wounded by a single shell.
On the 13th September the Battalion spent a quiet day (with only one
killed and seven wounded), except for a deadly tiring fatigue of
carrying bombs to Guillemont under shell-fire. Our artillery began
on the 12th, and continued day and night without much break till the
hour of advance on the 15th, when it changed to the duly ordered
stationary and creeping barrages of the field-guns.
THE 15TH SEPTEMBER
On the evening of the 14th, the 1st Brigade of Guards moved out
to the shell-holes and fragments of trench that formed their
assembly-positions, on a front of five hundred yards between Delville
Wood and the northern flank of Ginchy. There it lay in the cold with
the others till “Zero,” 6.20 A. M. of the 15th. The 2nd and 3rd
Coldstream had the front line, for they were to lead the attack;
the 2nd Grenadiers lay behind to support them and consolidate
the first objective--a line of trench about twelve hundred yards
north-east--and to hold it till the 1st Irish Guards came up and
had passed through them. Then, if the flanks were secure, the 2nd
Grenadiers were to come on and support in turn. The 1st Irish Guards
were to pass through the 2nd and 3rd Coldstream after the latter
battalions had reached the third objective, another line of trench
twenty-five hundred yards off, and were thence to go and take the
final objective--the northern outskirts of Lesbœufs, thirty-five
hundred yards from their jumping-off place. There was a limited
objective, three hundred yards beyond the first, which worked in with
the advance towards Flers of the divisions on the left of the Guards
from Delville Wood to Martinpuich. It was supposed to concern only
the Battalion (2nd Coldstream) on the left flank of the 1st Brigade.
Incidentally, it was announced that as soon as all the objectives had
been seized, “Cavalry would advance and seize the heights ahead.”
The Battalion formed up north-west of Ginchy in two lines, facing
north-east. Nos. 3 and 4 Companies in the first line; 1 and 2 in the
second on the right, commanded as follows:
No. 1, Lieutenant J. K. Greer, M.C.
No. 2, Captain R. Rankin.
No. 3, Captain C. Pease.
No. 4, Captain P. S. Long-Innes.
Captain L. R. Hargreaves, Lieutenants the Hon. P. J. Ogilvy, and
R. Rodakowski, 2nd Lieutenant T. C. Gibson, and C.S.M. Voyles and
Farrell were left in reserve. Lieutenant L. C. Whitefoord and his
section of the Brigade Machine-gun Company was attached to the
Battalion.
[Illustration:
_THE SOMME_
_First Battalion_
_1916-1917-1918_
_Emery Walker Ltd. del. et sc._]
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY EMERY WALKER LTD., LONDON
They waited the hour and occupied themselves, many times over, with
trivial details, repetitions of orders and comparisons of watches and
compasses. (Their compass-bearing, by the way, was N. 37, or within
a shade of North North-east.) Every one noticed that every one else
fussed a little, and rather resented it. The doctor and the priest
seemed to loom unnaturally large, and the sergeants were busier than
was necessary over shortcomings, till ten minutes or so before Zero,
Father Browne, who had given Absolution, spoke to the companies
one by one as they knelt before him, their bayonets fixed and the
searching dawn-light on their faces. He reminded them that that day
was one set apart to Our Lady, and, ere many minutes, not few of them
would be presenting their homage to Her in person. They realised that
he told no more than truth.
Through some accident, Zero had been a little mis-timed, and the
troops left their lairs, not under the roar and swish of their own
barrage, but in a silence which lasted perhaps less than a minute,
but which seemed endless. They felt, one man averred, like amateur
actors upon whom the curtain unexpectedly rises. The enemy, not
looking for the attack, were only expending occasional shots, which
emphasised the awful loneliness and exposure of it all, till, with
a wrench that jerked the ground, our barrage opened, the enemy’s
counter-barrage, replied, and through a haze of flying dirt No. 1
Company of the Irish saw a platoon of Coldstream in front of them
crumped out of existence in one flash and roar. After that, the
lines moved into a blizzard of shell and machine-gun fire where all
landmarks were indistinguishable in the upheaval of explosives. (“We
might as well have tried to guide ourselves by the waves of the
sea--the way they spouted up.”)
