daily allowance of live bombs increased to sixty. Drums and fifes
had been sent out from the Regimental Orderly-Room, together with a
few selected drummers from Warley. The Battalion promptly increased
the number from its own ranks and formed a full corps of drums and
fifes, which paraded for the first time on the 23rd November, when
they exchanged billets with the 1st Coldstream at Merville. The
first tune played was the Regimental March and the second “Brian
Boru,” which goes notably to the drums. (In those days the Battalion
was overwhelmingly Irish in composition.) Captain the Hon. H. R.
Alexander, who had been in hospital with influenza for a week,
rejoined on the 23rd as second in command.
Merville was a mixed, but not too uncomfortable, experience. The
Battalion with the rest of the Guards Division was placed temporarily
at the disposal of the Forty-fifth Division as a reserve, a position
which meant neither being actually in the trenches nor out of them.
They were beyond reach of rifle-fire and in a corner not usually
attended to by artillery. There was a roof to the officers’ mess,
and some of the windows did not lack glass. They ate off tables with
newspapers for cloth and enjoyed the luxury of chairs. The men lived
more or less in trenches, but were allowed out, like well-watched
poultry, at night or on misty mornings. All this was interspersed
with squad drill, instruction, baths, and a Battalion concert;
while, in view of possibilities that might develop, Captain Alexander
and the four company commanders “reconnoitred certain routes from
Merville to Neuve Chapelle.” But every one knew at heart that there
was nothing doing or to be done except to make oneself as comfortable
as might be with all the blankets that one could steal, at night, and
all the food one could compass by day. Leave was going on regularly.
Captain and Adjutant J. S. N. FitzGerald left on the 26th for ten
days and Lieutenant A. Pym took over his duties. When adjutants can
afford to go on leave, life ought to be easy.
Then they shifted to Laventie in a full blizzard, relieving the 2nd
Scots Guards in Brigade Reserve. Their own Brigade, the 2nd, was
taking over from the 3rd Guards Brigade, and Captain Alexander, who
not unnaturally caught a fresh attack of influenza later, spent the
afternoon reconnoitring the trenches which he would have to occupy
on the 28th. The No Man’s Land to be held in front of them was marsh
and ditch, impassable save when frozen. It carried no marks in the
shape of hedges or stumps to guide men out or back on patrol, and
its great depth—three hundred yards in places from wire to wire—made
thorough ferreting most difficult. In this war, men with small-arms
that carried twenty-eight hundred yards, hardly felt safe unless they
were within half bow-shot of their enemy.
The Battalion’s entry into their forlorn heritage was preceded by
a small house-warming in the shape of an artillery bombardment on
our side. This, they knew, by doleful experience, would provoke
retaliation, and the relief was accordingly delayed till dark, which
avoided all casualties. Their general orders were to look out for
likely spots whence to launch “small enterprises” against the enemy.
It meant patrols wandering out in rain and a thaw that had followed
the stiff frost, and doing their best to keep direction by unassisted
intellect and a compass. (“Ye’ll understand that, in those days,
once you was out on your belly in that muck, ye knew no more than
a babe in a blanket. Dark, wet and windy it was, with big, steep,
deep ditches waiting on ye every yard. All _we_ took of it was a
stiff neck, and all _we_ heard was Jerry gruntin’ in his pigstye!”)
A patrol of No. 4 Company under Lieutenant Brew managed to get up
within ear-shot of the German wire on the night of the 29th, crossing
a drain by a providential plank. While they lay close, listening to
the Huns hammering stakes in their trenches, they saw a German patrol
slip home by the very bridge which they themselves had used. Hope
ran high of catching the same party next night in the same place,
but it rained torrentially, and they found it impossible to move
a man out across the bog. They spent their time baling their own
trenches as these filled, and were happy to wade only ankle-deep.
But their professional lives were peaceful. Though the enemy shelled
mechanically at intervals not a soul was even wounded when on the
30th November they came back for the short rest in billets in
Laventie.
On their return to the “Red House” where they relieved the 1st
Coldstream on the 2nd December, their night patrols discovered,
apparently for the first time, that the enemy held their front line
very thinly and their support in strength. As a matter of later
observation, it was established that, on that sector, the front
line mostly withdrew after dark and slept at the back till our
unsympathetic guns stirred them up. Our custom seemed always to crowd
the front line both with men and responsibility.
