Boiry, where the support-lines were targets by day and night,
and the front-posts holes in the ground that seemed to shift at
every relief, were told on the 12th April that a German attack was
imminent, which report was repeated at intervals throughout the day.
But their patrols found nothing moving in front of them, and their
regular allowance of hostile mortar-bombs was not increased. The
rumours from the Lys side were far more disturbing.
On the 13th April they were relieved by the 24th Lancashire
Fusiliers, marched to Blairville where they embussed for Saulty at
the head of the little river that runs in stone channels through
quiet Doullens, and there, “very cold, wet, and muddy,” found the
best billets taken by Corps and Labour troops whom they knew not. The
sentiments of men who have been digging and fighting without a break
for ten weeks when confronted with warmly billeted staffs and fat
back-area working-parties need not be recorded.
At Saulty they rested from the 15th to the 23rd April under perpetual
short notice: one hour from 8 A. M. till noon and three hours for the
rest of the day and night. Thus “means of training were limited,” and
the weather varied from wet to snow-showers.
On the 24th of April the enemy captured Villers-Bretonneux, staring
directly into Amiens, which ground, had they been allowed to hold
uninterruptedly even for a day, might have been made too strong to
reduce with the forces at our disposal then, and thus would have
become the very edge of the wedge for splitting the French and
English armies asunder. But that night, and literally at almost
an hour’s notice, a counter-attack by a Brigade of the Eighteenth
Division, and the 13th and 15th Brigades of the Fourth and Fifth
Australian Divisions, swept Villers-Bretonneux clear, and established
ourselves beyond possibility of eviction. Thus, the one last chance
that might have swung the whole war passed out of the enemy’s hands.
On that same day the 1st Irish Guards returned in lorries along the
cramped and twisting roads by Bienvillers to Monchy, to relieve a
battalion of the Royal Scots in the front line at Ayette, three
miles south down the line from Boiry. Ayette village had been
recaptured on the 3rd April by the Thirty-second Division, and had
removed a thorn in the side of troops in that sector. Once again,
their guides almost unanimously lost their way, and the multivious
relief took half the night to accomplish.
It appeared as though the enemy had skinned his line here to feed his
other enterprises in the north; for his outposts did nothing and,
beyond shelling Monchy village from time to time, his guns were also
idle.
So on the 29th April they arranged a battalion raid on a German
post (supposed to be held by night only) to occupy it if possible.
But the enemy were in occupation and very ready. The little party
returned with their officer, 2nd Lieutenant G. C. MacLachlan, and a
sergeant wounded. A few weeks later the Battalion worked out a most
satisfactory little ten-minute return-raid without a single casualty,
and so cleared their account.
April had been an inexpensive month for both men and officers. The
Commanding Officer, the Assistant Adjutant, and the Medical Officer
had, as we know, been slightly gassed at Headquarters, and 2nd
Lieutenants C. L. Browne and MacLachlan wounded only. Three men had
been killed and forty-one wounded. But no less than twenty-six were
sent down sick--proof that the strain had told.
The enemy showed a certain amount of imagination unusual on that
front. One of our forward posts, expecting the return of a patrol
on the dawn on the 3rd May, saw a party of five approaching and
challenged. “Irish Guards” was the reply, followed by a few bombs
which did some damage. This peculiarly irritating trick had not
been worked on the Battalion for some time, and they felt it--as
their amused friends to left and right in the line took care that
they should. Otherwise, the enemy devoted themselves to more and
heavier gunnery, which, in a five-day tour, caused twenty casualties
(wounded) and one killed. Brigade Reserve camps were outside
Monchy-au-Bois, whence tired men were sent to the Details camp at
Pommier (regularly bombed by aeroplane), and from Pommier were drawn
occasional working-parties. One of these included the Battalion
Drummers and Pipers, who enjoyed what might be called a “day out” in
some old trenches.
On the 5th May, Lieutenant Keenan arrived from the 2nd Battalion to
take over the Adjutancy in place of Captain Gordon, who had been
transferred to the 2nd Battalion as Second in Command, after almost
three years’ continuous service with the 1st Battalion.
On the 7th May they went up from Monchy, by the ever-hateful,
ever-shelled Cojeul valley, to the Ayette subsector, relieving the
2nd Coldstream. Next day the devil-directed luck of the front line,
after a peaceful, fine night, caused the only trench-mortar sent over
by the enemy that did not clean miss all our posts, to fall directly
in No. 3 Post, right front Company (No. 4), instantly killing Captain
Budd, M.C., commanding the Company, and with him 2nd Lieutenant E.
C. G. Lord and seven men. Captain Budd’s energy and coolness, proved
on many occasions, were a particular loss to his comrades. He was a
large silent man, on whom every one could and did lean heavily at all
times. He knew no fear and was of the self-contained, intensely alive
type, always in danger, but never by his friends connected with any
thought of death. Second Lieutenant Lord (“Rosy” Lord) was a keen and
promising young officer. Those were the only casualties of the tour.
