first. Now that we had men, guns, and material, it looked as if it
might be staunched at last. A battalion does not think beyond its
immediate interests--even officers are discouraged from trying to run
the war by themselves--but it did not need to be told that it had not
been fattened up the last few weeks for Headquarters’ pleasure in its
appearance. Men know when they are “for it,” and if they forget, are
reminded from the doors of crowded estaminets and canteens, or from
the tail-boards of loaded lorries as their comrades fleet by in the
dusk. They were not surprised when orders came for a shift.
On the evening of the 30th May they were taken by train from their
camp, _via_ Amiens, Abbeville, and Boulogne and St. Omer to Cassel
in thirteen or fourteen hours, and from Cassel marched back along
the well-known pavé nearly to St. Omer again and billeted between La
Crosse and the dingy wide railway-crossing at Fort Rouge. All the
country round was busy raising crops; every old man, woman, and child
working as long as light lasted. Their only available training-ground
was the Forest of Clairmarais, with its two characteristic wooded
hills that stand up behind St. Omer. Here they were taught
“wood-fighting” in addition to other specialties, and the mess
found time to give a dinner of honour to a friendly Field-Ambulance
(Irish in the main) to whom they had, on various occasions, owed
much. Scandal asserts that the guests departed, in the dawn, on
their own stretchers. Here, too, on the 6th June they entered for
the Brigade horse-show and won first prize for the best turned out
limber-and-pair, and seconds for water-cart and cooker-and-pair--no
small thing when one considers what is the standard of excellence in
Brigade transport.
On the next day (June 7), the nineteen mines of Messines went up
together in the dawn. The three army corps (Second Anzac and Ninth
and Tenth Corps) loosed behind them, broke forward over Messines and
Wytschaete, and the whole German line from Armagh Wood to Plugstreet
was wrenched backwards from a mile to two miles all along. Messines
was a singularly complete and satisfactory affair, including some
seven thousand prisoners and, better still, a multitude of dead,
killed off in counter-attacks. It opened the road for the Third
Battle of Ypres which was to win more breathing-space round the wreck
of the city. Unlike Arras, where there was almost unlimited space
for assembly in subterranean caves and cellars, every preparation
in the Salient had to be carried out under the enemy’s eyes on
known and registered ground lacking shelter above or below. Thus
the attack, which was to cover a front of fifteen miles, demanded
as much effort and pre-arrangement as any operation that had till
then been undertaken in the whole course of the war. Those were made
and carried through among, and in spite of, the daily demands of
continuous local operations, with the same thoroughness and fixedness
of purpose as when the Brigade competed for its little prizes and
trophies at Renescure horse-show.
On the 12th June the Battalion marched thirteen miles for musketry to
Moringhem in the bare, high down-country behind Acquin, where two men
collapsed with heat-stroke. A century ago the drill-book laid down
that unaimed battalion-fire from “Brown Bess” should never be opened
at over four hundred yards. They practised slow and rapid firing with
fixed bayonets at two and three hundred; company sharp-shooters using
figures at the same range.
On the 16th June the first drawing in towards the Salient began.
They camped that night at Ouderzeele north of Cassel, after such
heat as made several of the men fall out by the way, and on the 17th
bivouacked in sheds and shelters in the woods south-east of Proven
on the Poperinghe road, where the cultivation, all unaffected by the
war half a dozen miles off, was as thick as ever, and, except for
“specialist” training in the woods, it was difficult to find the men
work. The men bore this quite calmly.
As a sign of the times Lieutenant H. Hickie, who had been on leave,
arrived and “again took over his duties as Quartermaster” on the
20th June. Lieutenant J. H. Nash left on the same date for the Army
Central School, and on the 22nd Captain R. Rodakowski and Lieutenant
W. Joyce were detailed for courses of instruction at Le Touquet Lewis
Gun School.
On the 23rd June, Major-General Sir A. J. Godley, commanding the
Second Anzac Corps, came over on a visit to the Battalion and
inspected the men, and day by day the pieces required for the next
move on the chessboard of war were pushed into their places along
the Salient. The Fifth Army--of four corps and some divisions--under
General Gough was to take the weight of the affair between Klein
Zillebeeke and Boesinghe, while the First French Army--First and
Fifty-first Divisions--would relieve the Belgians from Boesinghe to
Noordschoote and extend the line along the Yser Canal north of Ypres
to Steenstraate. The Guards Division was to lie next them on the
extreme left of our line at Boesinghe.
