time to get the full benefit of another day’s thaw. It was a quiet
tour. One man was killed by a trench-mortar, one badly wounded by a
rifle-grenade, seven by shell-splinters outside a dug-out, and five
men gassed. The enemy confined himself to long-range trench-mortars
and an “increase in aerial activity.” He was noticed to “object
very strongly to our air-craft crossing his lines.” Never was enemy
more anxious not to draw attention to his moves. And, far behind our
line at Arras and elsewhere, men dug and entrenched and sketched
works of defence to meet the German rush, while the front trenches
sat still and looked across deserts, apparently empty of life, till
a head moved in the open. It was a season without parallel in our
armies’ experience--this mere waiting for a certain blow to be dealt
at a certain time. No written history records the psychology of
those spring days. The Diary is concerned with the Battalion’s own
sorrow. Here is the story, as written: “During the month [February]
the Household Battalion was disbanded and eighty men were allotted
to the Battalion. This marks the beginning, and is the first
official recognition of the fact that the Irish Guards cannot keep
up the supply of Irish troops. A most regrettable epoch in the
history of the regiment.” On the heels of this comes, comically
enough, almost the sole personal expression of feeling in the entire
Diary. They went, on the last day of February, into rest at Gordon
Camp, christened after the 9th Gordons who made it. “It is without
exception the most comfortable and best-laid-out camp _I_ have ever
been in. Everything that one could possibly wish for is here--even an
officer’s bathroom with porcelain bath and hot and cold water laid
on.” It was an all-too-short interval in cold and dirty work; for
on the 2nd March the Scarpe trenches reclaimed them--Fampoux, Colt
Reserve, Pepper and Pudding--in snow, sleet, and unbroken monotony of
working-parties.
On the 6th March the Diary notes that the 2nd Grenadiers, whom they
relieved the next day, carried out a raid, successful in itself, and
doubly so as drawing no retaliation on their own line. It resulted in
two identifiable prisoners and a machine-gun. But battalions do not
approve of their neighbours raiding when the enemy is “nervous.”
THE MARCH PUSH
Their next front-line turn--6th to 10th March--was utterly
uneventful, and on the 12th they, being then in Stirling Camp, were
ordered to “stand to” for the expected German offensive. It proved
to be no more than a light shelling. So the still fine days, in line
or in support, ran out till the dawn of the 21st March when the
great shells suddenly descended on Arras, and rumours, worse than
any shelling, followed their tracks. Says the Diary: “The German
offensive has begun.”
The evacuation of the town, during the next two days, was a
nightmare of flying masonry, clouds of dust, the roar of falling
brick-work, contradictory orders, and mobs of drifting civilians,
their belongings pushed before or hauled after them; and no power to
order them where to go. Arras, always in the front line, had been
safe so long, it was inconceivable that there should be real danger
now. Might they not camp out and return to-morrow? But the enemy
were reported almost in sight, and ready to open on the town with
their field-guns. They had broken through, men said, under cover of
the heavy morning fog--broken through everywhere along the line of
all our old gains from Lens to St. Quentin, and their whole strength
was behind the blow. No one could understand it, though all men
argued; and while the refugees fled forth, expostulating, blaming,
but seldom weeping, that sunny day, eight hundred shells fell
purposefully on the dishevelled town. By evening word came that our
Somme line had not only broken but gone out--infantry, artillery and
uncounted stores--between Chérisy and Demicourt in the north. South
of that, the old Cambrai Salient, which had not been hardly tried,
was standing but would have to withdraw or be cut off, because, from
Gouzeaucourt to La Fère, ten miles and more south of St. Quentin, the
German tide had swept in from one to three miles deep, and was racing
forward. It is not difficult to imagine what manner of reports
the mere truth gave birth to, while the Battalion waited on in the
Communal College where it was billeted, and was not encouraged to
wander about the rocking, sliding streets.
By the evening of the 22nd March men began to understand it was no
mere break-through but a collapse such as had never befallen British
arms in the history of her people. Officers were sent out in the
morning to reconnoitre the support-line of a third system of defence
between Wancourt and Hénin-sur-Cojeul. But Hénin-sur-Cojeul was
already under the hand of the enemy, who had gained three more miles
in a few hours and, left and right, were widening the breach.