There naturally cannot be any definite or accurate record of the
day’s work. Even had maps been issued to the officers a week, instead
of a day or so, before the attack; even had those maps marked all
known danger-points--such as the Ginchy-Flers sunk road; even had
the kaleidoscopic instructions about the brown and yellow lines been
more intelligible, or had the village of Ginchy been distinguishable
from a map of the pitted moon--once the affair was launched, there
was little chance of seeing far or living long. The two leading
platoons of No. 3 Company following the Coldstream, charged, through
the ripping fire that came out of Ginchy orchard, to the German
first-line trench which ran from the sunken road at that point.
The others came behind them, cheering their way into the sleet of
machine-gun fire. The true line of advance was north-easterly, but
the 2nd Guards Brigade on the right of the 1st, caught very heavily
by the German barrage on their right flank, closed in towards the
1st Brigade and edged it more northward; so that, about an hour and
a half after the advance began, what the countless machine-guns had
left of the Irish found itself with three out of its four company
commanders already casualties, all officers of No. 2 Company out
of action, and the second in command, Major T. M. D. Bailie,
killed. They were held up under heavy shelling, either in front
of German wire, or, approximately, on the first-line objective--a
battered German trench, which our artillery had done its best to
obliterate, but fortunately had failed in parts. With the Irish were
representatives of every unit of the 1st and 2nd Brigades, mostly
lacking officers, and some fresh troops of the Fourteenth Division
from the left of the line. Outside their area, the Sixth Division’s
attacks between Ginchy Telegraph and Leuze Wood had failed, thanks to
a driving fire from the Quadrilateral, the great fortified work that
controlled the landscape for a mile and a half; so the right flank of
the Guards Division was left in the air, the enemy zealously trying
to turn it--bomb _versus_ bayonet.
Judgment of time and distance had gone with the stress and roar
around. The two attacking battalions (2nd and 3rd Coldstream) of the
1st Brigade had more or less gone too--were either dead or dispersed
into small parties, dodging among smoking shell-holes. The others
were under the impression that they had won at least two of the
three objectives--an error due to the fact that they had found and
fought over a trench full of enemy where no such obstacle had been
indicated. Suddenly a party of snipers and machine-guns appeared
behind the Irish in a communication-trench, fired at large, as much
out of bewilderment as design, wounded the sole surviving company
officer of the four companies (Lieutenant J. K. Greer), and owing
to the jamming of our Lewis-guns got away to be killed elsewhere. A
mass of surrendering Germans, disturbed by the advance of a division
on the left, drifted across them and further blinded the situation.
Nobody knew within hundreds of yards where they were, but since it
was obvious that the whole attack of the Division, pressed, after the
failure of the Sixth Division, by the fire from the Quadrilateral,
had sheered too far towards the left or north, the need of the moment
was to shift the men of the 2nd Guards Brigade back along the trench
towards their own area; to sort out the mixed mass of officerless men
on the left; and to make them dig in before the vicious, spasmodic
shelling of the congested line turned into the full roll of the
German barrage.
They cleared out, as best they could, the mixed English and German
bodies that paved the bottom of the trench, and toiled desperately
at the wreckage--splinters and concrete from blown-in dug-outs,
earth-slides and collapses of head-cover by yards at a time, all
mingled or besmeared with horrors and filth that a shell would
suddenly increase under their hands. Men could give hideous isolated
experiences of their own--it seemed to each survivor that he had
worked for a lifetime in a world apart--but no man could recall
any connected order of events, and the exact hour and surroundings
wherein such and such a man--private, N.C.O., or officer--met his
death are still in dispute. It was a still day, and the reeking,
chemical-tainted fog of the high explosives would not clear. Orders
would be given and taken by men suddenly appearing and as suddenly
vanishing through smoke or across fallen earth, till both would
be cut off in the middle by a rifle bullet, or beaten down by the
stamp and vomit of a shell. There was, too, always a crowd of men
seated or in fantastic attitudes, silent, with set absorbed faces,
busily engaged in trying to tie up, staunch, or plug their own
wounds--to save their own single lives with their own hands. When
orders came to these they would shake their heads impatiently and go
on with their urgent, horrible business. Others, beyond hope, but
not consciousness, lamented themselves into death. The Diary covers
these experiences of the three hours between 8 A. M. and 11 A. M.
