a new line through Rocquigny, Bapaume, and Ablainzevelle, almost
equally strong and elaborate. Behind it, as every one understood,
was a thing called the Hindenburg Line, known to the Germans as
“Siegfried”--a forty-mile marvel of considered defences with branches
and spurs and switches, one end of which lay on St. Quentin and the
other outside Arras. This could be dealt with later, but, meantime,
the enemy in the Arras-Le Transloy salient were uneasy. The attacks
delivered on selected positions; the little inter-related operations
that stole a few hundred yards of trench or half a village at a leap,
or carried a gun-group to a position whence our batteries could
peer out and punish; above all, the cold knowledge that sooner or
later our unimaginative, unmilitary infantry would shamble after
the guns, made them think well of lines in their rear to which they
could retire at leisure. Verdun had not fallen; very many of their
men lay dead outside its obliterated forts, and so very many living
were needed to make good the daily drain of the Somme that they had
none too many to spare for Austrian or Turkish needs. Their one
energetic ally was the weather, which, with almost comic regularity,
gave them time after each reverse to draw breath, position more guns,
reorganise reliefs, and explain to their doubting public in Germany
the excellence and the method of their army’s plans for the future.
The battle of the Ancre, for instance, was followed by an absolute
deadlock of six weeks, when our armies--one cannot assault and dig
out battalions at the same time--dropped everything to fight the mud,
while our front-line wallowed in bottomless trenches where subalterns
took from three to six hours to visit their posts on a front of one
quarter of a mile.
Bitter frosts set in with the first weeks of the New Year and the
“small operations” began at once, on our side, round such portions
of the Beaumont-Hamel heights as the enemy still clung to. Here the
Third, Seventh, and Eleventh Divisions fought, shift by shift, for
the rest of January and won the high ground needed for our guns to
uncover against Serre and Grandcourt, which were the keys of the
positions at the corner of the Arras-Le Transloy salient. Thanks
to our air-work, and the almost daily improvement in the power and
precision of our barrages, that little army came through its campaign
without too heavy losses, and still further cramped the enemy’s
foothold along the Ancre, while the rest of the line enjoyed as much
peace as the Somme allowed them when “there was nothing doing.”
MARKING TIME
The Guards Division, after their ten days’ rest and clean-up at
Sandpits Camp, Méaulte, supplied one brigade to take over a new
sector of trench opposite St. Pierre Vaast Wood on the extreme
east of things and left their 1st Brigade in reserve at Méaulte,
Ville-sous-Corbie, and Méricourt l’Abbé. The latter camp was allotted
to the Irish Guards who had to send one company for permanent
fatigues to the railway station--all the valley here was one long
siding for men and supplies--and another to the back of Bernafay Wood
for Decauville construction, while the remainder were drilled and
instructed in their specialties. This was the time in our armies’
development when nearly every third man was a “specialist” in some
branch or another except, as company officers remarked under their
breaths, the rifle and its bayonet. The men’s deferred Christmas
dinners (it will be remembered they had been in the line on the day
itself) were duly issued by half a battalion at a time in the big
cinema-hall in camp, and, lest the transport officer should by any
chance enjoy himself, their transport chose this time of rest to
develop “contagious stomatitis,” a form of thrush in the mouth, and
had to be isolated. Still, setting aside the cold, which does not
much trouble well-fed men, the Battalion had some pleasant memories
of its rest by the river. Leave was possible; smoking-parties made
themselves in the big huts; the sergeants gave a dinner, which is a
sure sign of well-being; there were cinemas for the men, and no one
troubled himself too much for the noise of the guns ten miles up
stream.
It is difficult to rediscover a battalion’s psychology at any given
time, but so far as evidence goes they had not too black doubts
as to the upshot of the campaign, though every platoon kept its
loud-voiced pessimists who foretold that they would take root in the
trenches for evermore and christened the R.O.D. locomotives “Roll on
Duration!”
On the 1st February (1917) in “cold bright weather with snow on the
ground,” the 1st Brigade were once again in Divisional Reserve near
Carnoy, ready to relieve the 3rd Coldstream near Rancourt on the
recently taken-over French sector, in trenches a little westerly
of St. Pierre Vaast Wood which is under Sailly-Saillisel. In the
wood itself lay a dreadful mine-crater of the old days, filled, as
it seemed, with dead French Colonial troops--browned and blackened
bodies, their white skulls still carrying jaunty red caps. Our
wondering patrols used to look down into it sometimes of moonlight
nights.