They were buried in the little Military Cemetery near Ayette.
Our guns had been working steadily from behind, but till this
trench-mortar outburst, most of the enemy replies had been directed
on Ayette itself or our support-lines.
The shelling throughout the month grew more and more earnest and our
replies, roaring overhead, worried the dead-tired soldiery. The work
was all at night--wiring and improving posts, and unlimited digging
of communication-ways between them; for whether a trench-line held
till Christmas, went up bodily next minute, or was battered down
every hour, in the making there was but one standard of work that
beseemed the Battalion; and though divisional commanders might, and
as on the dreary Scarpe posts did, draw gratified commanding officers
aside and tell them that for quantity and quality their trench-craft
excelled that of other battalions, the Battalion itself was never
quite contented with what it had accomplished.
Their next turn--May 16 to 21--was fine and hot for a couple of
mornings and regular barrages were put down on the support-line when
they were standing-to. Four men were killed and thirteen, of whom two
died later, were wounded.
They were heavily shelled in Brigade-Reserve camp on the night of
the 24th. Four officers--Captain Bence-Jones, Lieutenants Riley and
Buller, and 2nd Lieutenant Barry--wounded, one other rank killed, and
five wounded.
When they went up to relieve the 2nd Coldstream on the 25th May,
they were caught in platoon-order at the corner of Adinfer Wood, a
place of no good name to marching troops, and Lieutenant Williams was
slightly wounded. Three-quarters of an hour’s intense barrage was put
down, on front and support lines, as soon as they were fairly in,
causing several casualties.
The dawn of the 28th May began with another sharp barrage on the
front line and the dinner-hour was a continuous barrage of 5.9’s and
4.2’s directed at Battalion Headquarters. They were missed, but a
direct hit was made on an aid-post of the 2nd Grenadiers less than a
hundred yards off on our left. As a distraction, orders came in from
Brigade Headquarters the same morning that the Battalion would carry
out a raid on one of the enemy’s posts in front of the Right Company.
They were given their choice, it would seem, of two--one without
artillery-help and by day; the other with an artillery-backing and
by night. The Second in Command, Major R. Baggallay, elected for
works of darkness--or as near as might be in spite of a disgustingly
bright moon. Lieutenant C. S. O’Brien was detailed to command, with
Sergeant Regan, a forceful man, as sergeant. Only twenty-nine hands
were required, and therefore sixty volunteered, moved to this, not
by particular thirst for glory, of which the trenches soon cure
men, as by human desire to escape monotony punctuated with shells.
Extra rum-rations, too, attach to extra duties. As a raid it was a
small affair, but as a work of art, historically worth recording
in some detail. F Battery R.H.A. and 400 Battery R.F.A. supplied
the lifting barrages which duly cut the post off from succour,
while standing-barrages of 18-pounders, a barrage of 4.5’s hows.
and groups, firing concentrations at left and right enemy trenches,
completed the boxed trap. In the few minutes the affair lasted, it
is not extravagant to estimate that more stuff was expended than the
whole of our front in 1914 was allowed to send over in two days.
The post had been reconnoitred earlier in the evening and was known
not to be wired. All the raiders, with blackened faces and bayonets
and stripped uniforms that betrayed nothing, were in position on the
forming-up tape five minutes before zero. The moon forced them to
crawl undignifiedly out in twos and threes, but they lined up with
the precision of a football line, at one-yard intervals and, a minute
before zero, wriggled to within seventy yards of their quarry. At
zero the barrage came down bursting beautifully, just beyond the
enemy post, and about two seconds ere it lifted the raiders charged
in. No one had time to leave or even to make a show of resistance,
and they were back with their five prisoners, all alive and quite
identifiable, in ten minutes. The waiting stretcher-parties were not
needed and--best of all--“retaliation was slight and entirely on
Ayette.” (One is not told what Ayette thought of it.) The motive of
the raid was “to secure identity alive or dead.” But when all was
over without hurt, one single shell at morning “stand-to” (May 28)
killed 2nd Lieutenant L. H. L. Carver in a front-line trench.
They held the raided post under close observation that day and the
next (May 29), and discovered that it had been reoccupied by a
machine-gun party. As they particularly did not wish it to put out
wire or become offensive, they dosed it with constant bursts of their
own machine-gun and were rewarded by hearing groans and cries, and
our listening-patrol in No Man’s Land saw a man being carried away.
On the 31st May the enemy set to, in earnest, to shell all
reserve-lines and back-area for six hours; as well as the first-line
transport in Adinfer Wood after dark, when wounded horses are not
easy to handle. Their relief by the 2nd Grenadiers was badly delayed
by heavy shelling all the way from the front line to Monchy, but
instead of any number of casualties, which might reasonably have been
expected, the Battalion got through unscathed.
