Division) took over from them and the Grenadiers and got into
position for their attack the next morning. An early and obtrusive
moon made it difficult to fetch away the front-posts, and though
the leading company reached the Selle on its way back at a little
after five, the full relief was not completed till half-past nine,
when they had to get across-country to the main road and pick up the
lorries that took them to “very good billets” at Carnières. Their
own Details had seen to that; and they arrived somewhere in the
early morning “beat and foot-sore,” but without a single casualty in
relieving. Their losses for the whole affair up to the time of their
relief were one officer (Captain and Adjutant J. B. Keenan) wounded
in the face by a piece of shell, the sole casualty at Battalion
Headquarters; ten other ranks killed; forty-two wounded, of whom two
afterwards died, and two missing--fifty-five in all.
The companies were officered as follows:
_No. 1 Company_
Capt. A. W. L. Paget, M.C.
_No. 2 Company_
Lieut. E. Harvey, M.C.
_No. 3 Company_
Capt. G. L. St. C. Bambridge.
_No. 4 Company_
2nd Lieut. O. R. Baldwin.
_Battalion Headquarters_
Major A. F. Gordon, M.C.
Capt. J. B. Keenan.
Capt. C. A. J. Vernon.
Cleaning up began the next day where fine weather in “most delightful
billets” was cheered by the news that the Second Division’s attack
on Vertain had been a great success. In those days they looked no
further than their neighbours on either side.
Every battle, as had been pointed out, leaves its own impression. St.
Python opened with a wild but exciting chase in the wet and dark,
which, at first, seemed to lead straight into Germany. It ended, as
it were, in the sudden rising of a curtain of grey, dank light that
struck all the actors dumb and immobile for an enormously long and
hungry stretch of time, during which they mostly stared at what they
could see of the sky above them, while the air filled with dirt and
clods, and single shots pecked and snarled round every stone of each
man’s limited skyline; the whole ending in a blur of running water
under starlight (that was when they recrossed the Selle River), and
confused memories of freezing together in lumps in lorries, followed
by a dazed day of “shell-madness,” when all ears and eyes were
intolerably overburdened with echoes and pictures, and men preferred
to be left alone. But they were washed and cleaned and reclothed
with all speed, and handed over to their company officers for the
drill that chases off bad dreams. The regimental sergeant-major got
at them, too, after their hair was cut, and the massed brigade drums
played in the village square of Carnières, and, ere the end of the
month, inter-company football was in full swing.
A draft of ninety-one other ranks joined for duty on the 22nd
October. Lieutenant-Colonel Baggallay, M.C., came back from leave
and, in the absence of the Brigadier, assumed command of the
Brigade, and Captain D. W. Gunston joined.
THE BREAK-UP
On the last day of October they moved from Carnières to St. Hilaire
and took over the 3rd Grenadiers’ billets in the factory there, all
of which, house for house, officers and men, was precisely as before
the attack on the 20th, ten days ago. But those ten days had borne
the British armies on that front beyond Valenciennes in the north to
within gun-shot of Le Quesnoy in the centre, and to the Sambre Canal,
thirty miles away, in the south. Elsewhere, Lille had been evacuated,
the lower half of western Flanders cleared, from the Dutch frontier
to Tournai, while almost every hour brought up from one or other of
the French and American armies, on the Meuse and the Argonne, fresh
tallies of abandoned stores and guns, and of prisoners gathered in
rather than captured. Behind this welter, much as the glare of a mine
reveals the façade of a falling town-hall, came word of the collapse
of Bulgaria, Turkey, and Austria. The whole of the herd of the Hun
Tribes were on the move, uneasy and afraid. It remained so to shatter
the mass of their retiring forces in France that they should be in
no case to continue any semblance of further war without complete
destruction. Were they permitted to slink off unbroken, they might
yet make stand behind some shorter line, or manufacture a semblance
of a “face” before their own people that would later entail fresh
waste and weariness on the world.[9]
The weather and the destruction they had left in their wake was, as
on the Somme, aiding them now at every turn, in spite of all our
roadmen and engineers could do. Our airmen took toll of them and
their beasts as they retreated along the congested ways; but this was
the hour when the delays, divided councils and specially the strikes
of past years had to be paid for, and the giant bombing-planes that
should have taught fear and decency far inside the German frontiers
were not ready.
