line on the old battle-front from various units of the 2nd and 3rd
Guards Brigade. The 2nd Grenadiers relieved the 1st Grenadiers
in the front line on the right and the 2nd Coldstream the Welsh
Guards on the left sector. The Battalion itself was scattered by
companies and half-companies near Koekuit-Louvois farm, Craonne
farm, and elsewhere, relieving companies and half-companies of the
other battalions, and standing by to attend smartly to the needs
of the forward battalions in case of sudden calls for more bombs,
small-arm ammunition, and lights. They were instructed, too, to be
ready to support either flank should the troops there give way.
But the troops did not give way; and they had nothing worse to
face than heavy shelling of the supports at night and the work of
continuing the duckboard-tracks across the mud. Most of the men
were “accommodated in shell-holes and small, shallow trenches,”
for water stopped the spade at a couple of feet below ground; but
where anything usable remained of the German pill-boxes, which
smelt abominably, the men were packed into them. It was in no way a
pleasant tour, for the dead lay thick about, and men had not ceased
speaking of their officers of the week before--intimately, lovingly,
and humorously as the Irish used to do.
More than most, the advance on Houthulst Forest had been an officer’s
battle; for their work had been broken up, by the nature of the
ground and the position of the German pill-boxes, into detached
parties dealing with separate strong points, who had to be collected
and formed again after each bout had ended. But this work, conceived
and carried out on the spur of the moment, under the wings of death,
leaves few historians.
They were relieved on the 16th October by the 20th Lancashire
Fusiliers of the 104th Brigade on their right, returned to
Elverdinghe through Boesinghe, and entrained for a peaceful camp at
Proven. During their three days’ tour, Lieutenant R. H. S. Grayson
and fourteen other ranks were wounded, mainly by shell and two other
ranks were killed.
They had begun the month of October with 28 officers and 1081 other
ranks. They had lost in sixteen days 252 other ranks and 14 officers
killed or wounded. Now they were free for the time to rest, refit,
and reorganise in readiness, men said, to be returned to the Somme.
(“Ye’ll understand that, in those days, we had grand choice of the
fryin’-pan or the fire.”)
THE RETURN TO THE SOMME AND CAMBRAI
The Salient, with its sense of being ever overlooked and constricted
on every side, fairly represents the frying-pan: the broad, general
conflagration of the Somme, the fire. They quitted the frying-pan
with some relief, entrained at Proven with the 3rd Coldstream and
the 1st Brigade Machine-gun Company, detrained at Watten between
the Bois du Ham and the Forêt d’Eperlecques, beyond St. Omer, and
marched to the pleasant village of Bayenghem-les-Eperlecques, where
they had the satisfaction of meeting the 6th Border Regiment just
marching out of the billets that they were to occupy. The place was
an intensive training-camp, specialising in all the specialties, but
musketry above all. The Somme was open country, where, since they had
left it, multitudes of tanks had come into use for the protection
of troops, and troops thus protected do not need so many bombers to
clear out shell-holes as they do in the Salient, where tanks stick
and are shelled to bits in the mud. The inference was obvious! They
enjoyed compulsory and voluntary musketry, varied with inspections
and route-marchings.
On the 21st October His Royal Highness the Duke of Connaught visited
them as senior Colonel of the Brigade of Guards, was introduced to
all the officers, spoke to most of the N.C.O.’s and the men who
had been decorated during the war. The Battalion was formed up in
“walking out” order in the streets of the village to receive him. It
is alleged by survivors that the sergeants saw to it that never since
the Irish Guards had been formed was there such rigorous inspection
of “walking out” men before they fell in. (“We looked like all
Bird-cage Walk of a Sunday.”)
On the 24th there joined for duty a draft of six officers, Major
R. R. C. Baggallay, M.C., Lieutenant G. K. Thompson, M.C., and 2nd
Lieutenants C. E. Hammond, F. G. de Stacpoole, T. A. Carey, and E. C.
G. Lord. Lieutenant D. J. B. FitzGerald was transferred from the 1st
to the 2nd Battalion on the Twenty-fifth, which was the day chosen
for an inspection of the whole Division by Sir Douglas Haig, in cold
weather with a high wind.