They moved out on the 2nd of February _via_ Maricourt and Maurepas,
left No. 2 Company under canvas in Maurepas Ravine, distributed the
rest in shelters and dug-outs and resumed their watch. The frozen
ground stopped much digging or “improvements,” and the enemy’s front
line gave no trouble, but a few small shells were sent over, one
of which hit 2nd Lieutenant J. Orr temporarily in command of No. 1
Company and wounded a couple of men. The rest of their turn--February
2 to 6--was quiet, for the new-fallen snow gave away the least
movement on either side. While they crouched over their braziers and
watched each other, the operations round Serre and at the nose of the
Arras-Le Transloy salient, began again as the earth’s crust hardened.
The Sixty-third Division hammered its way for a day and a night up
the southern slopes of Serre, and our guns were threatening the line
of enemy’s trenches from Grandcourt westward. This move unkeyed the
arch of his local defences at this point, and next day he evacuated
Grandcourt and such of his front as lay between Grandcourt and the
Stuff redoubt.
By the 7th February our troops had carried forward to midway between
Beaucourt and Miraumont, and on the 10th February the Thirty-second
Division took in hand the business of shifting the enemy out of what
remained to him in the Beaumont Valley. Their advance brought Serre
village into direct danger from our artillery, and any further move
on our part up the valley of the Ancre would make Serre untenable.
On the 17th February that move was made by three Divisions (Second,
Eighteenth, and Sixty-third) before dawn, through heavy mist on
the edge of a thaw, and in the face of a well-contrived barrage
that caught the battalions forming up. But the positions and
observation-points, already gained, helped our guns to help the
infantry, broke up the enemy’s counter-attacks with satisfactory
losses, and, in the next few days, gave us good command over the
enemy’s artillery dispositions in the valley of the Upper Ancre and
a fair look into his defences at Pys and Miraumont. Then the game
stood thus: If Miraumont, which lay at our mercy, were taken, Serre
would go; if Serre went, Puisieux-au-Mont and Gomiecourt, the pillar
of the old German western defences, would be opened too; and it was
no part of the German idea to cling to untenable positions, whose
loss would have to be explained at home where people were asking why
victory delayed so long. Not only was the whole of Arras-Le Transloy
salient shaking by now; there was the prospect of indefinite wastage
to no good end all along the rest of the Somme front, and though
the weather, till then, had blunted the following weight of each
following blow, many considerations pointed to a temporary withdrawal
of a few miles in order to advance the more irresistibly at a more
fitting time. Slowly, methodically then, with careful screens of
veiled machine-guns behind them, and a series of scientifically
chosen artillery positions, equally capable of supporting a
counter-attack, or checking and destroying any too inconvenient
body of pursuers, the enemy moved back into ground not yet churned
and channelled by shell or traffic, over untouched roads which he
had kept in perfect order, to this very end; and left us to follow
through bottomless valleys of desolation.
The frost broke on the third week of February, and the last state
of the ground was worse even than it had been throughout the rainy
autumn. Trenches caved in bodily; dumps sank where they were being
piled; the dirt and the buttresses of overhead shelters flaked and
fell away in lumps; duckboards went under by furlongs at a time;
tanks were immobilised five feet deep and the very bellies of the
field-guns gouged into the mud. Only our airmen could see anything
beyond or outside the present extreme discomfort, but the mists that
came punctually with the thaws helped to baffle even their eyes.
On the 24th February the enemy had evacuated his positions in front
of Pys, Miraumont, and Serre; next day his first system of defence,
from Gueudecourt to west of Serre, running through half-a-dozen
fortified villages, was in our hands.
At the end of the month, Puisieux-au-Mont, with Gomiecourt and its
defences, were occupied by us. The Germans had pulled themselves
cleanly out of the worst of the salient.
By March they were back on their fortified Le Transloy-Loupart line,
except that they still held the village of Irles above Miraumont,
which was linked up to the Le Transloy-Loupart line by a peninsula
of wired trenches. Irles was carried by the Second and Eighteenth
Divisions on the 10th March.
As soon as our guns were able to concentrate on the Le
Transloy-Loupart line itself, which they did the day after, the
enemy, leisurely as always, released it, and fell back on and through
his next line a mile or two behind--Rocquigny-Ablainzevelle--steadied
his rear-guards, and continued his progress towards the Hindenburg
defences, withdrawing along the whole front from south of Arras to
Roye. By the 17th of March word was given for a general advance of
our troops in co-operation with the French.