A straight drive from the west on to the German lateral
communications promised the quickest return. It was laid in the hands
of the First, Third, and Fifth Armies to send that attack home, and
with the French and American pressure from the south, break up the
machine past repair.
Men, to-day, say and believe that they knew it would be the last
battle of the war, but, at the time, opinions varied; and the
expectations of the rank and file were modest. The thing had gone
on so long that it seemed the order of life; and, though the enemy
everywhere fell back, yet he had done so once before, and over
very much the same semi-liquid muck as we were floundering in that
autumn’s end. “The better the news, the worse the chance of a
knock,” argued the veterans, while the young hands sent out with
high assurance, at draft-parades, that the war was on its last legs,
discovered how the machine-gun-fenced rear of retirements was no
route-march. (“There was them that came from Warley shouting, ye’ll
understand; and there was them that came saying nothing at all, and
liking it no more than that; but I do not remember any one of us
looked to be out of it inside six months. No--not even when we was
dancing into Maubeuge. We thought Jerry wanted to get his wind.”)
On the 4th November, one week before the end, twenty-six British
divisions moved forward on a thirty-mile front from Oisy to north of
Valenciennes, the whole strength of all their artillery behind them.
The Guards’ position had been slightly shifted. Instead of working
south of Le Quesnoy, the Division was put in a little north of the
town, on the banks of the river Rhônelle, between the Sixty-second
Division on their right and the Forty-second on their left. The
Battalion had marched from St. Hilaire, in the usual small fine rain,
on the 2nd November to billets in Bermerain and bivouacs near by.
It meant a ten-mile tramp of the pre-duckboard era, in the midst of
mired horse- and lorry-transport, over country where the enemy had
smashed every bridge and culvert, blocked all roads and pulling-out
places with mine-craters, and sown houses, old trenches, and dug-outs
with fanciful death-traps. The land was small-featured and full
of little hills, so heavily hedged and orcharded that speculative
battalions could be lost in it in twenty minutes. There were coveys,
too, of French civils, rescued and evacuated out of the villages
around, wandering against the stream of east-bound traffic. These
forlorn little groups, all persuaded that the war was over and that
they could return to their houses to-morrow, had to be shifted and
chaperoned somehow through the chaos; but the patience and goodwill
of our people were unending.
The wet day closed with a conference at Brigade Headquarters, but
the enemy had thrown out our plan for action on that sector by
thoughtlessly retiring on both flanks of the Division, as well as a
little on the front of it, and final orders were not fixed till after
midnight on the 3rd November.
The 1st and 2nd Guards Brigade were to attack, the 3rd in reserve.
Of the 1st Brigade, the 2nd Coldstream would take the line as far as
the first objective; the 2nd Grenadiers would then come through and
carry on to the next line, the Irish Guards in support. The Brigade’s
assembly area was across the Rhônelle River, east of the long and
straggling village of Villers-Pol, on the Jenlain-Le Quesnoy road.
Zero was fixed for 7.20. The Battalion marched from Bermerain, and
met its first enemy shell as it was going under the Valenciennes
railway embankment. What remained of the roads were badly congested
with troops, and one gets the idea that the Staff work was casual.
To begin with, the Battalion found the 3rd Grenadiers and the 1st
Scots Guards between themselves and the 2nd Grenadiers, which was not
calculated to soothe any C.O. desirous of keeping his appointment.
Apparently they got through the Scots Guards; but when they reached
the Rhônelle, its bridge being, of course, destroyed, and the R.E.
working like beavers to mend it, they had to unship their Lewis-guns
from the limbers, tell the limbers to come on when the bridge was
usable, and pass the guns over by hand. While thus engaged the Scots
Guards caught them up, went through them triumphantly, made exactly
the same discovery that the Irish had done, and while they in turn
were wrestling with their limbers, the Irish, who had completed their
unshipping, went through them once more, and crossed the Rhônelle
on the heels of the last man of the 3rd Grenadiers--“one at a time,
being assisted up the bank by German prisoners.” By the mercy of the
Saints, who must have been kept busy all night, the shelling on the
bridge and its approaches ceased while that amazing procession got
over. They were shelled as they reformed on the top of the steep
opposite bank, but “by marvellous good-luck no casualties”; got into
artillery formation; were shelled again, and this time hit, and
long-range machine-gun fire met them over the next crest of ground.