with the words: “In the meantime, despite rather heavy shelling, a
certain amount of consolidation was done on the trench while the
work of reorganization was continued.” In the meantime, also, some
of the Coldstream battalions, mixed with a few men of the Irish
Guards, the latter commanded by Lieutenant W. Mumford, had rushed
on into the wilderness beyond the trench towards the brown line, or
what was supposed to be the brown line, three hundred yards or so
ahead, and for the moment had been lost. About half-past eleven the
Commanding Officer, the Adjutant, and 2nd Lieutenant G. V. Williams
and Lieutenant L. C. Whitefoord of the 1st Guards Brigade Machine-gun
Company, who represented all that was left of the officers, went
forward with all that was left of the Irish Guards and all available,
not too badly wounded Coldstreamers, towards the next objective.
Every one was glad to step out from the sickening trench into the
wire-trapped, shell-ploughed open whence the worst of the German
barrage had lifted, though enemy machine-guns were cropping it
irregularly. Their road lay uphill through a field of rank, unweeded
stuff, and, when they had topped a little rise, they saw what seemed,
by comparison, untouched country where houses had some roofs on them
and trees some branches, all laid out ahead, in the hot sunshine
between Flers and Lesbœufs. There were figures in the landscape
too--Germans on the move with batteries and transport--an enemy in
sight at last and, by the look of them, moving away. Then a German
field-battery, also in the open, pulled up and methodically shelled
them. They came upon a shallow trench littered with wreckage,
scraped themselves in, and there found some more of the Division,
while the German battery continued to find them. In the long run,
that trench, which had been a German covered-way for guns, came
to hold about sixty of the 1st Irish Guards, thirty of the 2nd
Grenadiers under Captain A. F. S. Cunningham, and a hundred or so of
both Battalions Coldstream under Colonel J. V. Campbell, the senior
officer present. Somewhere on the left front of it, fifteen of the
Irish were found lying out in shell-holes under C. S. M. Carton and
Sergeant Riordan. They were in touch, so far as touch existed then,
with the 9th Rifle Brigade on their left, but it was not advisable to
show one’s head above a shell-hole on account of enemy machine-guns
which were vividly in touch with everything that moved. Their right
was all in the air, and for the second time no one knew--no one could
know--where the trench in which they lay was situated in the existing
chaos. They fixed its position at last by compass-bearings. It was
more or less on the line of the second objective, and had therefore
to be held in spite of casualties. The men could do no more than
fire when possible at anything that showed itself (which was seldom)
and, in the rare intervals when shelling slackened, work themselves
a little further into the ground. At this juncture, Captain L. R.
Hargreaves, left behind with the Reserve of Officers in Trônes Wood,
was ordered up, and reached the line with nothing worse than one
wound. He led out a mixed party of Coldstream and Irish to a chain
of disconnected shell-holes a few hundred yards in advance of the
trench. Here they suffered for the rest of the afternoon under the
field-battery shelling them at less than half a mile, and the regular
scything of the machine-guns from the Quadrilateral on their right.
A machine-gun detachment, under Lieutenant L. C. Whitefoord, went
with them, and Lieutenant W. C. Mumford and 2nd Lieutenant F. S. L.
Smith with their little detachments of Irish and Coldstream came up
later as reinforcements. That scattered forward fringe among the
shell-holes gave what help it could to the trench behind it, which
filled up, as the day wore on, with more Irish and Coldstream working
their way forward. Formation was gone--blown to bits long ago. Nearly
every officer was down, and sergeant after sergeant succeeding to
the command, had dropped too; but the discipline held, and with it
the instinct that made them crawl, dodge, run and stumble as chance
offered and their corporals ordered, towards the enemy and not away
from him. They had done so, at first, shouting aloud in the massed
rush of the full charge that now seemed centuries away in time, and
worlds in space. Later, as they were scattered and broken by fire,
knowing that their battalion was cut to pieces, they worked with a
certain automatic forlorn earnestness, which, had any one had time to
think, was extremely comic. For instance, when a sergeant came across
a stray private meditating longer than seemed necessary at the bottom
of a too-tempting shell-hole, he asked him gravely what he thought he
was doing. The man, dazed and shaken, replied with an equal gravity
that he did not know. “Then,” said the sergeant, “get on forward out
o’ this an’ maybe ye’ll find out,” and smote him dispassionately
with the flat of a spade. The man, without a word, rose up, lifted
his head once more into the bullet-torn air, and pitched forward,
dead, a few paces farther on. And, at one time, in a terrible waiting
pause, when it was death to show a finger, they saw one man out on
the flank suddenly taken by madness. He lifted himself up slowly,
and as slowly marched across the open towards the enemy, firing his
rifle in the air meantime. The bullets seemed to avoid him for a long
while till he was visibly jerked off his feet by several that struck
him altogether. The stiff, blind death-march ended, and the watching
Irish clicked their tongues for wonder and pity.