The main of the Battalion’s work was simple aquatics; draining off
of waters that persisted in running uphill, and trying to find
the bottom of fluid and unstable ditches where things once lost
disappeared for ever. They had not yet seen a man choking in mud, and
found it rather hard to believe that such things could happen. But
the Somme was to convince them.
The organization of the Front evolved itself behind them as time
passed, and batteries and battalions came to understand each other.
Too much enemy shelling on a trench led to a telephone-call, and
after a decent interval of from two to six minutes (the record was
one minute fifty-five seconds) our batteries would signify their
displeasure by a flight of perhaps thirty shells at one drench,
or several separate salvoes. As a rule that was enough, and this,
perhaps, led to the legend that the enemy artillery was weakening.
And, with organisation, came the inevitable floods of paper-work that
Authority insists on. There was a conference of the four C.O.’s of
the Brigade on the subject on the 6th December, where suggestions
were invited for “reducing correspondence” and “for saving company
officers as much as possible,” which seemed, like many other
conferences, to have ended in more paper-work and resolutions on
“the importance of keeping a logbook in the trenches by each company
officer.” The logbook handed over by every company commander to his
relief is essential to the continuity of trench-war life, though nine
tenths of the returns demanded seemed pure waste.
Yet there is another point of view. (“Looking back on it, one sees
that that everlasting having to pull yourself together to fill in
tosh about raspberry jam, or how men ought to salute, steadies one a
good deal. We cursed it at the time, though!”)
On the 7th December, patrols reported the enemy with full trenches
working on their front-line wire, upon which our artillery cut it
up, and the enemy turned out in the evening to repair damages. The
local Battery B, 76th Brigade R.F.A., was asked “to fire again.” They
fired two salvoes at 10.15 P. M., and two more one hour later. One
Lewis-gun of No. 1 Company “also fired at this point.” So simple and
homœopathic was war in that age!
On the 8th their sister battalion took over from them at Red House,
in a relief completed in ninety minutes, and the drums of the 1st
Battalion played the companies through Laventie, while the drums of
the 2nd played them into billets at La Gorgue. For the first time
since they had been in France all the officers of both battalions
messed together, in one room, for all the time that they were there;
and, as supplies from friends at home were ample and varied, the
tales of some of the meals at La Gorgue endure to this day.
The system of the Guards’ company training always allowed large
latitude to company officers as long as required results were
obtained; and they fell back on it when bombers and Lewis-gun teams
were permanently added to the organization. With the reservation
that bombing-practice with live bombs was only to take place under
the battalion bombing officer, company commanders were made entirely
responsible for the training both of their bombers and Lewis-gunners.
It made an almost immediate difference in the handiness and
suppleness of the teams, and woke up inter-company competition. The
teams, it may have been pointed out, were surprisingly keen and
intelligent. One officer, finding a nucleus of ex-taxi drivers among
his drafts, treated the Lewis-gun as a simple internal-combustion
engine, which simile they caught on to at once and conveyed it in
their own words and gestures to their slower comrades.
On the 12th December, the Battalion was paraded while the C.O.
presented the ribbon of the D.C.M. to Lance-Corporal Quinn for
gallantry in Chalk-Pit Wood at the battle of Loos, that now seemed to
all of them a century distant.
On the 14th they moved to a more southerly sector to take over
from the Welsh Guards, and to pick up a company of the 13th
R.W. Fusiliers; one platoon being attached to each company for
instruction, and the Fusiliers B.H.Q. messing with their own. There
is no record what the Welshmen thought of their instructors or they
of them, except the fragment of a tale of trench-fatigues during
which, to the deep disgust of the Irish, who are not loudly vocal by
temperament, “the little fellas sang like canary-birds.”
Their new lines, reached across mud, from Pont du Hem, were the
old, well-known, and not so badly looked-after stretch from North
Moated Grange Street to Erith Street at the lower end of the endless
Tilleloy Road which faced south-easterly towards the Aubers
Ridge, then held by the enemy. The relief was finished without
demonstrations beyond a few shrapnel launched at one of the posts,
Fort Erith.