The morning of the 22nd March had been foggy again till noon and,
under that cover, the Germans had again broken in on our surprised
or withdrawing divisions. Report said that whole battalions and
even brigades had been cut off by the flood; their wireless working
faithfully so long as it stood, and the sound of their small-arm fire
continuing for a while after their last words had ceased. Late that
evening orders came for the Battalion to move at midnight from Arras
to Boisleux-St. Marc, some six miles due south of the town on a line
more or less prepared against eventualities, and, with their brigade,
to give what help they could to the divisions who might be falling
back on that front. This was all that could be made out of the mass
of contradictory orders that afflicted them, and the growing crop of
rumours and alarms that upset men almost more than any countermanded
orders.
The Battalion set to work on the 23rd March to dig a support-line
in rear of what was called the Army Line which ran in front of
Boisleux-St. Marc while the evacuation of Arras was being completed
and “all details and drummers marched to the Reinforcement Battalion
at Agnez-les-Duisans,” on the Scarpe well to the west of Arras. (“In
those days we was throubled the way a man is disthressed in dhreams.
All manner of things happening, ye’ll understand, and him the only
one able to do nothing. But I wisht _I_’d been a musicaner.”)
The Diary for the 24th March merely says, “remained in same
positions,” and refers to “repeated rumours.” They sent their
first-line transport back out of harm’s way, and went on digging. Yet
the 24th was a day no rumour could have painted much blacker than
it was. From directly in front of the Guards Division at Boisleux,
the line of the German gains in the past forty-eight hours dropped
straight south to the Somme at Cléry, and thence skirted its western
bank to Ham, where it broke across to the wide marshes of the Oise
below La Fère. Two thirds of the hard-bought ground of the Somme
campaign, the scores of villages whose names smelt of blood, were
lost, and the harvesting of the remainder was a matter barely of
hours.
Next day saw Béhagnies, Grévillers, Irles of the wired bastions,
Miraumont, Pys, Courcelette, Contalmaison, Thiepval and its myriad
dead, and Pozières of the Australians--the very hearts of the
deadliest of the first fightings--overrun; and the question rose
in men’s minds whether the drive would end, as was intended, in
the splitting apart of the French and British armies. For what was
happening north of the Somme was play to the situation south of it.
There the enemy’s swarms of aeroplanes harried the Amiens hospitals,
driving the civilians into the broadside of the country behind, where
the moonlight nights betrayed them to fresh hosts in the air.
By the 26th March the tongue of the advancing tide had licked past
Noyon and Roye and, next day, had encircled Montdidier. Meantime,
our old Somme base on the Ancre, whence the great fights were fed
and supplied from the hundred camps and dumps round Méaulte, and
the railway-sidings between Albert and Amiens, had passed into the
enemy’s hands. To all human appearance, the whole of our bitter
year’s effort was abolished, as though it had never been. The enemy
had prepared, brought together, and struck at the time that best
suited himself, with seventy-three divisions against thirty-seven
British divisions, and the outcome was appalling defeat of our arms.
It would thus seem that no amount of inspiring statesmanship at home,
or anxious readjustment of divisions at the front, will make troops
where troops are not. Therefore the battalions and batteries in the
full blast of the onset perished or were taken prisoners; and of the
stores captured or destroyed, lest they should benefit the enemy,
we may look to receive no account. Not the least depressing of the
sights that adorned the landscapes were the dumps lit by our own
hands, flaring to heaven when, as turned out afterwards, there was
really no need. Divisions were being raced up to reinforce the fluid
front as fast as might be, but no one knew for certain when or where
they would arrive, and Camp Commandants acted on their own judgments.
The battalions in the line swayed to conflicting storms of orders.
“STANDING-TO”
On the 25th, being still at Boisleux-St. Marc, the 1st Irish
Guards were detailed to relieve “several different units,” but
more specially the 1st Coldstream just east of Hamelincourt then
practically in possession of the enemy. (One found out where the
enemy were by seeing them come over the brows of unexpected slopes
in small groups that thinned out and settled down to machine-gunning
under cover of equally unexpected field-guns.) They spent the whole
day being “hit and held” in this fashion, and, close on midnight, got
definite instructions not to wait for any relief but to go off to the
sugar-factory near Boyelles, which they did, and bestowed themselves
in huts in the neighbourhood, and there were hotly shelled during
the night. The German attack was well home on that sector now, and
the German infantry might be looked for at any moment. They removed
from those unhealthy huts to an old trench next morning, where their
first set of orders was to relieve the 1st Scots Guards. (Order,
provisional, definite and cancelled all in two hours and a half!)
