Major-General Feilding, who presented the ribbons to the N.C.O.’s and
men who had been awarded medals and complimented the Battalion on
its past work. Second Lieutenant E. Budd (and five other ranks), 2nd
Lieutenant E. M. Harvey, with a draft of ninety-five, not counting
eleven more who had joined in small parties, and 2nd Lieutenants
A. L. Bain, H. H. Maxwell, and J. J. Kane all came in within the
next ten days. Captain R. G. C. Yerburgh, on rejoining from the
Central Training School at Havre, was posted to the command of No. 4
Company; and on the 8th October, a team, chiefly officers, greatly
daring, played a Rugby football match against “a neighbouring
French recruit battalion,” which campaign seems to have so inspired
them that they all attended a Divisional dinner that night at 1st
Brigade Headquarters at Dromesnil. There is, alas! no record of that
match nor of what the French Recruit Battalion thought of it; but
just before their departure from Hornoy they played a Soccer match
against the 26th French Infantry, and next day the C.O. and all
company officers rode over to that regiment to see how it practised
the latest form of attack over the open. Thus did they combine
instruction with amusement, and cemented the Sacred Alliance!
They dined also with their own 2nd Battalion, who were billeted
five miles away--a high and important function at Hornoy where
Brigadier-General Butler, formerly in command of the 2nd Battalion,
was present, with all the officers of both battalions. The band of
the Welsh Guards assisted and they all drank the health, among many
others, of the belle of Hornoy, who “responded with enthusiasm.”
Further, they played a football match against their brethren and won;
entertained the village, not forgetting the 26th French Infantry,
with their drums; drove all ranks hard at company drills and
battalion attacks; rehearsed the review for the approaching visit of
H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught, and welcomed small detachments as they
came in. The last was 2nd Lieutenant D. A. B. Moodie with 50, on the
26th October, when Lieutenant H. F. S. Law rejoined the Battalion
from his Intelligence duties with the Ninth Corps. Drill-Sergeant J.
Orr assumed the duties of 2nd Lieutenant from November 2.
The mess was now full again. The dead of the September Somme had
almost passed out of men’s memories till the war should be over
and the ghosts return; and the Battalion, immortal however much it
changes, was ready (“forty over strength”) for the bitter winter of
’16-’17.
On the 7th November they were warned to move back into line and
celebrated it by an officers’ dinner (thirty-seven strong) of both
battalions at the Hotel London, Hornoy.
On the 10th they regretfully quitted that hospitable village for
the too familiar camping grounds near Carnoy beyond Méaulte, which
in winter becomes a marsh on the least provocation. They were
accommodated “in bell-tents in a sea of mud” with weather to match.
Next day (11th November) they shifted to “a sort of camp” near
Montauban, “quite inadequate” and served by bottomless roads where
they were shelled a little after mass--a proof, one presumes, that
the enemy had news of their arrival.
On the 13th November, in cold but dry weather, they took over a line
of trench north of Lesbœufs between that village and Gueudecourt.
These were reached by interminable duckboards from Trônes Wood
and up over the battered and hacked Flers ridge. There were no
communication-trenches and, in that windy waste of dead weed and
wreckage, no landmarks to guide the eye. Trench equipment was
utterly lacking, and every stick and strand had to be man-handled
up from Ginchy. In these delectable lodgings they relieved the 7th
Yorkshires and the 8th South Staffordshires, losing one man wounded
by shell-fire, and Major the Hon. T. E. Vesey was sent down sick as
the result of old wounds received at Loos and in ’14. The Somme was
no place for such as were not absolutely fit, and even the fittest
had to pay toll.
Shelling for the next three days was “continuous but
indiscriminate.” Four men were killed, fourteen wounded, and three
disappeared--walked, it is supposed, into enemy ground. The wonder
was there were not more such accidents. Wiser men than they would
come up to the front line with a message, refuse the services of
a guide back because, they protested, they knew every inch of the
ground and--would be no more seen till exhumation parties three or
four years later identified them by some rag of Guards’ khaki or a
button.