The Battalion had had no communication with Brigade Headquarters
or any one else since early morning. It lacked supports, lights,
signals, information, wood, wire, sandbags, water, food and at
least fifty per cent. of its strength. Its last machine-gun had
been knocked out, and it had no idea what troops might be next on
either side. As the sun went down, word came from the advanced
party in the shell-holes where the wrecked machine-gun lay, that
the Germans were massing for a counter-attack on the blue line of
what had been the third objective. They could be seen in artillery
formation with a mass of transport behind them, and it passed the
men’s comprehension why they did not come on and finish the weary
game. But the enemy chose to wait, and at the edge of dusk the Irish
saw the 2nd Scots Guards attacking on their right through a barrage
of heavy stuff--attacking and disappearing between the shell-bursts.
The attack failed: a few of the Scots Guards came back and found
places beside the Irish and Coldstream in the trench. Night fell;
the enemy’s counter-attack held off; the survivors of the advanced
party in the shell-holes were withdrawn to help strengthen the main
trench; and when it was dark, men were sent out to get into touch
with the flanks. They reported, at last, a battalion of the Duke of
Cornwall’s on their left and the 2nd Grenadiers on their right. In
the protecting darkness, too, water and rations arrived from the
Ginchy-Lesbœufs road, by some unconsidered miracle-work of Captain
Antrobus and the other Battalion Transport Officers; and throughout
the very long night, stragglers and little cut-off parties, with
their wounded, found the trench, reported, fed, and flung themselves
down in whatever place was least walked over--to sleep like the dead,
their neighbours. Ground-flares had at last indicated the Battalion’s
position to our night-scouting contact aeroplanes. There was nothing
more to be done except--as one survivor put it--“we was busy thryin’
to keep alive against the next day.”
The dawn of September 16 pinned them strictly to their cramped
position, for the slope behind them ran in full view of the enemy.
Moreover, enemy aeroplanes had risen early and taken good stock
of the crowded shallow trench where they lay; and in due time the
enemy artillery began to scourge them. But some of our batteries had
moved up in the night, and one little field-battery that the Irish
thought very kindly of all that day, distracted their tormentors, so
that, though they were shelled with H.E. and shrapnel as a matter
of principle from dawn to dark, they could still make shift to hang
on. The only orders they received from the Brigade that day were
to maintain their positions and stand by to support an attack by
the 3rd Brigade. That attack, however, never was launched. They
lay still and watched, between bursts of shelling, a battalion on
their left attacking some German trenches south of Gueudecourt.
This happened once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Small
stooping or crawling figures crept out for a while over the face
of the landscape, drew the German guns, including those that were
shelling the Irish trench, upon their advance, wavered forward
into the smoke of it, spread out and disappeared--precisely as the
watching Guards themselves had done the day before. The impression
of unreality was as strong as in a cinema-show. Nothing seemed to
happen that made any difference. Small shapes gesticulated a little,
lay down and got up again, or having lain down, rose no more. Then
the German guns returned to bombarding the brown-line trench, and
the men lying closer realised that the lime-light of the show had
shifted and was turned mercilessly upon themselves again. All they
wanted was relief--relief from the noises and the stenches of the
high explosives, the clinging horror of the sights nearest them
and from the tension that lay at the back of the minds of the most
unimaginative. The men were dumb--tired with mere work and suffering;
the few officers doubly tired out by that and the responsibility
of keeping awake and thinking consecutively, even when their words
of command clotted on their tongues through shear weariness. The
odds were heavily in favour of a German attack after dark; and a
written warning from the rear said it would certainly come in the
course of the night. A party of explorers sent to look for defences,
found some sections of barb-wire on trestles in the wreck of an
enemy-trench behind them. It was man-handled and brought away by
lengths and, in some fashion, set up before the trench so that the
enemy might not actually stroll over them without warning.