It was all ideal machine-gun landscape. The 2nd Grenadiers, whom
they were supporting, had been held up by low fire from the village
of Wagnies-le-Petit on their left, a little short of the first
objective, which was the road running from Wagnies, south to Frasnoy.
The Battalion dug in behind them where it was, and after an hour
or so the enemy opened fire with one solitary, mad trench-mortar.
Not more than a dozen rounds were sent over, and these, very
probably, because the weapon happened to lie under their hands, and
was used before being abandoned. And luck had it that this chance
demonstration should kill Lieutenant A. L. Bain (“Andy” Bain), who
had joined for duty not a week ago. He was the last officer killed in
the Battalion, and one of the best. Lieutenant F. S. L. Smith, M.C.,
also was wounded. They stayed in their scratch-holes till late in
the afternoon, as the troops of the Forty-second Division on their
left were held up too, but the 2nd Guards Brigade on their right
gradually worked forward. Some of their divisional field-guns came
up and shelled Wagnies-le-Petit into silence, and at half-past four
orders arrived for the Battalion to go through the 2nd Grenadiers
and continue at large into the dusk that was closing on the blind,
hedge-screened country. There was no particular opposition beyond
stray shells, but the boggy-banked Aunelle had to be crossed on
stretchers, through thick undergrowth, in a steep valley. Everything
after that seemed to be orchards, high hedges, and sunk and raised
roads, varied with soft bits of cultivation, or hopelessly muddled-up
cul-de-sacs of farm-tracks. The companies played blind-man’s buff
among these obstacles in the pitch-dark, as they hunted alternately
for each other and the troops on their flanks. There was “very
heavy shelling” on the three most advanced companies as well as on
Brigade Headquarters throughout the night. The men dug in where they
were; and casualties, all told, came to about twenty. Very early
on the 5th November the 3rd Guards Brigade passed through them and
continued the advance. Preux-au-Sart, the village behind them, had
been taken by the 2nd Brigade the evening and the night before, so
the Battalion “came out of its slits” and went back to billet in its
relieved and rejoicing streets, where “the inhabitants on coming out
of their cellars in the morning were delighted to find British troops
again, and showed the greatest cordiality.” If rumour be true, they
also showed them how easily their Hun conquerors had been misled
and hoodwinked in the matter of good vintages buried and set aside
against this very day. “The men were very comfortable.”
The fact that Austria was reported out of the war did not make the
next day any less pleasant, even though it rained, and “all the
windows in the Battalion Headquarters were broken by one shell.”
Battalion Headquarters had come through worse than broken glass in
its time, but was now beginning to grow fastidious.
On the afternoon of the 7th November the Battalion marched to Bavai
over muddy roads in a drizzle. Even then, men have said, there
was no general belief in the end of Armageddon. They looked for
a lull, perhaps; very possibly some sort of conference and waste
of time which would give the enemy breath for fresh enterprise.
A few, however, insist that the careful destruction of the roads
and railway-bridges and the indifference of the prisoners as they
poured in warned them of the real state of affairs. (“It looked as
if the Jerries had done all the harm they could think of, and were
chucking it--like boys caught robbing an orchard. There wasn’t an
atom of dignity or decency about any of ’em. Just dirt and exhausted
Jerrydom.”) What the Battalion felt most was having to make detours
round broken bridges, and to dig ramps in mine-craters on the roads
to get their Lewis-guns across. They jettisoned their second-line
transport at a convenient château outside Bavai on this account;
found that there were no arrangements for billeting in the town, so
made their own, and, while Bavai was being shelled, got into houses
and again were “very comfortable.” The 2nd Brigade were in the front
line on the railway, and next day the 1st Brigade were to lead and
capture Maubeuge, seven miles down a road which cut across the line
of their earlier stages in the retreat from Mons, and three miles, as
a shell ranges, from the village of Malplaquet.