The Battalion was relieved by the 2nd Grenadiers at midnight (16th
November), but were not clear till morning, when they crawled back to
camp between Carnoy and Montauban, packed forty men apiece into the
icy-chill Nissen huts, supposed to hold thirty, and were thankful for
the foul warmth of them. Thence they moved into unstable tents on
the outskirts of Méaulte, on the Bray road, where the wind funnels
from all parts of the compass, and in alternate snow, rain, and snow
again, plumbed the deeps of discomfort. When frost put a crust on the
ground they drilled; when it broke they cleaned themselves from mud;
and, fair or foul, did their best to “improve” any camp into which
fortune decanted them.
It was a test, were one needed, that proved all ranks to the
uttermost. The heroism that endures for a day or a week at high
tension is a small thing beside that habit of mind which can hold
fast to manner, justice, honour and a show of kindliness and
toleration, in despite of physical misery and the slow passage
of bleak and indistinguishable days. Character and personality,
whatever its “crime-sheet” may have been, was worth its weight in
gold on the Somme, where a jest counted as high as a rum-ration.
All sorts of unsuspected people came to their own as leaders of men
or lighteners of care. There were stretcher-bearers, for instance,
whose mere presence and personality steadied half a platoon after the
shell-burst when, picking themselves up, men’s first question out of
the dark would be: “Where’s So-and-So?” And So-and-So would answer
with the dignity of Milesian Kings: “I’m here! Caarry on, lads!”
So, too, with the officers. In the long overseeing of endless
fatigues, which are more trying than action, they come to understand
the men with a thoroughness that one is inclined to believe that
not many corps have reached. Discipline in the Guards, as has been
many times pointed out, allowed no excuse whatever for the officer
or the man; but once the punishment, or the telling off, had been
administered, the sinner and the judge could, and did, discuss
everything under heaven. One explanation which strikes at the root of
the matter is this: “Ye’ll understand that in those days we was all
countin’ ourselves for dead men--sooner or later. ’Twas in the air,
ye’ll understand--like the big stuff comin’ over.”
On Sunday the 27th November, the day of the requiem mass for the
Irish Guards in Westminster Cathedral, a requiem mass was said in
Méaulte Church and they moved out to a French camp (“Forked Tree”),
south of the town where the big French huts held a hundred men
apiece, but cook-houses, etc., were all to build and the “usual
routine improvement work began again.” Their Brigade bombing officer,
Lieutenant the Hon. H. P. O’Brien, was appointed Staff Captain to the
1st Guards Brigade, and Captain R. G. C. Yerburgh left to be attached
to the 2nd Guards Brigade H.Q. Staff for instruction in staff duties.
They were visited by their corps and divisional commanders, inspected
by their Brigadier and route-marched till the 3rd December, when they
moved to Maltz Horn Camp.
It had been decided that the British Army should, by degrees, take
over a stretch of the French line from Le Transloy to a point
opposite Roye; and the Battalion’s share of this was about a thousand
yards of trench at Sailly-Saillisel, held by the 160th Regiment of
the Twentieth Corps (Corps de Fer). The front line ran a little in
front of what had once been that long and prosperous village on
the ridge, and, though not continuous, “it held in places.” The
support-line, through, and among the wreck of the houses, was dry and
fairly good. That there were no communication-trenches was a small
matter--men preferred to take their chances in the open to being
buried in trench mud--but there was no road up to it and “the going
was heavy.”
Once installed (December 6), after a prompt and workmanlike French
relief, which impressed them, they found the 156th French Infantry
on their right, a Coldstream Battalion on their left, and an
enemy in front disposed to be quiet “except when frightened” or
suspecting reliefs, when he would drop very unpleasant barrages on
the support-line.
They were relieved on the 9th December by the 2nd Grenadiers who were
late, because they were “constantly delayed by digging men out of
mud.” From Bois de la Haie, the long, thin slip of wood under Morval
whence the relief started at a quarter-past five in the evening, the
distance to the Battalion’s sector might be two miles. That relief
was not completed till half-past one on the morning of the 10th--say
eight hours to cover four or five miles in one continuous nightmare
of mud, darkness, loss of touch and the sudden engulfment of heavily
loaded men. A Grenadier battalion claims to hold the record (fifteen
hours) for the extrication of one man. Six or eight hours was not
uncommon. They were shelled, of course, on their arrival and lost
Sergeant Wylie, killed, and eleven wounded. Captain R. V. Pollok
joined from home on that day and took over command of No. 1 Company,
Major E. B. Greer, on loan from the 2nd Battalion, who had commanded
the Battalion temporarily, handed over to Captain the Hon. H. R.
Alexander, D.S.O. acting C.O. in place of Colonel R. McCalmont on
leave. Captain the Earl of Kingston had to go into hospital on the
10th--“result of an old wound”--and on the 13th December Lieutenant
J. J. V. F. Murphy--“exposure.”
On the 12th December, after a day’s rest in a muddy camp near
Montauban, they marched to Combles through the blackened site of
Guillemont to relieve the 2nd Battalion on a more southerly sector,
to furnish working-parties for the railway lines that were spreading
stealthily north and east, to help lay down plank roads--not the
least burdensome of fatigues, for the “planks” were substantial
logs--and to make the front line a little less impossible. It was an
easy turn, with very little shelling or sniping, “both sides being
only able to reach their front line by going over the open.” When
to this is added full moonlight and a fall of snow, moderation is
imposed on every one till they are under cover. Otherwise a local
battle might have developed--and what is the use of local battles
where both sides are stuck in the mud, and no help can be sent to
either? This question would be put to the Staff when, from the
comfortable security of their decent dug-outs, they lectured the
front-line, and were invited mirthfully to come up and experiment for
themselves.
The Battalion had eleven wounded in three days, and returned to
Bronfay to find their allotted camp already filled up by Gunners.
Then there was confusion and argument, and the quartermaster--notable
even among quartermasters--“procured” fuel and braziers and got
the men more or less warmed and fed. “The muddle,” says the Diary
sternly, “was due to no proper arrangements being made to find out to
whom Camp 108 belonged before the battalions were moved into them.”
Thus, on paper at least, did the front line get back at the Staff.
They returned to the Combles area on the 18th, relieved their
sister-battalion in less than three hours, and in fine frosty
weather, helped by the enemy’s inactivity, improved the trenches,
lost five killed and one wounded, and on their return found Camp 108
also “improved” and devoid of Gunners.
The year closed well. Their Christmas turn (December 25-27, when they
missed their Christmas dinners) was almost bloodless. The reliefs
went smoothly, and though a thaw made the trenches cave here and
there, but four men were wounded, and in their New Year turn, only
one.
About Christmas the Brigade, to their deep regret, lost their
Brigadier-General, C. Pereira--promoted to command the Second
Division, and in him, one of the best friends that they ever had. He
knew the Battalion very personally, appreciated its value, and fought
for its interests with devotion and a strong hand.
Nothing is said in the Diary of any attempts on the enemy’s part to
fraternise, and the New Year was “seen in without any incident,”
which means that no bursts of artillery marked the hour. And on the
3rd January the whole of the Guards Division went out of the line for
refit. The Twentieth Division took its unenvied place, and the 1st
Battalion Irish Guards lay at Sandpits Camp near Méaulte.
The strain was beginning to tell. They had had to transfer Lieutenant
F. S. L. Smith and 2nd Lieutenant J. Kane to the 2nd Battalion “owing
to shortage in that Battalion on account of sickness,” and their own
coolies were in need of rest and change. The strongest cannot stand
up beyond a certain point to exposure, broken rest, alarms all round
the clock; laborious physical exertions, knee or mid-thigh deep in
mud; sweating fatigues, followed by cooling-off in icy blasts or a
broth of snow and chalk-slime; or--more undermining than any bodily
stress--the pressure that grows of hourly responsibility. Sooner
or later, the mind surrenders itself to a mill-round of harassing
obsessions as to whether, if one had led one’s platoon up or down by
such and such a deviation--to the left or the right of a certain dead
horse, for example--if one had halted longer there or whipped up more
cautiously elsewhere--one might have saved such and such a casualty,
entombment in the mud, or some other shrieking horror of the night.
Reason insists that it was not, and could not have been, one’s own
fault. Memory brings back the face or the eyes of the dying, and the
silence, always accusing, as the platoon goes forward. When this
mood overtakes an officer he does well to go into rest for a while
and pad his nerves, lest he arrive at that dreadful stage when he is
convinced that his next turn of duty will see all his men destroyed
by his own act. Between this last stage and the dragging weariness,
the hoarse Somme cold, and the foul taste in the mouth which are
mere signs of “beginning to be fed up,” there is every variety of
derangement, to be held in check by the individual’s own character
and that discipline which age and experience have devised to hold him
when everything else has dropped away. It is the deadly journey, back
and forth to the front-line with material, the known and foreseen
war in darkness and mud against the natural perversity of things,
that shifts the foundations of the soul, so that a man, who scarcely
regards death hunting him at large by the hour, will fall into a
child’s paroxysms of rage and despair when the wire-strand rasps him
across the knuckles or the duckboard for the hundredth time tilts
sideways underfoot. “Ye’ll understand,” says the voice of experience,
“the fatigues do it in the long run.” All of which the Diary will
dismiss with: “A few fatigues were found in this area.”
The Somme was one overwhelming fatigue.
1917
THE SOMME TO GOUZEAUCOURT
The beginning of the year saw the British armies, now more than fifty
divisions strong, holding a front of a hundred and ten miles from
Ypres to within a short distance of Roye. Thus, allowing for changes
imposed by the fluctuations of war and attack, they lay:
The Second Army had the Salient: the First centred on Armentières;
the Third (Gough’s) carried on to the south of Arras, where the Fifth
held all along the valley of the Ancre and a portion of the old
British line on the Somme. The Fourth joined the French left wing
near Roye, and the French pressure worked in with ours.
From the Salient to the Somme battle-front, our line’s business was
to draw as much as possible of the enemy’s strength. Therefore, our
raids on that part of the line, during the latter half of 1916, were
counted by the hundred; and in all that time, at no point on any
given day there, could the Germans feel secure against our irruptions.
On the Somme our pressure was direct and, except for the weather,
worked as continuously as a forest fire in fallen pine-needles. A
fold of the hills might check it there; a bare ridge or a sodden
valley hold it elsewhere for the while; but always it ate north
and east across the stricken country, as division after division
gathered, fought, won foothold, held it, dug in, and gave place to
their unspent fellows beneath the cover of the advancing guns. Here
is a mere outline of the work of a few weeks:
The affairs of the 15th and 25th of September (1916), when the Fourth
Army pushed the line past Lesbœufs and Flers and beyond Gueudecourt
on the right, knocked out, as we know, both battalions of the Irish
Guards for the time being.
On the 27th and 28th of September the Second and First Canadian
Divisions, with the Eleventh and Eighteenth of the Second Army Corps,
captured Thiepval, the Stuff and Schwaben redoubts on the left of the
line; while the Fifty-fifth and New Zealand Divisions made possible
an advance on Le Sars and Eaucourt l’Abbaye villages in the centre,
which, after four days’ continuous fighting by the Forty-seventh,
Fiftieth, and Twenty-third Divisions, ended in the taking of Eaucourt
l’Abbaye and Le Sars.
On the 7th of October the French Army attacked in the direction
of Sailly-Saillisel, the Fourth Army chiming in along its whole
front from Lesbœufs to Destremont farm, which had been taken by the
Twenty-third Division on the 29th September. In this affair the
Twenty-third Division captured Le Sars, and the Twentieth Division
over a mile of trenches east of Gueudecourt.