The month’s list was heavy enough as it stood. Five officers had been
wounded and three killed in action; seventeen other ranks killed,
and forty-eight wounded, and all this in the regular wear-and-tear
front-line routine with nothing more to see than a stray German cap
here and there. Twenty-two men were sent down sick, and the Diary
begins to hint at the prevalence of the “Spanish fever,” which was in
a few months to sweep France and all the world.
June was a month of peace. It opened in reserve-trenches at the
south-west end of Monchy-au-Bois, and when they next went up into
line, a new route had been surveyed round the dreaded corner of
Adinfer Wood which saved some shelling of reliefs.
On the 4th June the C.O., Lieutenant-Colonel Pollok, left the
Battalion to take over command of Sixth Corps Army School, and Major
R. R. C. Baggallay assumed command. Likewise three stray Germans were
captured opposite one of our posts.
On the 5th Major Gordon arrived from the 2nd Battalion for duty as
Second in Command.
They were relieved by the 1st King’s Regiment on the 6th June--a
somewhat hectic performance, as the front-line track-ways were
intricate, needing guides at almost every turn of them, and, for
the run-up, one guide per platoon. After which, about one in the
morning, it was discovered that the King’s had come in without their
Lewis-guns. Some divisions were in the habit of leaving and taking
over the Lewis-guns _in situ_; but the Guards Division always went
in and out of the line with their very own weapons. One cannot
delay a clear June dawn and, as the relieved Battalion had to get
off in tightly packed and horribly conspicuous lorries, and as the
last platoon could not reach those lorries till 3 A. M., it was
touch-and-go whether daylight would not reveal them “like a Sunday
School treat” to the German guns. But luck held. The last lorry was
safe in Bavincourt Wood five miles behind Monchy before day had
stripped the landscape, and the 1st King’s were left to meditate on
the wealth and variety of the Irish tongue, as delivered on empty
stomachs in whispers down packed trenches.
The Battalion billeted at Bavincourt when the 2nd H.L.I. had got out
of their quarters, and since, like the other camps, Bavincourt was
regularly bombed, made earth walls round their Nissen huts, and slits
near them to be used against ’planes or too extravagant shell-fire.
Here they stayed till the end of the month, cleaning, refitting, and
training (in open warfare principally; and, this time, they were not
to be disappointed) at Lewis gunnery, bombing, and general physical
smartening-up. When the Brigade Sports took place at Saulty they won
every event but three, and when the Corps Commander, the following
week, inspected the different ways in the divisional methods of
carrying the eight Lewis-guns of each company all on one limber, “the
method employed by the Battalion was considered the best, and all
units were ordered to copy.” They had rigged a sort of false top on
a rear-limber which accommodated all eight guns together.
A Divisional Horse-show was held on the 22nd, but there the Battalion
did not get a single prize. They hammered on at their trainings and
Brigade field-days--all with an eye to the coming open warfare, while
the “Spanish fever,” which was influenza of the post-war type, grew
steadily worse among men and officers alike. When H.R.H. the Duke
of Connaught visited Divisional Headquarters at Bavincourt Château
on the 30th June, and the Battalion had to find not only the Guard
of Honour but 160 men to line the avenue to the Château, there were
seventy officers and men down with the pest, out of less than 900.
Thirty-one men had been sent down sick, two had been killed in action
presumably by overhead bombing, for the Diary does not mention any
trench casualties, and twenty-three wounded.
The following officers joined during the month of June: Lieutenant C.
A. J. Vernon, and 2nd Lieutenants E. B. Spafford, A. E. Hutchinson,
H. R. Baldwin, G. F. Mathieson, J. A. M. Faraday, E. M. Harvey, M.C.,
and A. E. O’Connor, all on the 2nd June; Captain A. W. L. Paget on
the 4th, and 2nd Lieutenant A. H. O’Farrell on the 10th June. Second
Lieutenant C. S. O’Brien, who was in command of the model raid
already mentioned, was awarded the Military Cross on the 9th of June.
After a sporting interlude on the 3rd July, when they met the 1st
Munster Fusiliers at athletics and won everything except the hundred
yards, they relieved the 15th H.L.I. in the intermediate line near
Hendecourt. As a matter of fact, they were a sick people just then.
All Battalion Headquarters except the Commanding Officer, and all the
officers of No. 2 Company, besides officers of other companies, were
down with “Spanish fever” on going into the line. A third of the men
were also sick at one time, and apparently the enemy too, for they
hardly troubled to shell by day and let the night-reliefs go without
attention. The only drawbacks were furious summer thunderstorms
which, from time to time, flooded the trenches and woke up more
fever. The front line held here by the Guards was badly knocked about
and battered, and instructions ran that, in event of serious attack,
it would not be contested.