On the 15th 2nd Lieutenant Brew went out with a patrol to investigate
some mine-craters in front of the German firing-line and found
them empty, but woke up an enemy machine-gun in the background.
Other patrols reported like slackness, but when they tried to take
advantage of it, they met the same gun awake, and came home upon
their bellies. The ground being so flat, however, the German machines
could not get well down to their work of shaving the landscape,
and fifteen inches will clear a prostrate man if he lies close. A
snipers’ team had been organised, and the deep peace of that age
may be seen from the fact that, at the end of a quiet day, the only
claim put in was for “one victim who was passing a gap between two
mine-craters.”
They were relieved by the 1st Coldstream on the 16th December and
went into billets, not more than two miles back, at Pont du Hem and
La Flinque Farm, with scattered platoons and single officers holding
posts in the neighbourhood of the Rue du Bacquerot. A draft of
forty-seven men, which should have been fifty, turned up that same
day. The odd three had contrived to mislay themselves as only men on
draft can, but were gathered in later with marvellous explanations at
the tips of their ready tongues. Officers sent out from Warley also
got lost _en route_, to the wrath of company commanders clamouring
for them. One writer home complains: “it seems that they are waylaid
by some unknown person at the base and sent off for quite long
periods to take charge of mysterious parties which dig trenches
somewhere unknown.” This was the origin, though they knew it not
at the Front, of the divisional entrenching battalion—a hated and
unpopular necessity.
On the 18th December, Captain Eric Greer joined on transfer from
the 3rd Reserve Battalion as Second in Command, and a couple of
companies (Nos. 1 and 2) had to start the relief at Winchester Farm
by daylight. The authorities had ordered the trenches should be kept
clear that evening for a number of gas-cylinders to be placed in the
parapets. It meant running the heavy cylinders up a light, man-power
railway to the front line, when they were slung on poles, carried to
the recesses that had been dug out for them, and there buried beneath
sand-bags. (“There was all sorts and manners of gadgets made and done
in those days. We was told they was all highly scientific. All us
Micks ever took by any of them was fatigues. No! We did _not_ like
them gas-tanks.”)
The next day a shell lit within five yards of a recess apparently
stocked with extra gas-tanks. The officer of No. 2 Company at once
telephoned for retaliation. “After a slight lapse during which the
gunners shelled our trench, and were told by the O.C. No. 2 that
that was not _exactly_ what he wanted, the retaliation was quite
satisfactory.” They could easily count the number of shells that fell
in those days and piously entered them in the company logbooks.
Here follows an appreciation, compiled at first-hand, of their
surroundings, and the methods by which they kept themselves more or
less dry. “Drains are a very difficult problem as there is probably
only a fall of three feet in as many miles behind the line. The
system is that the men drain the water in the actual trenches or
redoubts into a drain slightly in rear. Then there are a number
of drains, two or three per company-area, running straight back.
Three men are told off to these and do nothing but patrol them,
deepening and clearing where necessary.... From about two hundred
yards in rear, the R.E. take and run off the water by larger drains
and ditches already in existence into a river some miles in rear.
At least that is the theory. The line is now wonderfully dry to
live in as the profuse supply of trench-boards has made an enormous
difference. Thus men can walk dry-shod up Winchester Street, our
main communication-trench, on a path of floor-boards built up on
piles over, perhaps, three feet of water. Of course, it hits both
ways, as you are taken out of the water, but also out of the ground
above your waist, and parapets must be built accordingly.... The
front line, which is also the only one, as the labour of keeping it
habitable absorbs every available man, is composed of a sand-bag
redoubt about seven or eight feet high, and very thick. It is
recessed and traversed. About ten or fifteen yards in rear runs the
‘traffic trench,’ a boarded path which sometimes runs along the top
of black slime, and sometimes turns into a bridge on piles over
smelly ponds. Between the redoubt and traffic-trench, rising out of
slime, are a weird collection of hovels about three feet high, of
sand-bags and tin. They are the local equivalents of ‘dug-outs’—cover
from rain but not from shells. Everywhere there are rats.”