On the 25th June, the Battalion moved from Proven into the edge
of the battle-area near Woesten, a couple of miles or so behind
Boesinghe itself, and came under the fire of a long-range German
naval gun which merely cut up the fields round them. Both sides were
now hard at work in the air, trying to put out each other’s eyes;
and a German aeroplane brought down one of our observation-balloons
hideously alight, close to Woesten camp. All the Salient hummed
with opposing aircraft, the bombing of back-areas was cruel and
continuous, and men had no rest from strain. But our batteries,
profiting by the help of our machines, hammered the enemy line as
it had not been hammered there since war began. Oil-drums, gas and
thermite shells were added to the regular allowances sent over, and,
whenever chance offered, raiding-parties dove in and out of the front
lines sharking prisoners for identification. The Battalion’s share
in this work was the usual fatigue--“unloading trucks” and the like,
beneath intermittent artillery-fire which, on the 29th June, ended in
three direct hits on the farm-house (Roussel farm) near Elverdinghe,
where they lay. One man was killed outright and three others wounded.
Their regular routine-work of death had begun again.
On the 1st of July they went into line on the Boesinghe sector,
relieving the 2nd Coldstream on the west or near sector of the Yser
Canal. Their trenches were of the usual built-up, sand-bagged type.
Headquarters were at Bleuet farm, well under fire of all kinds,
and though they managed their relief at night with little shelling,
early next morning, Lieutenant E. Shears was killed by shell. It
was a bad sector in every way, for not only did the Battalion link
on here to the Belgian army--later relieved by the French--on their
left, and any point of junction of Allied forces is always severely
dealt with, but the enemy were kept in tension by constant raids,
or the fear of them, all along the line. This meant that their SOS
signals went up on the least provocation and their barrages followed
with nervous punctuality. Added to this, fatigue-work was very heavy,
not only in repairs but in supply; and the necessary exposure of the
carrying-parties led to constant casualties.
On the 5th July, for instance, at two in the morning, gas shells
fired from projectors (the Germans were searching the line in earnest
that night) fell on a working-party of No. 4 Company. Nineteen men
were at once prostrated, of whom one died then and there, and two a
few days later; while Lieutenant Bagenal was slightly affected. (It
is difficult, especially in the dark, to keep working-parties, who
have to work against time, inside their gas-masks.) They were shelled
for the rest of the day with no further casualties.
On the 6th July Major Hon. H. R. Alexander, leaving for England to
attend the officers’ course at Aldershot, Captain R. R. C. Baggallay
took over the command, and on the 8th July they were relieved by
the 3rd Coldstream and bivouacked at Cardoen farm, where they spent
two days nominally resting--that is to say, supplying one hundred
and ten men each night for the detestable work of carrying-parties
to the front line. Lieut.-Colonel Rocke, D.S.O., commanding since
May 24, returned from leave on July 8, but unluckily on the 11th,
when the Battalion was in line, in the wreck of Boesinghe Village
(Headquarters at Boesinghe Château), slipped and broke his shoulder
while going round the trenches, and Captain Baggallay again took
over command. There was steady well-ranged shelling all that day,
particularly on Boesinghe Château, in the rear of which the aid-post
and headquarters of No. 1 Company lay. Battalion Headquarters were
shelled for half an hour separately. No. 3 Company’s Headquarters
in the support-line were wrecked by direct hits, and the entire
company shelled out, while the whole of the back lines were worked
over, up and down. All repairs had to be built up with sand-bags, for
the ground was too marshy to give useful dirt, and the labour was
unending.
On the 12th July they were shelled more heavily than the previous two
days on exactly the same places, and their transport, which till now
had had reasonable luck, was caught fetching up water and rations.