On the 6th November General Antoine, commanding the First French Army
Corps, which had lain on the Division’s left at Boesinghe, was to
present French medals gained by the Division, but, thanks to the wet,
parade, after being drawn up and thereby thoroughly drenched, was
dismissed and the medals presented without review. Lieut.-Colonel R.
V. Pollok, commanding the Battalion, received the Croix de Guerre.
It is all a piece with human nature that the miseries of a week in
liquid mud among corpses should be dismissed with a jest, but a
wet parade, which ruins three or four hours’ careful preparation,
regarded as a grievous burden for every one except the N.C.O.’s, who,
by tradition are supposed to delight in “fatigues” of this order.
Their three weeks’ training came to an end on the 11th November,
when they moved thirteen miles, in torrents of rain, to the village
of Ecques, which was filled with Portuguese troops, and began a long
march. They did not know their destination, but guessed well where
they were going.
Some had all the reasons in the world to know that the Division would
relieve the French on half a dozen different named sectors. Others
were certain that it would attack independently quite elsewhere.
Even Italy, where the Caporetto disaster had just taken place, was
to the imaginative quite within the bounds of luck. But their line
of route--twelve or thirteen miles a day in fine weather--dropped
always south and east. From Ecques it crossed the Lys at Thérouanne;
held over the worn road between St. Pol and Béthune, till, at
Magnicourt-le-Comte, came orders that all kits were to be reduced
and sent in to St. Pol. Elaborate reasons were given for this, such
as lack of transport owing to troops being hurried to Italy, which
dissipated the idea of light wines and macaroni entertained by the
optimists, and deceived no one. If they turned left when they struck
the St. Pol-Arras road, it would not be the French whom they were
relieving. If they held on south, it would be the old Somme ground.
And they held on south to Beaufort, marching by daylight, till the
18th of October found them in a camp of huts outside Blaireville and
well in the zone of aeroplane observation. They moved under cover of
darkness that night to a camp of tents at Gomiecourt between wrecked
Bapaume and battered Arras.
The bare devastated downs of the Somme had taken them back again,
and they were in the Fifth Corps, Third (Julian Byng’s) Army. It
was revealed at Divisional Headquarters conference on the night of
the 19th that that army was on the eve of attack. There would be
no preliminary bombardments, but an outrush of tanks, with a dozen
infantry divisions on a six-mile front from Gonnelieu to the Canal du
Nord near Hermies.
The affair might be a surprise for an enemy whom our pressure on
the Salient had forced to withdraw a large number of troops from
the Somme front. If the tanks worked well, it ought to result in
the breaking through of the triple-trench system of the Hindenburg
Line, which had been immensely strengthened by the Germans since
their leisurely retirement thither in April. We might expect to
push on across their reserve system three or four miles behind the
Hindenburg Line. We might even capture Cambrai twelve thousand yards
from our jumping-off place, though that would be a side-issue; but,
with luck, our attack would win us more high ground towards the
north and the north-east, whence we could later strike in whichever
direction seemed most profitable. Secrecy and hard-hitting would
be of the essence of the contract, since the enemy could bring up
reinforcements in a couple of days. Meantime the Guards Division
would stand by at two hours’ notice, ready to be used as required.
If Cambrai were taken, they would be called upon to hold it and
make good. If it were not, then the battle would rank as a raid
on a big scale, and the Division might be used for anything that
developed. That same day Major Baggallay, M.C., carried out a road
reconnaissance of the front at Doignies and Demicourt north of
Havrincourt Wood. The situation there betrayed nothing. “Apparently
the whole of that front-sector was habitually very quiet.”
Twenty-four hours later, it was alive and roaring with our tanks
rooting through the massed wire of the Hindenburg Line, the clamour
of half-a-dozen divisions launched at their heels and the smashing
fire of our guns in advance of them and their covering smoke-screens;
while far to the north and south dummy attacks, gas and artillery
demonstrations veiled and confused either flank. The opening day was,
beyond doubt, a success. The German line went out under the tanks,
as breakwaters go out under the race of a tide; and from Gonnelieu
to north of Hermies three systems of their defence were overrun to
a depth of four or five miles. By the 21st November our attack had
punched out a square-headed salient, ten miles across the base, the
southerly side of which ran along the high ground of the Bonavis
Ridge, more or less parallel to the St. Quentin-Escaut Canal from
Gonnelieu to Masnières, which latter place we held. The easterly
side lay from Masnières through Noyelles-sur-l’Escaut and Cantaing
to Fontaine-Notre-Dame and Bourlon Wood. This latter, as the highest
point of command, was the key of the position on our north flank.