Having added gas to their local responsibilities, they suffered
from the enthusiasms of the specialists attached to, and generals
who believed in, the filthy weapon. As soon as possible after
the cylinders, which they feared and treated with the greatest
respect, were in position, all the talk was of a real and poisonous
gas-attack. They were told on the 19th December that such a one would
be launched by them on the first night the wind should favour it,
and that their patrols would specially reconnoitre the ground that,
by the blessing of fortune, the gas would waft across. Then the moon
shone viciously and all special patrols were ordered off.
On the 20th the Gunner Officer, Major Young, paid a breakfast call,
with the pleasant news that he was going to open an old repaired gap
in the enemy wire, and cut two new ones, which, on the established
principle of “throwing stones at little brother,” meant the infantry
would be “retaliated on.” He did it. The C.O.’s of the Battalion
and the 1st Coldstream, and the Brigade-Major, made a most careful
periscope reconnaissance of the ground, with particular attention
to the smoking gaps that Major Young had blasted, and arranged for
a joint reconnaissance by the 1st Coldstream and 2nd Irish Guards
for that very evening. The two subalterns told off to that job
attended the conference. Second Lieutenant Brew, who had gifts
that way, represented our side, for the affair naturally became an
inter-regimental one from the first, and 2nd Lieutenant Green the
Coldstream. That afternoon everybody conferred—the brigade commanders
of the 2nd and 3rd Guards Brigade, with their Staffs, all four C.O.’s
of the 2nd Brigade, and the C.O. of the 1st Welsh Guards; and between
them they arranged the attack in detail, with a simplicity that in
later years almost made some of the survivors of that conference weep
when they were reminded of it. The gas was to be turned on at first,
while machine-guns and Lewis-guns would make a joyous noise together
for five minutes to drown the roar of its escape. The artillery
would start heavy fire “at points in rear” simultaneously with
the noisy gas. At five minutes past Zero machine-guns would stop,
and the artillery would slow down. But thirty-five minutes later
they would “quicken up.” Three quarters of an hour after Zero “gas
would be turned off,” and, five minutes after that, the attacking
parties would start “with gas-helmets on their heads but rolled up”
and, penetrating the enemy’s second line, would “do all possible
damage before returning.” Then they arranged to reassemble next day,
after inspecting the ground. The Battalion was relieved that same
evening by the 1st Coldstream, whom they expected to have for their
confederates in the attack, and lay up at Pont du Hem.
On the 21st December, Brew, who had been out the night before
reconnoitring with Green of the Coldstream, started on yet another
investigation of the enemy wire at 3 A. M. They got right up to
the wire, were overlooked by a German patrol, and spotted by a
machine-gun on their way home. “But they lay down and the bullets
went over them.” There was another conference at Winchester House in
the afternoon, where all details were revised, and the day ended with
a message to the troops who would be called upon, that the “attack
had been greatly modified.”
On the 22nd December the notion of following up the gas by a
two-company attack was washed out, and the assailants cut down to
a select party, under the patient but by now slightly bewildered
Brew, of bombers and bludgeoneers, who were to enter the German
trench after three quarters of an hour of mixed gas and artillery,
“collect information and do all possible damage.” If the gas
and guns had produced the desired effect, five more bombers and
bludgeonists, and a machine-gunner with one crowbar would follow as
a demolishing-party, paying special attention to telephones, the
bowels of machine-guns and, which was really unkind, drains. The R.E.
supplied the bludgeons “of a very handy variety,” and everything
was present and correct except the favouring breeze. (“And, all the
while, ye’ll understand, our parapet stuffed with these dam gas-tanks
the way they could be touched off by any whizz-bang that was visiting
there, and the whole Brigade and every one else praying the wind ’ud
hold off long enough for some one else to have the job of uncorking
the bottle. Gas is no thrick for beginners!”)
They called the attack off once more, and the Battalion, with only
one night left of their tour, in which to “uncork the bottle,” wired
to the 1st Coldstream at Pont du Hem, “Latest betting, Coldstream
2 to 1 on (T. and O.) Irish Guards, 6 to 4 against.” Back came the
prompt answer, “Although the first fence is a serious obstacle,
it should not take more than twenty-four hours with such fearless
leapers. Best luck and a safe return. No betting here. All broke. We
think we have caught a spy.” He turned out to be a perfectly innocent
Frenchman “whose only offence was, apparently, that he existed in the
foreground at the moment when a bombing-school, some miles in rear,
elected to send up some suspicious blue lights.”