The four company quartermaster-sergeants and the mess-sergeant were
wounded, a horse and groom killed, and, later on, the transport
officer was slightly gassed. (“’Tis the Transport, ye’ll understand,
that has to take all Jerry’s back-chat after dhark, an’ no chance of
replyin’.”) By night they found carrying-parties to fill dumps--five
of them--each dump seeming to those serving it more exposed and
undesirable than the other four put together.
On the 14th of July there was a German raid, preceded by an hour’s
“box” barrage of trench-mortars, .77’s, and machine-guns, on two
platoons of No. 4 Company then in the front line behind the canal.
A shrapnel-barrage fell also on the supports. A “box” barrage is a
square horror of descending fire cutting off all help, and ranks high
among demoralising experiences. Luckily, the line was lightly held,
and the men had more or less of cover in dug-outs and tunnels in the
canal bank. A Lewis-gun post in a covered emplacement, almost on
the bed of the canal itself, was first aware, through the infernal
racket, of Germans crossing the canal, and fired at them straight
down the line of its bed. They broke and disappeared in the rank
weed-growth, but there was another rush over the parapet of the line
between two sentry groups in the firing-bays. The trenches were alive
by then with scattered parties stumbling through the black dark,
and mistaking each other for friends or enemies, and the ruin of
the works added to the confusion. As far as can be made out, one
officer, Lieutenant H. J. B. Eyre, coming along what was left of a
trench, ran literally into a party of the enemy. His steel helmet and
revolver, all chambers fired, were found afterwards near the wreck of
a firing-bay, but there was no other trace. It was learned later that
he had been mortally wounded and died that evening. In trench-raids,
when life, death, or capture often turn on a step to the left or the
right, the marvel was that such accidents were not more frequent.
A wounded German was captured. He had no marks of identification,
but said he belonged to a Schleswig regiment, and that the strength
of the raid was intended to be two hundred. It did not, as the
men said, “feel” anything like so many, though the wild lights of
explosion that lit the scene showed large enemy parties waiting
either in the bed of the canal or on the opposite bank. These, too,
vanished into the dark after their comrades in the trenches had been
turned out. Probably, it was but an identification fray backed by a
far-reaching artillery “hate” that troubled all the back-areas even
up to Elverdinghe.
Our front-line casualties in the affair were but one officer and one
man missing and one wounded. Yet the barrage blew the men about like
withered leaves, covered them with mud, plastered them with bits of
sand-bags, and gapped, as it seemed, fathoms of trench at a stroke,
while enemy machine-guns scissored back and forth over each gap. The
companies in the support-line who watched the affair and expected
very few to come out of it alive, suffered much more severely from
the shrapnel-barrage which fell to their share.
It was their last tour in the trenches for ten days, and it closed
with heavy barrages on the front and back lines, while they were
being relieved by the 1st Coldstream. This continued till our
guns were asked to reply, and after ten minutes made them cease.
The Battalion left the trenches in a steady downpour of wet and
entrained from Elverdinghe for Proven, whence they moved into the
training-area at Herzeele, where a representation of the ground to
be attacked on the day of battle, with its trenches and farms, was
marked out, and had to be studied by company commanders, N.C.O.’s,
and men according to their rank and responsibility. The officers’
mess at Herzeele was in the quaint old three-storied tower, built
when the Spaniards held rule in the Low Countries.
From the 16th to the 23rd July their mornings were spent at every
sort of drill--smoke-helmet drill, musketry, wiring, Lewis-gun, etc.,
and their afternoons in going over the training-ground and practising
attacks. All that time the weather was perfect. As soon as they moved
away to Proven and into the battle-area on July 25 heavy rain began,
which, as on the Somme, where the devil duly looked after his own,
was destined to baulk and cripple the battle. For an introduction to
their next month’s work, the Battalion, roused at 2 A. M. on that
day by gas-alarms from the front, provided over five hundred men for
working-parties to get stuff into the front line; lost ten men killed
by shell-fire and one officer, Lieutenant H. H. Maxwell (who had come
unscathed through the raid of the 14th), and seven men wounded; and
next evening moved to their own place, a distance of two and a half
miles, with two hundred yard intervals between the platoons, under
casual shell-fire.