Later came orders--equally definite, equally washed out later--to
relieve the 2nd Coldstream in another sector, and finally just before
midnight they relieved the 1st Scots Guards after all. That battalion
had been in the army line between St. Léger and Hénin, but the
enemy’s advance had forced it back in the direction of Boisleux-St.
Marc near the Arras-Albert railway-line. The Battalion found it a
little before dawn, and lay out with all four companies in the front
line, as did the other battalions. By this time, though it would be
not easy to trace their various arrivals in the confusion, the Guards
Brigades had got into line between Boisleux-St. Marc and Ayette,
on a front of roughly three and a half miles, while battalions of
exhausted and withdrawing divisions, hard pressed by the enemy,
passed through them each with its burden of bad news. It was not an
inspiriting sight, nor was the actual position of the Guards Brigades
one to be envied. High ground commanded them throughout, and a number
of huts and half-ruined buildings gave good cover to the gathering
machine-guns. The German advance on that quarter resembled, as one
imaginative soul put it, an encompassment of were-wolves. They
slouched forward, while men rubbed tired eyes, in twos and threes,
at no point offering any definite target either for small-arm or
artillery, and yet, in some wizard fashion, always thickening and
spreading, while our guns from the rear raged and tore uselessly at
their almost invisible lines. Incidentally, too, our own gun-fire in
some sectors, and notably behind the Fourth Guards Brigade, did our
men no service. But the most elaborate of preparations have an end,
and must culminate in the charge home.
An intense barrage on the morning of the 27th March heralded the
crisis, but luckily went wide of all the Battalion except No. 2
Company on the left. The attack followed, and down the trenched
line from Ayette and Boisleux-St. Marc, the Brigade answered with
unbroken musketry and Lewis-guns. It was an almost satisfactory
slaughter, dealt out by tired, but resolute, men with their backs
to the wall. Except for occasional rushes of the enemy, cut down
ere they reached the wire, there was nothing spectacular in that
day’s work. The Battalion shot and kept on shooting as it had been
trained to do in the instruction-camps and on the comfortable ranges
that seemed now so inconceivably far away. The enemy, having direct
observation over the whole of our line, shot well and close. We
suffered, but they suffered more. They ranged along the front from
north to south as waves range down the face of a breakwater, but
found nothing to carry away or even dislodge. Night closed in with a
last rush at the wire on the Battalion’s front that left a wreckage
of German dead and wounded, and two machine-guns horribly hung up
in the strands. Our losses in officers were 2nd Lieutenant Stokes
severely wounded in the morning, and in the afternoon, Lieutenant
Nash killed, and Captain Derek FitzGerald wounded and sent down.
Lieut.-Colonel R. V. Pollok and Lieutenants Bence-Jones and Bagenal
were also slightly wounded but remained at duty. When an officer
dropped and could not get up again without help he was assumed to be
unfit for work--but not before.
(“Ye’ll understand, ’twas no question, those days, what ye could or
could not do. Ye _did_ it.”)
And so ended the 27th of March with the German front from Lens to
Albert held up, and destined, though men then scarce dared believe,
not to advance to another effective surge. The French and British
armies were perilously near forced asunder now and, the needs of the
case compelling what might have been done long ago, General Foch in
the little city of Doullens was, on the 26th March, given supreme
command of all the hard-pressed hosts. The news went out at once
into the front line where men received it as part and parcel of
the immense situation. Nothing could have astonished them then, or,
unless it directly concerned food or rest, have made them think.
The Battalion was placed where it was to endure, and was thankful
that the 28th was a “fairly quiet day” but for heavy shelling on
their right, and trench-mortars and shells on themselves. No. 2
Company, who had been unlucky with the big barrage the day before,
suffered once again.
Next day (29th March), which was another “quiet” occasion, Lieutenant
Zigomala was wounded and forty “of the most tired men” were relieved
by an equal number from the Reinforcement Battalion, which relief
became systematized, as it eased the strain a little to clear out
visibly finished men day by day. All were worn down but “remained
cheerful.” Those who have full right to speak affirm that, in
absolutely impossible situations, the Irish could be trusted to “play
up” beyond even a cockney battalion. The matter will always be in
dispute, but none know better than the men who saw the Push through
how superbly the mud-caked, wire-drawn platoons bore themselves.
On the 30th March the attack rolled up again from the south where it
had met no particular encouragement, and barraged the Battalion’s
sector with heavies for a couple of hours; causing forty-two
casualties among the men and wounding Lieutenants Stacpoole and
Bagenal. It then fell upon the 2nd Grenadiers and 1st Coldstream
immediately to the Battalion’s left and right, and was driven off
with loss. There were other attacks, but with less venom in them,
before the Hun could be induced to withdraw. Half the Battalion spent
the night digging a line of posts in support which they occupied by
dawn.
On the last of March “nothing of importance occurred.” Everything,
indeed, had occurred already. The old Somme salient which, English
fashion, had become an institution, was completely reversed on the
ominous newspaper maps. The Germans stood a-tip-toe looking into
Amiens, and practically the entire spare strength of the British
armies in France had been used and used up to bring them to that
stand. The French were equally worn down. The American armies were
not yet in place, and what reinforcing divisions were ready in
England somewhat lacked training.
The Battalion, a straw among these waves, had in the month lost,
besides officers, twenty-three other ranks killed and one hundred and
seven wounded and one missing. It is even reported that there had
been many days on which, owing to press of work, they had not shaved.
(“That, ye’ll understand, is being dirty, an’ a crime. Believe me,
now, there was times when we was _all_ criminals, even Mr. ---- an’
it disthressed him more than bloody war.”)
The fierceness of the enemy’s attack on the 28th March--ranging from
Puisieux to north-east of Arras--had been, to an extent, his own
undoing. For he had thrown his men in shoulder to shoulder in six
lines at some spots, and our guns had caught them massed, forming up.
But the check, severe as it was, did not choke off a final effort
against the strained British and French cordon, on the 4th and 5th
of April. The main weight of it, on the first day, fell south of
the Somme, and on the second, north, from Dernancourt below Méaulte
to Bucquoy which is on the same level as Gomiecourt. Except that
the eastern side of Bucquoy was carried for a time, the northern
attack was completely held, and so at last, after a heart-shattering
fortnight, the Somme front came to rest. The Battalion, with its
Headquarters under much too direct enemy observation near Boiry-St.
Martin, reverted to its ancient routine of trench-work and reliefs
under shell-fire.
The days included regular bursts of shelling, a large proportion of
which was blue or yellow-cross gas, and when the Battalion lay in
reserve they were kept awake by our energetic batteries on three
sides of them.
Their St. Martin camp was a scientifically constructed death-trap.
Most of it was under enemy observation and without ground-shelter.
What shots ranged over our forward batteries or short of our rear
ones, found their camp. When our 15-inch guns retaliated, from a
hundred and fifty yards behind them, the blast extinguished all
candles. The Diary observes: “The noise and the hostile retaliation
made proper rest difficult.” That was on the 4th April, when the
attack south of the Somme was in full swing.
On the 5th April their huts in Brigade-reserve were shelled for half
an hour, with six casualties, and when they went into the line on
a new sector, held by scattered posts, nearly every one of their
guides lost his miserable way in the dark. Headquarters here were
pitched in an old German trench and then--for they were not even
rain-proof--shifted to the edge of Boiry-St. Martin village. A cellar
had to be dug out and supported, and the rain descended on the
mud-pie that it was, and when Headquarters, and all their papers,
had established themselves, the enemy gas-bombarded the village
with perfect accuracy. The Commanding Officer, Lieut.-Colonel R. V.
Pollok, the Assistant Adjutant, Lieutenant J. N. Ward, and the M. O.,
Captain Woodhouse, had to be sent down suffering from yellow-cross
gas after-effects.
Consider for a moment the woes of a battalion headquarters in the
field. Late in January, Captain Gordon, the _pukka_ Adjutant, riding
to Arras for a bath, canters into a barrage of “heavies” and is
wounded in the hand--a vital spot for adjutants. This leaves only the
C.O. and the Assistant Adjutant, Lieutenant J. N. Ward, to carry on,
and whatever the state of the front, the authorities demand their
regular supply of papers and forms. No sooner has the Assistant
Adjutant got abreast of things, than all Battalion Headquarters are
knocked out in an hour. Luckily, they were only away for three or
four days. The enemy added a small and easily beaten off raid to the
confusion he had made in Orderly-Room; Major Baggallay took over the
command, and Captain Budd, adequate and untroubled as ever, who had
held the ghostly F Post on the Scarpe, acted as Adjutant. Officers
were beginning to wear out now. Three “of the most tired” were sent
down and replaced by substitutes from the Reinforcement Battalion.
The following officers joined for duty on the 10th April: Lieutenant
M. Buller, Lieutenant (Acting Captain) W. Joyce, Lieutenant Hon. B.
A. A. Ogilvy, and 2nd Lieutenants T. B. Maughan, P. R. J. Barry, H.
J. Lofting, G. C. MacLachlan and J. C. Haydon.
It was on the morning of the 9th April that the enemy opened his
second great thrust on the Lys, and the three weeks’ fighting that
all but wiped out the Ypres Salient won him Messines, Kemmel,
Armentières, Neuve Eglise, Bailleul, Merville, and carried him
towards the Channel ports, within five miles of Hazebrouck. That
the stroke was expected made it none the less severe. Spring on
that front had chosen to be unseasonably dry. The lowlands in the
Lys valley, normally their own best defences, gave passage to men
and guns when they should have been still impassable. Whatever else
may have betrayed them, the Germans had no cause to complain of the
weather throughout the war, or indeed of the foresight of their
adversaries. They had to deal chiefly with divisions that had been
fought out in the Somme Push, reinforced with fillings from England
and sent northward in a hurry. Sir Douglas Haig’s despatches give the
relative disparity thus:
In the Lys battle, prior to the 30th April, the enemy engaged
against the British forces a total of 42 Divisions, of which 33
were fresh and 9 had fought previously on the Somme. Against these
42 German Divisions, 25 British Divisions were employed, of which 8
were fresh and 17 had taken a prominent part in the Somme battle.
These were worn out, and as the days of fighting continued many of
them were so dead to the world that they laid them down and slept
where they dropped by battalions. When orders came, it was a matter
almost of routine that each senior, handing them on, should assault
his junior into some sort of comprehension. Officers dared not trust
themselves even to lean against walls for fear they should slide
down dead asleep; and as a private of the Line put it in confession,
“I don’t know what the men would have done but for standing sentry.
They got their sleep then.” There is a story of a tattered brigade,
eight days, or it might have been ten, without closing an eyelid,
which was flung back into the fight after assurance of relief,
and, what was much worse, a few hours’ rest. They returned, like
sleep-walkers, and laid them down in some shallow hen-scratchings
that passed for trench-work, where without emotion they resigned
themselves to being blown out or up in detail. While they watched
drowsily the descent and thickening of a fresh German shell-storm,
preluding fresh infantry attacks, it occurred to them vaguely that
there were high and increasing noises overhead--not at all like the
deep whoop of “heavies.” Then all the darkness behind the enemy lit
with a low outlining ground-flare--the death-dance of innumerable
.75’s. Foch had sent up very many guns behind them, almost wheel to
wheel, and when the French gunners at last shut off, the packed enemy
trenches that were waiting to continue their march to the Channel, as
soon as their own fire should have wiped up the few British bayonets
before them, lay as still as the graves that they were. Then what
remained of the brigade that had seen this miracle was relieved by
another brigade, and stretched itself out to sleep behind it. Experts
in miseries say that, for sheer strain, the Lys overwent anything
imagined in the war, and in this, many who have suffered much, are
agreed.
The 4th Guards Brigade, which had been in billets near
Villers-Brulin, after its heavy work on the Arras side, was
despatched on the 10th April to the flat country round Vierhoek, and
there--as will be told--spent itself in the desperate fighting round
La Couronne and Vieux-Berquin that gave time to bar the enemies’ way
to Hazebrouck and--wiped out the 2nd Battalion.