On the 23rd December, after a very quiet night, an entirely new plan
of attack came in from an unnamed specialist who suggested that the
gas (words cannot render their weariness of the accursed thing at
this stage!) should be let off quite quietly without any artillery
fire or unusual small-arm demonstration, at about four in the
morning, when the odds were most of the enemy would be asleep, and
that of those on duty few would ever have heard the sound of escaping
gas. As the expert noted, “It requires a quick decision and a firm
determination to give an alarm at 4 A. M., unless one is certain that
it is not a false alarm, especially to a Prussian officer.” The hope
was that the slow-waking and highly-to-his-superiors-respectful Hun
would be thus caught in his dug-outs. The artillery would, gas or
no gas, only give a general warning, and the suggested barrage (the
first time, oddly enough, that the word is employed in the Diary) in
rear of the enemy trenches would prevent his reserves from coming up
into the gas-zone, “where there is always a chance that they may be
gassed in spite of their gas-helmets.” So all the commanders held
yet another conference, and agreed that the gas should be loosed
at 4.30, that the barrage in the rear should be abandoned and a
bombardment of the enemy’s parapet substituted for it, and that no
patrols should be sent out. The companies were duly warned. The wind
was not. The enemy spent the day shelling points in the rear till our
guns retaliated on their front line, which they returned by shelling
our parapet with small stuff. One piece they managed to blow in, and
turned a machine-gun on the gap. They also made one flooded dug-out
a shade less habitable than before. The wind stayed true south all
night, and the rain it brought did more damage to the hovels and huts
than any enemy shells; for the Chaplain and the Second in Command
were half buried by “the ceiling of their bedroom becoming detached.
The calamity was borne with beautiful fortitude.” (Even a second in
command cannot express all his sentiments before a Chaplain.)
Christmas Eve was officially celebrated by good works; for the
Battalion, its gas still intact, was warned to finish relief by eight
o’clock, because, for the rest of the night, our guns would bombard
German communication-trenches and back-areas so as to interfere
as much as possible with their Christmas dinner issues. The 1st
Coldstream filed in, and they filed out back to their various billets
and posts at Pont du Hem, La Flinque Farm, and the rest. Christmas
Day, their first at the front, and in the line, was officially washed
out and treated as the 25th of December, dinners and festivities
being held over till they should be comfortably settled in reserve.
Some attempts at “fraternisation” seem to have been begun between
the front-line trenches in the early morning, but our impersonal
and impartial guns shelled every moving figure visible, besides
plastering cross-roads and traffic lines at the back. Lieut.-Colonel
McCalmont, Lord Desmond FitzGerald, and Captain Antrobus rode over
from the 1st Battalion for lunch, and in the afternoon Lord Cavan
spoke to the officers of his approaching departure from the Guards
Division to command the Fourteenth Corps; of his regrets at the
change, and of his undisguised hopes that the Guards Division might
be attached to his new command. “He finished by telling us that we
were following in the steps of our great 1st Battalion, which, as he
has told the King and Sir Francis Lloyd, was as fine a battalion as
ever trod.” Then there was a decorated and becandled Christmas tree
brought out from England by Captain Alexander, which appeared at
dinner, and, later, was planted out in the garden at the back of the
mess that all might admire. Likewise, No. 1 Company received a gift
of a gramophone, a concertina, and mouth-organs from Miss Laurette
Taylor. The Irish take naturally to mouth-organs. The gramophone was
put under strict control at once.
On boxing day, the whole 2nd Guards Brigade were relieved by the 1st
Brigade, and went back out of reach of the shells to Merville _via_
La Gorgue, passing on the road several companies of the 1st Battalion
on their way to relieve the 1st Scots Guards. (“When the like of that
happens, and leave is given for to take notice of each other, ye may
say that the two battalions cheer. But ’tis more in the nature of a
running roar, ye’ll understand, when we Micks meet up.”)
Merville billets were thoroughly good, and the officers’ mess ran to
a hard-worked but quite audible piano. Best of all, the fields around
were too wet for anything like drill.