They camped (July 27) in support near Bleuet farm, and, that evening,
had word that our aeroplanes reported no Germans could be seen in
the German front-line system, and that the 3rd Coldstream had sent
patrols forward who were already established across the canal. As a
matter of fact, the enemy was holding his front line in chains of
single posts, preferring rather to fight for it than in it; and was
relying on his carefully hidden ferro-concrete block-houses--later
known as “pill-boxes”--which, as he had arranged them in the torn
and marshy landscape, and along the line of the Ypres-Staden
rail, could hold up and dissipate any average infantry attack.
They were impervious to anything except direct hits of big stuff.
Their weakness was the small size of the slit through which their
machine-guns operated, and a certain clumsiness in the arrangement
of the gun itself, which made it difficult to depress. Consequently,
cool heads could crawl up and under, and rush the thing at close
quarters.
Whether the enemy believed there would be no serious attack at the
junction of the French and British arms in the Boesinghe sector, or
whether he drew his men out of the front line to give room for his
barrages, may never be known. It is certain, however, that he left
his front line immediately facing the Guards Division empty, and that
miscalculation enabled the Guards to launch their attack without
having first to fight their way across the canal. The Coldstream had
possessed themselves promptly of the evacuated trenches, and there
stayed for some time before the enemy realised what had happened,
sent aeroplanes to locate the raiders, and tried--without success--to
shell them back again. It was a quick, well-thought-out coup that
saved very many good lives.
On the 28th July the Battalion, after various contradictory orders,
was sent forward in the evening to relieve the left of the 3rd
Coldstream in the outpost-line. There was a report that the enemy
meditated an attack on that Battalion at their junction with the
Thirty-eighth Division on their right. (It must be remembered that
the French, who had had some difficulty in getting their guns
forward, were not in place, and their First Division lay on the left
of the Guards.) Up, then, went the Battalion in the evening and
took over the outpost-line from Douteuse House, to where it joined
the French forces. Two platoons of No. 2 Company, under Captain R.
Rodakowski, crossed the canal in the mud on improvised bridges of
slabs of wood nailed across rabbit-wire and canvas, and lay up in
an old German front line. The other two platoons occupied the old
British front line on the canal bank. Battalion Headquarters and
aid-post were at the Château, as usual. No. 1 Company (Captain W.
C. Mumford, M.C.) in support, and No. 4 Company (Captain Law, M.C.)
had a couple of platoons forward and two back. They were all shelled
equally through that night with gas and lachrymal shells, _plus_
barrages on headquarters and the various lines of support. The gas
was responsible for six casualties, chiefly among signallers and
orderlies, whose work kept them on the move. Nothing could be done to
strengthen the newly occupied trenches, as there was no wire on the
spot; for the R.E. parties, trying to bring it up, were pinned till
daylight by back-barrages.
On the 29th July a patrol was sent out to look at a concrete
blockhouse which our artillery reported they were unable to destroy
with the guns that were in use at the moment. The patrol drew fire
from the blockhouse, went on into the dark, and found that the
enemy’s line behind it was held by small posts only. Returning, it
would seem that they were fired at again, an N.C.O. and a man being
wounded, but they wounded and captured a prisoner, who said that
the post held twenty men. Whereupon that blockhouse was “kept under
observation” by small parties of our men, under Lieutenant Budd, M.C.
Next morning they observed five or six of the enemy lying out in
shell-holes round the blockhouse, which was too small for the whole
of its garrison. This overflow was all sniped in due course, till
the blockhouse, with fourteen unwounded prisoners, surrendered, was
absorbed into our outpost-line, and held against the enemy’s fire.
Considering that fire at the time--which included 5.9’s, 4.2’s, and
.77’s--it was a neatly expeditious affair. The Battalion was relieved
by the 1st Grenadiers and the Welsh, and went back to camp in the
Forest area to spend the 30th July preparing themselves and their
souls for the morrow’s work.
The Guards Division lay, as we know, between the First French
Division on its left and our Thirty-eighth Division on its right;
the line of the Ypres-Staden railway with its blockhouses marking
the limit between the two British divisions. This was an awkward
junction, which caused trouble later. Four objectives were laid
down. The first was the nearest German system of trenches, which had
lain under searching artillery-fire for some time, and would not be
difficult; the second, six hundred yards farther on, ran parallel to
the Pilckem road; the third an imaginary line a hundred yards beyond
the well-known Iron Cross Kortikaar-Cabaret road, beyond Pilckem
Ridge, and the last went up to the Steenbeek River. The total depth
of the run was about two miles from the canal bank.