Thence, the northerly flank of the salient ran roughly westward from
the wood, south of Mœuvres till it joined our original front north of
Boursies. About one half of the salient was commanded by German guns
from the north of Bourlon Wood, and the other half from the south in
the direction of the Bonavis Ridge.
Besides these natural disadvantages there were large numbers of our
cavalry hopefully disposed on the main routes in readiness for the
traditional “break-through,” the harrying of enemy communications,
etc. November on the Somme is not, however, quite the best season for
exploits of horse, sabre and lance.
Meantime, the Battalion spent the 20th November, and till the evening
of the 21st, at two hours’ notice in camp near Barastre, and on the
23rd November moved to bivouac just west of the village of Doignies
behind Demicourt on the edge of the “habitually very quiet sector”
before mentioned. The 1st and 3rd Brigades Guards Division had been
detailed to relieve two brigades of the Fifty-first Division in the
line attacking Fontaine-Notre-Dame village at the extreme north tip
of the salient a dozen miles away; and on the evening of the 23rd
November they received verbal orders to get away from Doignies. At
the moment the Battalion was moving off, came written orders that the
whole of its first-line transport should accompany it; so a verbal
order was sent to the transport officer to bring it on in rear of the
Brigade column. That was the beginning of some not too successful
Staff work and some unnecessary wanderings in the dark, complicated
by the congestion of the roads and the presence of the ever-hopeful
cavalry. The Battalion, its transport all abroad, crossed the Canal
du Nord from Doignies and waited by the roadside till Lieut.-Colonel
Follett, commanding the Brigade, rode into Graincourt, picked up
guides from the 152nd Brigade, brought on the Battalion another
couple of thousand yards to the cross-roads at La Justice, found
fresh guides from the Gordons and Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
and moved downhill straight into line at Cantaing mill after “a good
and quiet relief,” at 3.20 A. M. on the morning of the 24th. Fighting
had been going on day and night since the 20th for the possession
of Bourlon Wood and village, where the Fortieth Division had been
worn to a skeleton in alternate attack and counter-attack, but there
was no trouble that dawn or day on the Cantaing sector where the
Battalion lay and listened to the roar of the battle a mile and a
half to the north. Their concern was to improve their line and find
out where on earth the Staff had lost their first-line transport.
It appeared that varying orders had been given to the transport for
the different battalions, complicated by general instructions to
follow their own units by the light of nature; and there the orders
stopped. Naturally, as the roads boiled with traffic, all transport
was promptly stood aside to let troops get ahead, with the result
that after many adventures in the dark, including the collapse of a
bridge over the Canal du Nord when half the loads had crossed, the
Battalion’s transport got into Ribecourt at five in the morning,
still without any orders, found that no one knew where Brigade
Headquarters might be, billeted themselves in a wrecked farm and
managed to get into touch with their Battalion in the afternoon of
the 24th. About this time, the Fortieth Division with the tanks
attacked Bourlon village, captured the whole of it, only to be fought
out by the enemy on the following day. The Wood had not at that time
gained its dark name in history. All that the waiting Battalion at
Cantaing reports on the 25th November, while wood and village fumed
like the infernos that they were, is “no fighting on the battalion
front, although there was heavy fighting on the left.”
It broke out again on the 26th towards evening (the fifth day of
continuous battle), when the 4th Grenadiers of the 3rd Guards Brigade
were sent up to support the Fortieth Division and, on the way
thither, went through a heavy German barrage as though they were on
parade.
But the high ground above Bourlon Wood and Fontaine-Notre-Dame gave
the enemy an artillery and observation command which enabled them to
sweep our front and back areas in the northern half of the salient
almost as they chose. Pressure, too, was beginning to develop on
the flanks. The forty-eight hours in which the enemy could bring up
fresh troops had grown to nearly a week, and they had used every hour
of it. In no way could the situation be called healthy, but were
the Bourlon Ridges won, at least our gain of ground might be held.