They began their last day, half an hour after midnight, marching
“as a battalion” out of Bavai with their Lewis-gun limbers. Twice
they were slightly shelled; once at least they had to unpack and
negotiate more mine-craters at cross-roads. It was a populous world
through which they tramped, and all silently but tensely awake--a
world made up of a straight, hard road humped above the level of the
fields in places, rather like the Menin road when it was young, but
with untouched tiled houses alongside. Here and there one heard the
chatter of a machine-gun, as detached and irrelevant as the laugh
of an idiot. It would cease, and a single field-gun would open as
on some private quarrel. Then silence, and a suspicion, born out of
the darkness, that the road was mined. Next, orders to the companies
to spread themselves in different directions in the dark, to line
ditches and the like for fear of attack. Then an overtaking, at
wrecked cross-roads, of some of the 2nd Brigade, who reported patrols
of the 3rd Grenadiers had pushed on into Maubeuge without opposition,
and that the rest of that battalion was gone on. Just before dawn,
No. 4 Company of the Irish, marching on a road parallel to the
highway, ran into a company of Germans retiring. The Diary says: “A
short sharp fight ensued in which five of the enemy were wounded
and twelve captured, the rest getting off in the dark.” But there
is a legend (it may have grown with the years) that the two bodies
found themselves suddenly almost side by side on converging tracks,
and that the Irish, no word given, threw back to the instincts of
Fontenoy--faced about, front-rank kneeling, rear-rank standing, and
in this posture destroyed all that company. It was a thing that might
well have come about darkling in a land scattered with odds and
ends of drifting, crazed humanity. No. 2 Company solemnly reported
the capture of two whole prisoners just after they had crossed the
railway in the suburbs of Maubeuge, which they passed through on the
morning of the 9th, and by noon were duly established and posted,
company by company, well to the east of it. No. 2 Company lay in
the village of Assevant, with pickets on the broken bridge over the
river there, an observation-line by day and all proper supports; No.
4 Company in posts on the road and down to the river, and Nos. 1 and
3 in reserve; Yeomanry and Corps Cyclists out in front as though the
war were eternal.
AFTER THE ARMISTICE
And, thus dispersed, after a little shelling of Assevant during the
night, the Irish Guards received word that “an Armistice was declared
at 11 A. M. this morning, November 11.”
Men took the news according to their natures. Indurated pessimists,
after proving that it was a lie, said it would be but an interlude.
Others retired into themselves as though they had been shot, or went
stiffly off about the meticulous execution of some trumpery detail
of kit-cleaning. Some turned round and fell asleep then and there;
and a few lost all holds for a while. It was the appalling new
silence of things that soothed and unsettled them in turn. They did
not realize till all sounds of their trade ceased, and the stillness
stung in their ears as soda-water stings on the palate, how entirely
these had been part of their strained bodies and souls. (“It felt
like falling through into nothing, ye’ll understand. Listening for
what wasn’t there, and tryin’ not to shout when you remembered for
why.”) Men coming up from Details Camp, across old “unwholesome”
areas, heard nothing but the roar of the lorries on which they had
stolen their lift, and rejoiced with a childish mixture of fear as
they topped every unscreened rise that was now mere scenery such
as tourists would use later. To raise the head, without thought of
precaution against what might be in front or on either flank, into
free, still air was the first pleasure of that great release. To lie
down that night in a big barn beside unscreened braziers, with one’s
smiling companions who talked till sleep overtook them, and, when
the last happy babbler had dropped off, to hear the long-forgotten
sound of a horse’s feet trotting evenly on a hard road under a full
moon, crowned all that had gone before. Each man had but one thought
in those miraculous first hours: “I--even I myself, here--have come
through the War!” To scorn the shelter of sunken roads, hedges, walls
or lines of trees, and to extend in unmartial crowds across the whole
width of a pavé, were exercises in freedom that he arrived at later.
“We cannot realize it at all.” ... “So mad with joy we don’t feel yet
what it all means.” The home letters were all in this strain.
The Battalion was relieved on the 12th November by the 2nd Grenadiers
and billeted in the Faubourg de Mons. All Maubeuge was hysterical
with its emotions of release, and well provided with wines which,
here as elsewhere, had somehow missed the German nose. The city
lived in her streets, and kissed everybody in khaki, that none should
complain. But the Battalion was not in walking-out order, and so had
to be inspected rigorously. Morning-drill outside billets next day
was in the nature of a public demonstration--to the scandal of the
grave sergeants!