The 2nd (Ponsonby’s) and the 3rd (Seymour’s) Brigades were to take
the first three objectives, after which the 1st (Jeffreys’s Brigade),
following close behind, was to come through and take the fourth.
The 2nd Brigade, which was on the right of the division, held
the front from the Ypres-Staden railway-bridge over the canal to
Boesinghe Bridge. The 3rd Brigade continued the line to the left for
six hundred yards. The 1st Brigade, less the 1st Irish and the 3rd
Coldstream, which were under the direct orders of General Feilding,
G.O.C. Guards Division, was in reserve.
Our barrages, conceived on a most generous scale, were timed to creep
at a hundred yards in four minutes. They were put down at 3.50 A. M.,
July 31, a dark, misty morning on the edge of rain, and the whole
attack went forward with satisfying precision so far as the Guards
Division was concerned. The various objectives were reached at the
given times, and level with the French advance. By eleven o’clock the
farthest was in our hands, and what difficulties there were arose
from the division on the Guards’ right being held up among unreduced
blockhouses enfilading them from the railway line.
Meantime, the 1st Battalion Irish Guards spent the day, after
breakfast at a quarter-past five, in reserve round the little
two-roomed, sand-bagged and concreted Chasseur farm, where there
was an apple-tree with all its leaves on; under half an hour’s
notice to move up if required. But no order came. They were shelled
intermittently all day, with a few casualties, and Captain F. S. Law
was slightly wounded. The evening, as pessimists prophesied, closed
in heavy rain, and the ground began to go. They stayed where they
were till the afternoon of the 1st August, when word came to take
over the line held by the 3rd Grenadiers and the 1st Coldstream on
the first, second, and third objectives.
They moved out in rain into the usual wilderness of shell-holes
filling with water, but for the moment were not shelled. No.
4 Company went by daylight to its positions on the first
objective--Cariboo Wood and some half-wiped-out German trench-systems
in a partly destroyed wood. The other companies waited till dusk
before distributing themselves on the Green line--the third
objective--which was about a thousand yards this side the Steenbeek
River. While the move was in progress, a brigade of the Thirty-eighth
Division reported that they had been shelled out of their advanced
positions on the river and were falling back, which, as far as
could be seen, would leave the right flank of the Guards Division
in the air. If this were so, and the dusk and the rain made it
difficult to judge, it was imperative to put everything else aside
and form a defensive flank along the railway line that separated
the two divisions. The companies were diverted accordingly, hastily
re-directed in the dark, and, when all was done, the brigade that had
made the trouble went back to its original position on the further
objective. There was small choice of sleeping-places that night.
Such German blockhouses as came handiest were used for battalion
and company headquarters while the companies lay out in the wet and
talked about the prospect of hot meals. They were not very severely
shelled, but when August 2 broke in heavy rain and the brigade on
their right continued to send up SOS’s at intervals, thereby obliging
them to maintain their flank on the railway line, they felt that
“conditions were becoming exceedingly trying,” as the Diary says.
Then came a relief, which was at least a change. The 1st Scots
Guards relieved the two platoons of No. 4 Company back in Cariboo
trenches, where the shelling was light; and later, as darkness fell,
set the other companies free to go forward and relieve the 2nd
Grenadiers at the front of things. The change-over took five hours,
and in the middle of it the brigade on their right once more sent up
SOS’s, which brought down a German barrage, and necessitated every
one “standing to” for developments. It proved a false alarm, and “no
action was taken by the enemy”--an omission which it is conceivable
the Guards Division rather regretted. Beyond question that Brigade
had been badly held up among the blockhouses, and had been savagely
shelled in and out of shell-holes that bewilder troops; but--till
their own trouble comes--no troops go out of their way to make
excuses for a nightmare of SOS’s. (“There’s enough fatigues, ye’ll
understand, when you’re _out_ o’ the line. Extra fatigues in action,
like defensive flanks, is outrageous.”)