So it was decided that the 2nd Guards Brigade, 3rd Grenadiers, 1st
Coldstream, 2nd Irish Guards and 1st Scots Guards, together with the
4th Grenadiers and the Welsh Guards borrowed, should on the 27th
attack Fontaine village and Bourlon Wood. They did so attack; they
were cut to pieces with machine-gun fire in the advance; they were
shelled out of Bourlon Wood; they were counter-attacked by heavy
reinforcements of the enemy; they had no reinforcements; they fell
back on Fontaine village in the evening; they withdrew from it in
the darkness and fell back on La Justice. It was a full failure
with heavy casualties and the news went back, with the speed of all
bad news, to the 1st Brigade, which had been relieved on the 26th,
the 1st Irish Guards lying at Ribecourt in the ruined farm where
their transport had taken refuge. They should have been in a trench
outside the village, but a battalion of another division was found in
possession of it, and so was not disturbed.
GOUZEAUCOURT
There was no shelter against the driving snowy rain, and the men,
without great-coats or blankets, were “very cold, wet and miserable.”
The next day was no better, and on the 29th the Fifty-ninth
Division took over their area from them while the Guards Division
was rearranged thus: the 3rd Brigade at Trescault, the 2nd at
Ribecourt, and the 1st at Metz-en-Couture, a wrecked, red-brick
village, once engaged in the sugar-beet industry, lying on and under
a swell of the downs some four thousand yards west of Gouzeaucourt.
The Divisional Artillery was at Flesquières, more than four miles
away. The Battalion’s march to Metz was badly delayed by blocks on
the road and a general impression spread that trouble was not far
off. Individually, the soldier is easy to deceive: collectively, a
battalion has the sure instinct of an animal for changes in the wind.
There were catacombs in Metz village where one company was billeted
whereby it was nearly choked to death by foul gases.[8] This seemed
all of a piece with the bad luck of the tour, and the dawn of the
30th November was ushered in by single shells from a long-range gun
which found them during the night. Half an hour after they had the
order to move to Heudicourt and had digested a persistent rumour that
the enemy were through at Gonnelieu, telegrams and orders began to
pour in. The gist of them was that the line had undoubtedly cracked,
and that the Brigade would move to Gouzeaucourt at once. But what
the Brigade was to do, and under whose command it was to operate,
were matters on which telegrams and orders most livelily conflicted.
Eventually, the Division as a whole was assigned to the Third Corps,
the 3rd Brigade was ordered to come up from Trescault and help the
1st, and the various C.O.’s of the battalions of the 1st Brigade rode
forward to see for themselves what was happening. They had not far
to go. Over the ridge between Gouzeaucourt and Metz poured gunners,
carrying their sights with them, engineers, horses and infantry, all
apparently bent on getting into the village where they would be a
better target for artillery. The village choked; the Battalion fell
in, clear of the confusion, where it best could, and set off at once
in artillery formation, regardless of the stragglers, into the high
and bare lands round Gouzeaucourt. There were no guns to back them,
for their own were at Flesquières.
As was pointed out by an observer of that curious day--“’Tis
little ye can do with gunsights, an’ them in the arrums av men in
a great haste. There was men with blankets round ’em, an’ men with
loose putties wavin’ in the wind, and they told us ’twas a general
retirement. We could see that. We wanted to know for why they was
returnin’. We went through ’em all, fairly breastin’ our way and--we
found Jerry on the next slope makin’ prisoners of a Labour Corps
with picks an’ shovels. But some of that same Labour Corps they took
their picks an’ shovels and came on with us.”
They halted and fixed bayonets just outside Gouzeaucourt Wood, the
Irish on the left of the line, their right on the Metz-Gouzeaucourt
road, the 3rd Coldstream in the centre, the 2nd Coldstream on the
right, the 2nd Grenadiers in reserve in Gouzeaucourt Wood itself.