There is no clear evidence of the state of the Battalion’s collective
mind at this time, but from home letters it might be gathered that
the strain of the Bush and its bewilderment had given place to the
idea that great things were preparing. Battalions are very often
told tales to this effect, but they suit themselves as to the amount
that they swallow. No power on earth, for instance, could have
persuaded the veterans of the Somme, after Cambrai, that there was
“anything doing”; but as the summer of 1918 grew warmer in the wooded
and orchard country behind the Amiens-Albert line, and our lines
there held and were strengthened, and those who had been home or
on the seas reported what they had heard and seen, hope, of a kind
not raised before, grew in the talks of the men and the officers.
(“Understand, I do _not_ say there was anny of the old chat regardin’
that the war would finish next Chuseday, the way we talked in ’16.
But, whatever they said acrost the water, _we_ did not hould ’twould
endure those two more extra years all them civilians was dishin’ out
to us. _What_ did we think? That ’19 would see the finish? ’Twud be
hard to tell what we thought. Leave it this way--we was no more than
waitin’ on mercies to happen an’--’twas mericles that transpired!”)
They relieved their own brigade battalions with the punctilio proper
to their common ritual, and for the benefit of over a hundred
recruits. It was their ancient comrades under all sorts of terrors,
the 2nd Coldstream, whose guides from Boiry-St. Martin one night lost
their way in the maze of tracks and turns to the front line. But, as
meekly set forth in the Diary, when it came the Battalion’s turn to
be relieved by the 2nd Grenadiers, “all tracks had been carefully
picketed by _this_ Battalion to assist grenadier companies coming in
and ours going out.” The occasions when the guides of the 1st Irish
Guards lost their way must be looked for in the reports of others.
“Little shelling and no casualties” were the order of the fine days
till, on the 29th July, taking over from the 2nd Coldstream, they
found six platoons of the 3rd Battalion, 320th Regiment, U.S.A.,
which had come into line the night before and were attached for
instruction. These were young, keen, desperately anxious to learn,
and not at all disposed to keep their heads down.
Next day the enemy opened on them, and “were rather offensive in
their shelling.” The front platoon of the Americans, attached to
the Battalion’s front company, caught it worst, but no casualties
were reported. Then things quieted down, and a patrol of Special
Battalion Scouts, a new organization of old, trusty No Man’s
Landers, under Lieutenant Vernon as Intelligence Officer, went out
on reconnaissance, across the Cojeul valley, and wandered generally
among ancient trench-lines in bright moonlight. They found a German
party working on fresh earth, but no signs of enemy patrols on the
move in the valley. This was as well. No one wished to see that dead
ground occupied, except by our own people at the proper time.
July’s bill of casualties was the lowest of all. No officer and
but one man had been killed, and two wounded. This last was when
the enemy shelled Boiry to celebrate the arrival of the American
platoons. Seventeen men were sent down sick. Fifty other ranks were
transferred to the 1st from the 2nd Battalion, now acting as a feeder
to its elder brother.
On the 1st of August the Battalion was still in the peaceful front
line watching the six American platoons being relieved by other
six platoons from the 2nd Battalion of the 320th Regiment. It was
observed, not without some envy--“They did not know enough to save
’emselves throuble, an’ they would not ha’ done it if they had. They
was too full of this same dam’ new ould war.” Even at this immense
distance of time, one can almost hear the veterans commenting on the
zeal and excitement that filled the stale lines where, to those
young eyes from across the water, everything was as shining-new as
death.
On the 3rd August the Battalion made a reconnaissance of a
post with the idea of raiding it, which was a complete though
bloodless failure. Some of our back guns chose the exact moment
when the raiders were setting out (on the sure information of a
scouting-party, who had just come in) to wipe up the unconscious
little garrison and their machine-gun, and woke the night with heavy
shell dropped _in_ our own wire and in front of our objective.
Naturally nothing could be done, and the affair was called off
till the next evening (4th August), when a “crawling-party,” under
Lieutenant Vernon, of a corporal and six men went out along the same
route that the scouts had taken the night before. They were expected
and welcomed with enthusiasm. A sentry gave the alarm, a little party
ran out to cut them off, the machine-gun (a heavy one), which had not
betrayed itself before, promptly opened fire, but wide of our prone
men, and a German, as promptly, hove bombs in the wrong direction.
All this, says the report, happened as soon as some one inside the
post gave “short, decisive orders.” Then Véry lights flared without
stint, and, being some way from home, with much unlocated wire
between, the raiders got away swiftly and safely. The tracks of the
scouts through the long grass the night before had put the enemy
on the alert. But if our guns had only held their tongues on that
occasion, our coup might have been brought off. Instead of which, the
enemy woke up and shelled a front company for a quarter of an hour
with 60-pounders before he could be induced to go to bed.
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE END