of the 2nd August, and on the evening of the 3rd, still in ceaseless
rain, were relieved by the 1st Scots Guards and marched through
mud, water and darkness, over broken ground “beyond description” to
Elverdinghe Siding, where they were packed into trucks at five in the
morning and taken to Poll Hill Camp near Bandaghem for training.
Their casualties, all things reckoned, had been very light. They had
gone into action on the 31st July with 26 officers and 1002 other
ranks and had lost only 2 officers and 125 other ranks from all
causes.
The total casualties for the twelve battalions of the Guards Division
in the action had been 59 officers and 1876 men in two days; and rain
falling without a break for the next four days drowned out the sad
fight. The enemy’s line had been pushed back from Bixschoote, through
Frezenberg, Westhoek, Stirling Castle, and Shrewsbury Forest down
to Hollebeke. At that stage our armies, as had happened so often
on the Somme, were immobilised. The clay ground was cullendered and
punched by the shells into chains of pools and ponds. All valleys
and hollows turned into bogs where, if men wandered from the regular
tracks across them, they drowned or were mired to death. If they
stayed on the plankings the enemy’s guns swept them away. When all
had been done that man could do, the first phase of the Third Battle
of Ypres closed in a strengthened conviction that all the powers of
evil were in strict alliance with Germany. Our armies held off seven
counter-attacks along the line, settled themselves in it and then,
perforce, waited for the weather to clear.
It rained on and off till the 15th August, and, as most of the corn
in the fields round Poll Hill Camp had, owing to the wet, not been
cut, training-ground was limited just at the very time when the new
German system of holding a line with a chain of carefully camouflaged
posts called for a change in attack methods. So the Battalion was
practised in “surprise situations”--_i.e._ discovering invisible
enemies with machine-guns in shell-holes that turned the advancing
line into a ragged scattering “scrum.” Their dummy barrages were
slowed, too, as the Diary says, “to enable the surprise situations
to be dealt with and to give time for the line to re-form behind
the barrage after having dealt with these situations.” This was a
kind of work for which, like bombing, the Irish had considerable
natural aptitudes. It was summed up, unofficially, thus: “In the
ould days, a trench was a trench, ye’ll understand, an’ something
to lay hould upon. Third Ypres was failin’ into nothin’ and then
findin’ ’twas two pill-boxes an’ a fort on your flank.” Therefore,
the specialists in the shape of the Lewis-gunner and the “mopper-up”
who dealt with the débris of attacks were important persons and were
instructed accordingly when the Battalion was not indented upon for
working-parties on the gun-tracks and bridges round Boesinghe.
THIRD YPRES AND THE BROEMBEEK
On August 1 Lieutenant the Hon. P. J. Ogilvy joined the Battalion and
took over No. 1 Company from Acting Captain W. C. Mumford, who had
been appointed Town Major of the busy and occasionally battered town
of Elverdinghe; and Lieutenant E. Budd took over the 4th Company from
Acting Captain H. F. d’A. S. Law, wounded.
On the 15th August, the eve of the Langemarck attack, they were
put on one hour’s notice, which was withdrawn the next day, when
six divisions (the Forty-eighth, Eleventh, Fifty-sixth, Eighth,
Twentieth and Twenty-ninth) struck again along the line from the
Menin road to our junction with the French in the north. The weather
once more blinded our aeroplanes so that our artillery could not
deal effectively with the counter-attacks; the pill-boxes held up
our infantry, and though prisoners, guns, and a little ground round
Langemarck were gained, the line of the Salient from St. Julien
southwards stood as it had since the first. The Battalion was
peacefully at bomb-practice on that day, and by some oversight a live
bomb got mixed up with the dummies, and caused thirteen casualties,
luckily none of them very serious, and the training went forward. As
the crops were cut ground was gradually extended and every one was
worked hard at practice attacks; for they understood that their lot
would be cast in the Salient for some time.
On the 27th August medal ribbons were presented by the General of
the 1st Brigade to those who had won honour in the Boesinghe battle,
either by their cool-headedness in dealing with “surprise situations”
or sheer valour in the face of death or self-devotion to a comrade;
for there was every form of bravery to choose from. Lieutenant E.
Budd received the bar to his Military Cross, and Sergeant (a/C.S.M.)
P. Donohoe (No. 3056), No. 1910 Sergeant (a/C.S.M.) F. M’Cusker, No.
3224 Corporal E. M’Cullagh, No. 4278 Lance-Corporal J. Vanston, No.
7520 Private S. Nulty, No. 5279 Private J. Rochford (bar to Military
Medal), No. 10171 Lance-Corporal S. McHale, Military Medal; No. 10161
Lance-Corporal W. Cooper, D.C.M.
The following N.C.O.’s and men were unable to be present on parade,
but were awarded honours during the past month. No. 4512 Sergeant J.
Balfe, No. 3146 Lance-Corporal F. Coyne, No. 4386 Sergeant Macdonald,
No. 6078 Private J. Martin, Military Medal; No. 4884 Private D.
O’Brien, Croix de Guerre.
On the last days of August they marched to Proven Siding and
entrained for Elverdinghe and thence to Dulwich Camp, well known as
being “somewhat exposed and liable to long-range shell-fire.” They
were used at once by the greedy R.E.’s for burying cables and making
artillery-tracks preparatory to the next move in the interminable
Third Battle of Ypres.
From the 1st to the 4th September they, with the 1st Guards Brigade,
were in support to the 3rd Guards Brigade which was in the line,
and sent up about half their strength for carrying-parties every
night. The line, swampy and overlooked by the high ground under
Houthulst Forest to the north and north-east, consisted of posts in
shell-holes--the shell-holes being improved only just sufficiently
to make them “habitable.” The standard of comfort in the Salient
at that time was lower than on the Somme, where men were dying,
at least, dry. All posts were elaborately concealed from overhead
observation, for the enemy aeroplanes roved over them, bombing and
machine-gunning at large. Though the Battalion was lucky in its four
days’ turn, it lost on the night of the 4th September 2nd Lieutenant
G. P. Boyd and four men killed and twenty-three wounded. Some of the
other battalions in support suffered severely from bombing raids, and
all back-areas were regularly raked over so that the troops might be
worried by loss of sleep.
From the 5th to the 8th they lay in Rugby Camp, in reserve to the
2nd Coldstream and 2nd Grenadiers of their own Brigade in the front
line. Here they enjoyed a “fairly quiet time,” and had only to find
a hundred men or so per night for forward-area work. Rugby, Dulwich
and the other camps were all duly and regularly bombed, shelled and
gassed, but that was accepted as part of the daily and nightly work.
On the 9th they were up at the front among the “just sufficiently
habitable shell-holes” of the Green line beyond the Iron Cross
Kortikaar-Cabaret road from the Ypres-Staden railway to the junction
with the French. Their guides met them at Bois farm, fifteen hundred
yards back, and since, once among the holes, all food sent up risked
the life or mutilation of a man, they carried two days’ rations and
picked up their water from a Decauville railway that ran to the
terminus (daily bombed and bombarded) on the Wijden Drift road.
While the last two companies (Nos. 2 and 4) were getting their
tins at railhead, an hour and a half’s barrage was dropped on them
and twenty-seven men were killed or wounded. Relief was delayed in
consequence till one on the morning of the 10th, and, about an hour
later, a wandering covey of eight Germans, who had lost their way in
the dark, were rounded up by the forward platoons of No. 3 Company
(2nd Lieutenant Corry, D.C.M.). It was a small brisk fight, and it
came pleasantly after the barrage at railhead, and the shelling that
befell them from three to half-past five. They were annoyed, too, by
low-flying enemy aeroplanes who fired at the men in the posts but as
a rule missed them. A deserter came in and patrols were sent out to
see where the nearest enemy-post might be. One was located near the
railway line in front of the right company. Exploration work of this
sort in such a blind front as the enemy had arranged here, ends only
too often in patrols losing their way as the eight Germans had done;
and company officers do not like it.
On the 11th September, after some artillery work on our side, the
enemy guns carried out a shoot on the pill-boxes occupied by the
right (No. 1) company while their infantry were “unusually active,”
probably because the Thirty-eighth Division on the Guards’ right
was being relieved that night by the Twentieth. As a side-issue of
the fight the Battalion on their left was attacked, which, so far
as the Irish Guards were concerned, meant that the left company
(No. 2) swiftly manufactured a fresh post on their left to improve
communication with their neighbours, and prevent the enemy working
round their flank through the remnants of a wood. In this work they
had to disperse with rifle-fire several parties of the enemy who
might have interfered with their arrangements, and Captain T. F.
MacMahon was wounded. This bald record covers a long, tense night of
alarms and fatigues, and fatigue-parties dropping like partridges
where the barrage found them, to creep forward as soon as it was
lifted; and, somewhere on the left, the crackle and blaze of an
attack on a battalion which was entirely capable of taking care of
itself.
Their relief on the night of the 13th by the 1st Scots Guards was
“very much delayed.” Two detachments got lost, one through the guide
being killed and the other “through the guide losing himself.” Yet it
was a very dark, and, therefore, theoretically a safe, night, with
very little shelling--proof of the utter uncertainty of every detail
connected with war.
They had lost in that fortnight one officer (2nd Lieutenant Boyd)
and fourteen men killed; one officer (Captain T. F. MacMahon) and
seventy-eight other ranks wounded. For the rest of the month they
were training in camps--Cariboo and Poll Hill--of which the former
was not out of reach of shell-fire, and studied new methods of attack
to combat the enemy’s new methods of defence in his protected and
fortified shell-holes. These he now held in depth, one shell-hole
post covering or flanking the next, so that men fought their way
up a landscape of miniature redoubts, invisible to guns, almost
invisible to aeroplanes, and much more expensive to reduce than the
narrow-slotted pill-boxes.
On the 21st September their Brigadier-General Jeffreys saw the
Battalion on parade, near Proven, and bade them farewell on his
promotion to command the Nineteenth Division. He was succeeded in
command of the 1st Brigade by General C. R. C. de Crespigny. On the
27th Lieut.-Colonel R. V. Pollok commanding the Battalion, who had
been on leave, returned and took over from Captain A. F. L. Gordon
acting in his absence. On the 29th Lieutenant B. Reford who had been
Assistant Adjutant took over No. 3 Company _vice_ Captain T. F.
MacMahon, wounded on the 11th, and 2nd Lieutenant T. S. V. Stoney
joined for duty on the 25th.
Among the honours mentioned as awarded to the men that month for
gallantry and devotion to duty was the D.C.M. to 5279 Private J.
Rochford for “gallantry, devotion to duty and organizing ability”
when employed as a stretcher-bearer with a working-party on September
3, the night when Lieutenant Boyd and twenty-eight men were killed
or wounded by bombs. This, it may be noted, is that Rochford whose
presence steadied, and whose jests diverted, whole platoons upon the
Somme, and for whose health the men inquired first after the platoon
or working-party had been shelled.
And while they trained, with the utter self-absorption of men
concerned in the study of methods of taking man’s life, the Salient
heaved and flamed day after day with German counter-attacks as
our guns covered the adjustment and reinforcements and protection
of artillery troops and material in preparation for the battle of
September 20. As usual, the weather broke on the eve of it. Ten
Divisions (Nineteenth, Thirty-ninth, Forty-first, Twenty-third,
First and Second Australians, Ninth, Fifty-fifth, Fifty-eighth and
Twentieth) attacked from near Hollebeke in the south to Langemarck in
the north; pushed back the line on the whole length of their attack;
gained one mile outwards along the desperate Menin road, established
themselves in Polygon Wood, broke eleven counter-attacks, took over
3000 prisoners and left as many enemy dead. It was followed up
on the 26th September by another attack, on a six-mile front from
south of the Menin road to north-east of St. Julien, in which six
divisions (Thirty-ninth, Thirty-third, Fifth and Fourth Australians,
Fifty-eighth and Fifty-ninth) once more moved our line forward along
that frontage, in some places nearly half a mile. Our movement
clashed, almost to the minute, with German counter-attacks by fresh
divisions launched to recover the ground they had lost on the 20th
September, and the fighting was none the lighter for that coincidence.
The 3rd October saw the weather break again just as fighting was
resumed on a seven-mile front from the Menin road to the Ypres-Staden
railway. Twelve divisions went in here (the Thirty-seventh, Fifth,
Twenty-first, Seventh; First, Second and Third Australians; the New
Zealand; Forty-eighth, Eleventh, Fourth and Twenty-ninth). Reutel,
Nordemhock, and Broodseinde villages were taken, Abraham Heights
gained, the Gravenstafel spur cleared by the New Zealanders; three
fresh German divisions were caught by our guns almost in the act
of forming up for attack, and 5000 prisoners were passed back. The
enemy’s losses here were very satisfactory and mainly due to our
gun-fire.