On the 14th a great thanksgiving-service was held in the Cathedral
for all the world, the Battalion providing the Guard of Honour at the
Altar, and lining the Place d’Armes at the presentation of a flag
by the Mayor of Maubeuge to the Major-General. The massed drums of
the Division played in the square in the afternoon, an event to be
remembered as long as the Battalion dinner of the evening. They were
all route-marched next morning for an hour and a half to steady them,
and on the 16th, after dinner, set off in freezing weather for the
first stage of their journey to Cologne. It ran _via_ Bettignies and
then to Villers-Sire-Nicole, a matter of five and a half miles.
On the 17th they crossed the Belgian frontier at Givet and reached
Binche through a countryside already crowded with returning English,
French, Italian, and Belgian prisoners. One Diary notes them like
migrating birds, “all hopping along the road, going due west.” Binche
mobbed the drums as one man and woman when they played in the town
at Retreat, but it was worse at Charleroi on the 19th, where they
could hardly force their way through the welcoming crowds. The place
was lit from end to end, and the whole populace shouted for joy at
deliverance.
Now that they had returned as a body to civilization, it was needful
they should be dressed, and they were paraded for an important
inspection of great-coats, and, above all, gloves. That last, and the
fact that belts, when walking out, were worn _over_ the great-coats
were sure signs that war was done, and His Majesty’s Foot Guards
had come into their own. But they found time at Charleroi, among
more pleasant duties, to arrest three German soldiers disguised as
civilians.
On the 23rd they left for Sart-St.-Laurent, whose Mayor, beneath a
vast Belgian flag, met and escorted them into the town. The country
changed as they moved on from flat coal-districts to untouched hills
and woods. On the 24th they picked up a dump of eighty-four guns of
all calibres, handed over according to the terms of the Armistice;
passed through a tract of heavily wired country, which was “evidently
intended for the Meuse Line that the Germans were to have fallen back
on”; and a little later crossed (being the first of the Division to
do so) the steeply banked, swiftly running Meuse by a pontoon bridge.
Next their road climbed into Nanine, one of the loveliest villages,
they thought, they had ever seen. But their hearts were soft in those
days, and all that world of peace seemed good. They dared not halt
at Sorinne-la-Longue the next day, as the place was infected with
influenza (“Spanish fever”), so pushed on to Lesves, and on the 26th
November to Sorée, where was another wayside dump of thirty or forty
Hun guns. It is noteworthy that the discarded tools of their trade
frankly bored them. Where a Hun, under like circumstances, would have
re-triumphed and called on his servile Gods, these islanders (of
whom almost a half were now English) were afflicted with a curious
restlessness and strong desire to get done with the work in hand. All
their world was under the same reaction. They had to wait at Sorée
for three days, as supplies were coming up badly. Indeed, on the
28th November, the Diary notes bitterly that “for the first time in
the war the supplies failed to arrive. The Quartermaster managed to
improvise breakfasts for the Battalion.” It was not all the fault of
bad roads or the dispersion of the troops. The instant the strain was
taken off, there was a perceptible slackening everywhere, most marked
in the back-areas, on the clerical and forwarding sides. Every one
wanted to get home at once, and worked with but half a mind; which,
also, is human nature.
They were on the road again by December 5 with the rest of their
brigade, and reached Méan in the afternoon over muddy roads. By the
6th they were at Villers-St.-Gertrude hill-marching through beautiful
scenery, which did not amuse them, because, owing to the state of
communications, supplies were delayed again. So, on the 8th December
at Lierneux, fifteen miles from Villers-St.-Gertrude, another halt
was called for another three days, while company officers, homesick
as their men, drilled them in the winter dirt. On the 11th they
crossed the German frontier line at Recht, and the drums played the
Battalion over to the “Regimental March.” (“But, ye’ll understand,
we was _all_ wet the most of that time and fighting with the mud
an’ our boots. ’Twas Jerry’s own weather the minute we set foot in
his country, and we none of us felt like conquerors. We was just
dhrippin’ Micks.”) At Vielsalm, almost the last village outside
Germany, they picked up a draft of sixty men to share with them the
horrors of peace ahead, and a supply-system gone to bits behind them.