To go back a month. Rumours of what was to be expected had cheered
the camps for some time past; and just as the fall of single
rocks precedes the collapse of an undermined quarry-face, so the
German line had crumpled in certain spots long before their system
readjusted itself throughout. Front-trenches, far removed from
actual points of pressure, observed that life with them was quieter
than even the state of the weather justified, and began to make
investigations.
When the Battalion went up, as usual, on the 15th February to relieve
the 2nd Grenadiers in the trenches a little north of Rancourt and
opposite St. Pierre Vaast Wood, their casualties for the four days
were but three killed and five wounded. “Practically no sniping and
very occasional shelling.” They treated it lightly enough, for it was
here that the sentry told the conscientious officer who had heard a
shell drop near the trench: “Ah, it fell quite convenient here”--a
jerk of his thumb over his shoulder, and as an afterthought--“’Twas a
dud, though.” The ground was still hard, and, to the men’s joy, they
could not dig.
Captain R. J. P. Rodakowski arrived from the base on the 18th of the
month. The thaw caught them in camp at Maurepas, just as the enemy’s
withdrawal got under way, and their turn in trenches from the 23rd to
26th February was marked by barrages let down on them of evenings,
presumably to discourage curiosity. So they were ordered at short
notice to send out a couple of officer’s patrols from their left
and right companies to reconnoitre generally, and see if the enemy
were falling back. The first patrol, under 2nd Lieutenant Shears, an
N.C.O., three bombers, and three “bayonet-men,” spent a couple of
hours among the wire, were bombed but returned unhurt. The second,
also of seven men, under Lieutenant Browne, were seen by the enemy,
headed back to our lines, but made a fresh outfall, which carried
them to the wire where, “finding a weak spot, they cut their way
through it” and won within a few yards of the enemy’s parapet when
they were bombed. They used up their own supplies and came back with
a good report, and four men and Lieutenant Browne wounded. On their
information a raid was arranged for the next day to take over a
couple of hundred yards of the enemy’s trench, but it was cancelled
pending developments elsewhere. They lost two killed and thirteen
men and one officer wounded in this tour, and went back to routine
and “specialist” training in a camp near Billon on the last day of
February.
Their domestic items for the next fortnight, which, like the rest
of March, was cold and stormy, run as follows: 2nd Lieutenant A. L.
Bain went to the Fourteenth Corps School for a fortnight at Méaulte,
which, in that weather, was no special treat; and Lieutenant E.
H. Shears to Headquarters Lewis Gun School at Le Touquet, a much
superior place. Lieut.-Colonel R. C. A. McCalmont left on the 3rd
March to take over command of the 3rd Infantry Brigade just south of
the Somme, and had a tremendous send-off from the Battalion. He was
succeeded in the command by Major the Hon. H. R. Alexander, D.S.O.,
M.C., and Major G. E. S. Young came over from the 2nd Battalion
as second in command--as it proved for all too brief a time. The
specialist training continued, and “open warfare” was practised
by companies. There was an irreverent camp-jest just then that
whenever the enemy abandoned one quarter of a mile of trench, the
five nearest British army corps forsook every other game to practise
“open warfare.” The Battalion learned also attacks on triple lines of
trenches, the creeping barrage being personified by their drums and
those of the 2nd Coldstream. In this sort of work, men say, there is
a tendency to lean a little too heavily on such a barrage, which had
to be checked by taking the offender’s name. (“So, ye’ll understand,
ye catch it, both ways; for if ye purshue the live barrage ye’ll
likely to be killed; an’ if you purshue a dhrummy barrage too close,
your name’s in the book. That’s War!”)
THE SOMME ADVANCE
By the middle of March the German line was giving all along; and
when the Battalion moved up into Brigade Reserve on the 12th, they
understood an advance was close at hand. Their allotted and sketchy
stretch of trench, which they took over from the 4th Grenadiers (on
the 13th March), was at Sailly-Saillisel, of evil associations,
and on the 14th, on information received after patrolling under
Lieutenant E. Budd and Lieutenant Bagenal, the German front line
ahead was reported clear and at once occupied. Then they were
committed to a muddle of German works in the direction of Le
Mesnil-en-Arrouaise, which were named after the Idols of the Tribes.
There was nothing to see or to steer by except devastated earth,
mud, wire, scraps of sand-bags, heaped rubbish and carcases. The
whole line went forward on the 15th, the 1st Battalion Irish Guards
in touch by patrol with their 2nd Battalion on their right and on
the left with the 2nd Coldstream. No one knew exactly what was in
the enemy’s mind, or how far his retirement was extending, but an
hour after the Battalion had started they came under long-range
machine-gun and heavy artillery fire while they were consolidating
“Bayreuth” trench. Major G. E. S. Young was so badly wounded this
day by a shell, which came through a company headquarter’s dug-out
he was visiting, that he died in a hospital a fortnight later and
was buried at Grovetown cemetery, and Lieutenant Walter Mumford,
M.C., was slightly wounded in the leg. The next trench, “Gotha,”
was also under gun-fire. They simply moved forward, it seemed, into
registered areas, where they were held up, as by a hose of high
explosives, till the enemy had completed his local arrangements.
Then his artillery on that sector would withdraw across clean, hard
country; some long-range machine-gun or sniping work might continue
for a while; and then all would be silent, with the sudden curious
silences of the Somme, till the next step forward was made on our
side and dealt with as above. Thus the Battalion worked through the
emptied German trenches and dug-outs, and on the 20th March held
a line from Le Mesnil-en-Arrouaise to Manancourt on the Tortille
River. The German retreat was as orderly as an ebb-tide. In the
north, Bapaume had been taken on the 17th March by the First and
Second Australian Division, and Péronne was occupied on the 18th by
the Forty-eighth Division. Beyond Bapaume our troops entered the
third and last--Beugny-Ytres--line of German trench and wire-work
that lay between them and the Hindenburg defences four or five miles
behind it across open country. From Péronne southward to close upon
Germaine, where we were in touch with the French, our advance-parties
had crossed the Somme and spread themselves, as far as the state of
the ground allowed, in--it could hardly be called pursuit so much as
a heavy-footed following-up of the enemy, and making our own roads
and tracks as we moved. We found everything usable thoughtfully
destroyed, and had to reconstruct it from the beginnings, ere any
further pressure could be exercised.
The German front before Arras was unaffected by their withdrawal,
and here preparations of every conceivable sort were being piled up
against the approaching battle of the Ancre where from Croisilles
to Vimy Ridge our Third and First Armies broke through on a front
of fifteen miles on April 9, and after a week’s desperate fighting,
hampered as usual by the weather, carried that front four miles
farther eastward, captured 13,000 prisoners and 200 guns; and,
through the next month, fought their road up and into the northern
end of the Hindenburg Line near Bullecourt whose name belongs to
Australia.
On the 23rd of March the Battalion was taken out of its
unmolested German trenches and marched to Combles, where it was
used in road-making between Frégicourt, Bullet Cross-roads and
Sailly-Saillisel, till the 5th of April. There was just one day
in that stretch without rain, hail or snow, and when they were
not road-making they buried dead and collected salvage and were
complimented by the commanding officer of engineers on their good
work. As the men said: “It was great days for the Engineers--bad luck
to ’em--but it kept us warm.”
Their total losses for March had been one officer, Major G. E. S.
Young, killed and one, Lieutenant Walter Mumford, M.C., slightly
wounded; fourteen other ranks killed and forty wounded--fifty-six
in all or less than 10 per cent. of the Battalion’s strength at the
time. Second Lieutenant H. V. Fanshawe joined on the 30th March.
On the 6th April they changed over to railway construction on the
broad-gauge track between Morval and Rocquigny. The men camped at
one end of Le Transloy village and Battalion Headquarters in the
only house (much damaged) that still stood up. Here they stayed and
slaved for a week, in hail and snow and heavy frosts at night; and
were practically reclothed as their uniforms were not in the best
of condition. (“Ye could not have told us from--from anything or
anybody ye were likely to meet in those parts, ye’ll understand.
But--one comfort--we was all alike--officers an’ all.”) A village
that has not been too totally wrecked is a convenient dump to draw
up. The men “improved” their camp and floored their tents out of
material at hand, and were rewarded by finding usable German stores
among the ruins. One sees how their morale held up, in spite of
dirt, iron-rust and foul weather, from the fact that they went
out of their way to construct--even as they had done at Ypres--“a
magnificent Irish Guards Star of glass and stones all surrounded by
a low box-hedge.” Nor was it forgotten that they were soldiers; and,
in spite of the railway-work, and the demands of the Sappers, some
of the “specialists” and occasionally a company could be trained at
Le Transloy. Even training is preferable to “fatigues,” and on the
15th of April they were taken in hand in good earnest. They marched
twelve miles in pouring rain to a camp at Bronfay where “a very
strict course of platoon training for all ranks was undertaken.” It
began with twenty minutes’ walking or running (in the usual rain or
snow) before breakfast at 7.30, and it continued with a half-hour’s
break till half-past twelve. “Even after three days there was an
appreciable improvement in drill and smartness,” says the Diary, and
when their Brigadier inspected them on the 22nd April he was pleased
to compliment. Of afternoons, every one seemed to lecture to every
one else according to their seniority; the Brigadier on “Outposts”;
the commanding officer--Major R. Baggallay--on “Advance and Rear
Guards,” the officers to the platoon-sergeants on every detail of
life-saving or taking, and when their own resources failed, the C.O.
of the 2nd Coldstream lectured all officers and sergeants of the
1st Brigade on “the attack in open warfare.” It was a very thorough
shaking-up--foot and transport--from the “specialists” to the cook’s
mate; and it culminated in No. 5 Platoon (Lieutenant E. Budd) being
chosen to represent the Battalion at the Brigade Platoon competition
in Drill, Arms Drill, Musketry, Bayonet-fighting and a tactical
exercise. The 2nd Grenadiers platoon won, but No. 5 justified itself
by taking a very close second place. Survivors, who remember, assert
that the platoons of those days were in knowledge, strength, and
virtue immeasurably above all known standards of fighting men. (“And
in the long run, d’ye see, they went with the rest. All gone! Maybe
there’ll be one or two of ’em left--policemen or tram-conductors an’
such like; but in their day an’ time, ye’ll understand, there was
nothing could equal them.”)
The lighter side of life was supplied by the 3rd Coldstream’s
historic and unparalleled “Pantomime,” which ran its ribald and
immensely clever course for ten consecutive nights when the cars of
the Staff might be seen parked outside the theatre precisely as in
the West End.
On the 1st May they resumed work on the Etricourt-Fins railroad and
made camp among the ruins of the village for the next three weeks
in fine hot weather. The officers and N.C.O.’s were exercised
freely at map-reading (which on the Somme required high powers of
imagination), sketching reports and compass-work and occasionally
officers and N.C.O.’s made up a platoon and worked out small tactical
exercises--such as the rush-in and downing of a suddenly raised
machine-gun after a barrage had lifted. The men were kept to the
needs of railway and transport, but it was an easy life in warm,
grassy Etricourt after months of mud and torn dirt. A swimming bath
was dug for them; there were wild flowers to be gathered, and an
orchard in blossom to show that the world still lived naturally,
and their work was close to their parade-grounds. Men spoke
affectionately of Etricourt where shell-holes were so few that they
could count them.
A home-draft had brought the Battalion six pipers who on the 4th of
May “played at Retreat for the first time,” and thereafter followed
the Battalion’s fortunes. As everybody knows, Irish pipes have one
drone less than the Scottish, but it is not commonly understood that
the piper in his close-fitting saffron kilt plays them almost without
any movement of the body--a point of difference that has puzzled very
many Scots regiments. That immobility, as the Pipe Major observed on
an historic occasion, is “one of the secrets of the regiment.”
On the 20th of May they marched--not without some discomfort from an
artillery brigade which was trying to use the same road at the same
time--from Etricourt to Curlu on the Somme, where they were once
more billeted in houses. Here, after so many weeks of making their
own camps to their own minds, they were introduced to other people’s
housekeeping, and found the whole village “left in a filthy condition
by previous troops.” So they cleaned it up and trained and learned
from the Divisional Gas Officer of Transport how gas-helmets should
be adjusted on horses--to which some of the scared beasts hotly
objected; and they bathed by companies in the warm Somme, making
a picnic of it, while the long-drawn battle of the Ancre in the
north died down to mere bloody day-and-night war among the villages
covering the Hindenburg Line and its spurs. The talk in the camps
turned on great doings--everything connected with the front-line
was “doings”--against Messines Ridge that looks over the flat
shell-bitten Salient where there is more compulsory trench-bathing
than any man wants. It had commanded too much of that country for
too long. At its highest point, where Wytschaete village had once
stood, it overlooked Ypres and the British positions around, and was
a menace over desolate Plugstreet far towards Armentières. Rumour
ran that arrangements had been made to shift it bodily off the face
of the earth; that populations of miners had burrowed there through
months, for miles; that all underground was riddled with workings
where men fought in the dark, up and down tunnels that caved, round
the sharp turns of boarded and bagged galleries, and on the lips of
black shafts that dropped one into forty-foot graves. Yet, even were
Messines Ridge wiped out, the enemy had large choices of commanding
positions practically all round the Salient, and it seemed likely,
by what news sifted into their area, that the Guards might be called
upon before long to help in further big doings, Ypres way--perhaps a
“break-through” towards Lille.
THE SALIENT AND BOESINGHE