What seems to have impressed men most was the extreme nakedness
of the landscape, and, at first, the absence of casualties. They
were shelled as they marched to the Wood but not heavily; but when
they had passed beyond it they came under machine-gun fire from the
village. They topped the rise beyond the Wood near Queen’s Cross and
were shelled from St. Quentin Ridge to the east. They overran the
remnant of one of our trenches in which some sappers and infantry
were still holding on. Dismounted cavalry appeared out of nowhere in
particular, as troops will in a mixed fray, and attached themselves
to the right of the thin line. As they swept down the last slope to
Gouzeaucourt the machine-gun fire from the village grew hotter on
their right, and the leading company, characteristically enough,
made in towards it. This pulled the Battalion a little to the right,
and off the road which was supposed to be their left boundary, but
it indubitably helped to clear the place. The enemy were seen to be
leaving in some haste, and only a few of them were shot or bayoneted
in and out among the houses. The Battalion pushed in through the
village to the slope east of it under Quentin Mill, where they
dug in for the night. Their left flank was all in the air for a
while, but the 3rd Brigade, which had been originally ordered to
come up on the right of the 1st, was diverted to the left on the
Gouzeaucourt-Villers-Plouich line, and they got into touch with the
4th Grenadiers. There was no attempt to counter-attack. Tanks were
used on the right during the action, but they do not seem to have
played any material part in the Battalion’s area, and, as the light
of the short and freezing November day closed, a cavalry regiment or
“some cavalry” came up on the left flank.
The actual stroke that recovered Gouzeaucourt had not taken more than
an hour, but the day had cost them a hundred and thirty men killed,
wounded, and missing; Lieutenant N. F. Durant killed, Lieutenant
(Acting Captain) Joyce, Lieutenant G. E. F. Van der Noot, Lieutenant
G. K. Thompson, M.C., and 2nd Lieutenant P. M. Riley wounded. All the
casualties were from machine-gun fire; men dropping at the corners of
streets, across thresholds in cellars and in the angles of wrecked
walls that, falling on them, hid them for ever.
A profane legend sprang up almost at once that the zeal shown by the
Guards in the attack was because they knew Gouzeaucourt held the
supplies of the division which had evacuated it. The enemy had been
turned out before he could take advantage of his occupation. Indeed,
a couple of our supply-trains were found untouched on rail at the
station, and a number of our guns were recaptured in and around the
place. Also, the divisional rum-supply was largely intact. When this
fact came to light, as it did--so to say--rum-jar by rum-jar, borne
joyously through the dark streets that bitter night, the Brigade
was refreshed and warmed, and, men assert, felt almost grateful to
the division which had laid this extra “fatigue” on them. One grim
incident stays in the minds of those who survived--the sight of an
enormous Irishman urging two captives, whom he had himself unearthed
from a cellar, to dance before him. He demanded the jigs of his
native land, and seemed to think that by giving them drink his pupils
would become proficient. Men stood about and laughed till they could
hardly stand; and when the fun was at its height a chance shell out
of the darkness to the eastward wiped out all that tango-class before
their eyes. (“’Twas like a dhream, ye’ll understand. One minute
both Jerries was dancin’ hard to oblige him, an’ then--nothin’,
nothin’--nothin’--of the three of them!”)
The next day, orders came for the Guards Division to continue their
work and attack on a front of two miles along the line of the ridge
a thousand yards east of Gouzeaucourt, which ran south through
Gonnelieu village and Gauche Wood to Villers Hill. Tanks, they
were told, would help and the Divisional Artillery would put down
barrages. The Fifty-ninth Division would be on their left and the
Cavalry Division on their right. The 1st Guards Brigade were assigned
Gauche Wood; the 3rd Brigade had the much more difficult problem of
rushing Gonnelieu village in the event of another Division who were
attacking it that morning (1st December) failing to make headway.
The 1st Brigade’s attack on Gauche Wood was undertaken by the 2nd
Grenadiers on the right, the 3rd Coldstream, in reserve, in their
trenches. They assembled before dawn on the 1st December, waited a
while for a promised detachment of tanks and finally started off
without them. Their artillery support was meagre, and the troops had
to cover three-quarters of a mile over grassy land to the fringe
of the wood. The enemy’s first barrage fell behind them; the wood
itself was crammed with much more effective machine-guns, but, once
it had been entered, the issue became a man-to-man affair. Then
some tanks turned up and some cavalry, the latter an hour late. The
tanks were eventually withdrawn, as they found no trenches to crush
in the wood and drew much shell-fire in the open; but the cavalry,
which included Bengal Lancers, were of good use on the right flank
of the attack. The two Guards Brigades, one attacking Gonnelieu to
the north, the other Gauche Wood to the south, drew a little apart
from each other as the men closed in where the machine-gun fire
was hottest, and about nine o’clock the 1st Irish Guards sent up a
company (No. 1) to fill the gap which developed on both sides of the
Gouzeaucourt-Gonnelieu road, the boundary between the Brigades.