On the 5th October, then, so far as the Guards Division was
concerned, the line of our working front ran through Poelcappelle
and thence back to the Ypres-Staden railway at a point some thousand
yards north of Langemarck. From that point it merged into the old
line gained on the 20th of September which followed the Broembeek
River at a short distance to the south of it, towards our junction
with the French, and thence lost itself in the flooded areas beyond
Noordschoote. No weight of attack had fallen on that sector of the
front since September 20 when Langemarck had been captured, and the
French line, with ours, advanced in the direction of Draibach and
Houthulst Forest.
THE BROEMBEEK
It was decided to renew the attack, in combination with the French
here, on the 9th October, from north-west of Langemarck across the
Ypres-Staden railway down to a point in the line gained on the 4th
October, east of Zonnebeke, on a front of six miles. The weather
prepared itself in advance. Rain began punctually on the 7th,
continued through the 8th, and made the going more than usually
unspeakable. It affected the Guards Division principally, since
their share of the work involved crossing the little valley of the
Broembeek River which, should it continue to flood, offered every
possible opportunity for holding up troops under fire, loss of
direction (since men never move straight across bogs) and engulfment
of material. The Broembeek was a stagnant ditch, from twenty to
thirty feet wide and from two to five deep, edged with shell-holes
and, in some parts, carrying vertical banks four or five feet deep.
There was, mercifully, no wire in it, but night-patrols sent out the
week before the battle of the 9th reported it could not be crossed
without mats.
The 1st Brigade of the division, which lay in reserve while the 3rd
Brigade held the front line, had trained for several days at Poll
Hill Camp over ground “marked” to represent the ground that the
Battalion would have to attack over. The certainty of being drenched
to the skin on a raw October night as a preliminary to tumbling from
shell-hole to shell-hole till dawn between invisible machine-guns and
snipers was left to the imagination of the men.
On October 6th, “the details to be left out of the attack departed
to join the Guards Division Reinforcement Battalion at Herzeele.”
Men say that the withdrawal of these reprieved ones on the eve of
action was as curious a sight as the arrival of a draft. (“For ye’ll
understand, at that time o’ the war, men knew ’twas only putting off
what was bound to happen.”)
Then, in foul weather, the Battalion entrained for Elverdinghe with
the 3rd Coldstream of their Brigade. The idea was that the 1st
Brigade (De Crespigny’s) would attack parallel to the line of the
Ypres-Staden railway on their right, about three hundred yards from
it, the 2nd Brigade (Sergison-Brooke’s) on their left next against
the French, with the 3rd Brigade (Seymour’s) in support. This last
brigade had been very heavily used in making arrangements for the
Division to cross the Broembeek, piling dumps and helping to haul
guns into fresh positions through the mud. The furthest objective
set, for the advance, was the edge of the Houthulst Forest, three
thousand yards across semi-fluid country with no landmarks other
than the line of smashed rail on their right, and whatever fortified
houses, farms, pill-boxes and shell-holes they might encounter during
their progress. When they had overcome all obstacles, they were
instructed to dig in on the edge of the forest.
At 9.30 on the night of the 8th, in heavy rain, the Battalion marched
from Abingley Camp to their assembly lines (these all duly marked
by tapes and white signboards, which, to the imaginative, suggest
graveyards) from Elverdinghe to Boesinghe road, up “Clarges Street”
to Abri Wood, and then to Cannes farm till they met the guides
for their assembly areas at Ruisseau farm. From here began the
interminable duck-boards that halt and congest the slow-moving line;
and it was not till four in the morning that the Battalion was formed
up and moved off. The rain had stopped a little before midnight and
a late moon came to their help.
The companies were commanded as follows: No. 1, Captain the Hon. P.
J. Ogilvy; No. 2, Lieutenant D. S. Browne; No. 3, Captain R. B. S.
Reford; No. 4, Lieutenant N. B. Bagenal.
There was some shelling as they got into their assembly positions
at 5.20 A. M., but casualties were few. The 2nd Grenadiers and 2nd
Coldstream led off under a few minutes’ blast of intense fire from
field-guns and Stokes mortars, crossed the Broembeek and were away.