Then the treacherous weather broke once more, and the battered and
crumbled ground held their feet till a few days of dry cold were
snatched for an attack in the direction of Courcelette by four
Divisions (Fourth Canadian, Eighteenth, Fifteenth, and Thirty-ninth),
where a fresh line was needed.
On the 23rd October, and on the 5th November again, as side-issues
while waiting on the weather for a serious attack on Beaumont-Hamel,
a couple of divisions (Fourth and Eighth) went in with a French
attack against Pierre St. Vaast Wood, where a tangle of enemy
trenches at the junction of the two armies was slowly smoked and
burned out.
The 10th of November (after one day’s fine weather) gave the Fourth
Canadian Division a full day’s fighting and, once more, a thousand
yards of trench in the Courcelette sector.
On the 13th of November the battle of the Ancre opened from Serre
to east of the Schwaben redoubt (Thirty-first, Third, Second,
Fifty-first, Thirty-ninth and Nineteenth Divisions), with the
intention of gaining command of both banks of the river, where it
entered the enemy lines six or seven miles north of Albert. This
was a sector of the old German front to the west, which had thrown
back our opening attack of July 1, and had grown no more inviting
since. Serre itself, helped by the state of the ground before it, was
impossible, but Beaucourt, Beaumont-Hamel, and a portion of the high
ground above it, with the village of St. Pierre-Divion in the valley,
were, in the course of the next few days, captured and held.
All the above takes no count of incessant minor operations, losses
and recaptures of trenches, days and nights of bombing that were
necessary to silence nests of subterranean works, marked on the maps
of peace as “villages”; nor of the almost monotonous counter-attacks
that followed on the heels of every gain. So long as movement was
possible the Somme front was alive from end to end, according as one
hard-gained position gave the key to the next, or unscreened some
hitherto blinded works. Against every disadvantage of weather and
over ground no troops in history had before dared to use at that
season, the system and design of the advance revealed itself to the
enemy. Their counter-attacks withered under our guns or died out in
the fuming, raw-dug trenches; the slopes that had been their screens
were crowned and turned against them; their infantry began to have
no love for the blunt-nosed tanks, which, though not yet come to
the war in battalions, were dragging their smeared trails along the
ridges; the fighting aeroplanes worried them, too, with machine-gun
fire from overhead; photographers marked their covered ways by day
and our heavy bombers searched them by night, as owls search stubble
for mice. It all cost men and stuff, and the German Army Command had
little good news to send back to the German tribes.
Yet the last six months of 1916 had advanced our front no more than
some eight miles--along the Albert-Bapaume road. At no point were
we more than ten miles from our beginnings. All that showed on the
map was that the enemy’s line to the north had been pinched into
a salient which, starting from just east of Arras, followed the
line of the old German front built up two years before, through
Monchy-au-Bois, Gomiecourt and Serre to the high white grounds
above Beaumont-Hamel. Thence it turned east across the Ancre,
seven or eight kilometres north of Arras, skirted Grandcourt,
crossed the arrow-straight Albert-Bapaume road by the dreary Butte
de Warlencourt, ran north-east of Gueudecourt, and on the rim of
the rise above Le Transloy, till it crossed the Péronne-Bapaume
road just north of Sailly-Saillisel. Here it swung south-east from
Rancourt and Bouchavesnes down the long slopes to the Valley of the
Somme, and its marshes west of Péronne. Thence, south-westerly by
Berny-en-Santerre, Ablaincourt to the outskirts of Chaulnes, ending
at Le Quesnoy-en-Santerre, where the French took on. The twenty-five
mile stretch from Le Transloy to Le Quesnoy was the new section that
had been handed over to the British care, piece by piece, at the end
of the year.
To meet this pinch and all that they could see that it meant,
the Germans had constructed, while they and the weather held us,
elaborate second and third lines of defence behind their heavily
fortified front. The first barrier--a double line of trenches,
heavily wired, ran behind Sailly-Saillisel, past Le Transloy to
the Albert-Bapaume road, Grévillers and Loupart woods, and _via_
Achiet-le-Petit to Bucquoy.