At 6.20 the 1st Irish Guards and 3rd Coldstream followed them. The
Battalion’s crossing-place at the river, which, after all, proved
not so unmanageable as the patrols reported, had no bridges, but
there was wire enough on the banks to have made trouble had the enemy
chosen that time and place to shell. They went over in three-foot
water with mud at the bottom; re-formed, wet and filthy, and followed
the 2nd Grenadiers who had captured the first and second objectives,
moved through them at 8.20 and formed up on the right of the 3rd
Coldstream under the barrage of our guns for their own advance on the
final objective--the edge of the forest.
So far, barring a tendency to bear towards the right or railway side,
direction had been well kept and their losses were not heavy. The
companies deployed for attack on the new lines necessitated by the
altered German system of defense--mopping-up sections in rear of the
leading companies, with Lewis-gun sections, and a mopping-up platoon
busy behind all.
Meantime, the troops on the Battalion’s right had been delayed in
coming up, and their delay was more marked from the second objective
onward. This did not check the Guards’ advance, but it exposed the
Battalion’s right to a cruel flanking fire from snipers among the
shell-holes on the uncleared ground by the Ypres-Staden line. There
were pill-boxes of concrete in front; there was a fortified farm
buried in sand-bags, Egypt House, to be reduced; there were nests
of machine-guns on the right which the troops on the right had not
yet overrun, and there was an almost separate and independent fight
in and round some brick-fields, which, in turn, were covered by
the fire of snipers from the fringes of the forest. Enemy aircraft
skimming low gave the German artillery every help in their power,
and the enemy’s shelling was accurate accordingly. The only thing
that lacked in the fight was the bayonet. The affair resolved
itself into a series of splashing rushes, from one shell-hole to
the next, terrier-work round the pill-boxes, incessant demands for
the Lewis-guns (rifle-grenades, but no bombs, were employed except
by the regular bombing sections and moppers-up who cleared the
underground shelters), and the hardest sort of personal attention
from the officers and N.C.O.’s. All four companies reached the final
objective mixed up together and since their right was well in the
air, by the reason of the delay of the flanking troops, they had
to make a defensive flank to connect with a battalion of the next
division that came up later. It was then that they were worst sniped
from the shell-holes, and the casualties among the officers, who had
to superintend the forming of the flank, were heaviest. There was not
much shelling through the day. They waited, were sniped, and expected
a counter-attack which did not come off, though in the evening the
enemy was seen to be advancing and the troops on the Battalion’s
right fell back for a while, leaving their flank once more exposed.
Their position at the time was in a somewhat awkward salient, and
they readjusted themselves--always under sniping fire--dug in again
as much as wet ground allowed, and managed in the dark to establish
connection with a battalion of Hampshires that had come up on their
right.
They spent the night of the 9th October where they lay, in the
front line, while the enemy sniped them, shelled their supports,
or put down sudden wandering barrages from front to back. Every
company commander had been killed or wounded during the day; their
medical officer (Captain P. R. Woodhouse, M.C.) was wounded at duty
on the 10th, the men were caked with mud and ooze, worn to their
last nerves and badly in need of food and hot drinks. There was
no infantry action on their front, however, throughout the 10th,
and in the evening they were relieved by two companies of the 1st
Grenadiers; the other two companies of that battalion relieving the
2nd Grenadiers in the support-line. The battle, which counted as “a
successful minor operation” in the great schemes of the Third Battle
of Ypres, had cost them four officers killed in action on the 9th,
one died of wounds on the 11th, seven officers and their doctor
wounded in the two days; forty-seven other ranks killed; one hundred
and fifty-eight wounded, and ten missing among the horrors of the
swampy pitted ground. The list runs:
Capt. the Hon. P. J. Ogilvy }
Capt. R. J. P. Rodakowski }
2nd Lieut. A. L. Wells } killed October 9.
2nd Lieut. T. S. V. Stoney }
2nd Lieut. H. V. Fanshawe died 11th October of
wounds received on
the 9th.
Capt. R. B. S. Reford }
Lieut. N. B. Bagenal }
Lieut. D. S. Browne } wounded October 9th.
2nd Lieut. E. M. Harvey }
2nd Lieut. T. Corry }
Capt. P. R. Woodhouse }
Lieut. H. H. Maxwell } wounded October 10th.
2nd Lieut. E. H. Dowler }
It took them eight hours along the taped tracks and the duck-boards
to get to Rugby Camp behind Boesinghe, where they stayed for the
next two days and drew a couple of officers and a hundred men from
the Divisional Reinforcement Battalion to replace some of their
casualties.