fell to their share. A mere passage of big stuff overhead seeking its
butts in the town did not count any more than excited local attacks
to left or right of the immediate sector; and two or three men
wounded by splinters and odds-and-ends would not spoil the record
of “a quiet day.” Occasionally, as the tides and local currents of
attack shifted, our guns behind them would wake up to retaliation or
direct punishment. Sometimes the enemy’s answer would be immediate;
sometimes he accepted the lashing in silence till nightfall, and
then the shapeless town would cower and slide still lower into
its mounds and rubbish-heaps. Most usually a blow on one side or
the other would be countered, it seemed to the listeners in the
trenches between, exactly as in the prize-ring. But the combatants
were heavy-, middle-, and light-weight guns, and in place of the
thump of body blows, the jar and snap of jabs and half-hooks, or
the patter of foot-work on the boards, one heard the ponderous Jack
Johnsons arrive, followed by the crump of the howitzers, and then
the in-and-out work of field artillery quickening to a clinch, till
one side or the other broke away and the silence returned full of
menaces of what would happen next time “if you hit my little brother
again.” A local and concentrated shelling of the Battalion’s second
line one day, which might have developed bloodily, was damped down
in three minutes, thanks to a telephone and guns that worked almost
simultaneously. Nobody but themselves noticed it in the big arena.
Suddenly on the morning of the 9th April (it was due, perhaps,
to some change of troops on the front) the enemy snipers and
machine-guns woke up; and Lieutenant Kinahan, a keen, well-trusted,
and hard-working officer, was shot through the head by a sniper, and
died at once. By next day, Captain Greer of No. 4 Company had the
pleasure to report that his C.S.M.’s little party of snipers had
“accounted” for the killer. Sniping on that front just then was of a
high order, for the local enemy had both enterprise and skill, with
rifle and bomb.
Their trenches were a little below the average of those parts, that
is to say, almost impossible. A consoling local legend had it,
indeed, that they were so vile that a conference of generals had
decided to abandon them, but that, hearing the Guards Division
were under orders for the Salient, forebore, saying: “We’ll put the
Guards in ’em and if _they_ can’t make ’em decent we’ll give ’em
away to Jerry.” And in addition to repairs and drainage (“County
Council work,” as one sufferer called it) there were the regular
fatigues which, as has been pointed out many times, more than any
battle break down and tire the body and soul of the soldier. Here is
one incidental, small job, handed out as all in a night’s work. The
officer speaks. “It was particularly beastly. We were supposed to
make a dummy machine-gun emplacement for the enemy to shell. I took
forty men to meet the R.E. officer at a pleasant little rendezvous
‘two hundred yards north-west from Hell Fire Corner.’ Of course, we
were sent to the wrong place to look for that Sapper; and, of course,
the Boche was shelling the road on both sides of us. That was about
half-past nine. Then we drew our stuff to carry up. There were two
sheets of iron, each 12 by 6, and any quantity of sand-bags, shovels,
and timber. We had to travel a mile and a half by road, then up a
communication-trench, and then a few hundred yards across the open.
That was all. Well, it took four men to carry each of those cursed
pieces of iron on the level, open road. You couldn’t get ’em up a
trench at all. But we hung on to ’em, and about one o’clock we had
covered the road-bit of the journey and were half-way from the road
to the place where we had to build our blasted dummy. Then we got on
to ground absolutely chewed up by shell-holes and old trenches. You
couldn’t go a foot without falling. When we’d struggled a bit longer
with those sheets, we simply had to chuck ’em as unshiftable; and
make the best dummy we could of sand-bags only. Imagine two parties
of four tottering Micks apiece trying to sweat those tin atrocities
across that sort of country! And then, of course, a mist got up and
we were lost in the open—lovely!—and our guide, who swore he knew
the way, began to lead us round in circles. The R.E. and I spotted
what he was doing, because we kept an eye on the stars when we could
see ’em. So, after any amount of bother, we all got home. There were
bullets flying about occasionally (that’s part of the job), and we
ran into some shelling on our way back at four in the morning when
the Huns could see. But what I mean to say is that if it hadn’t been
for those two dam’ sheets which weren’t really needed at all, a dozen
men could have done the whole business straight off. And that was
just one small fatigue!”
Nothing of all this worried the morale of the men. They took it all
as a part of the inexplicable wonder of war, which orders that the
soldier shall do what he is told, and shall stay where he may be put.
A platoon was being inspected that month in Ypres. Suddenly shelling
opened some distance off, at first, but methodically drawing nearer
to dredge the town, till at last the shrapnel burst almost directly
overhead. The men stood rigidly to attention without moving a
muscle, till the officer gave them orders to take cover. Then they
disappeared into the nearest cellar. Later on, it occurred to the
officer that the incident “though commonplace was not without its
interesting aspect.”
They lay at Poperinghe in divisional rest from the 13th till the
19th April, during which time Lieutenant Nutting, and 2nd Lieutenant
Reford from the 11th Notts and Derby Regiment, joined for duty.
Thence they shifted over to camp near Vlamertinghe in Brigade Reserve
as left Battalion of the left Brigade.
On the 21st April Lieutenant R. McNeill joined, and on the 24th
they went into the line to relieve the 1st Coldstream in the left
sector—as unpleasing a piece of filth as even the Salient could
furnish. Five days before their entry it had been raided and blown
in, till it was one muddled muck-heap of wreckage and corpses.
Front-line repairs, urgently needed, could only be effected in the
dark; traffic- and communication-trenches had to be spasmodically
cleaned out between “crumps,” and any serious attack on them during
their first turn would have meant ruin.
The enemy tried a bombing raid on the night of the 28th-29th,
which was beaten off, without casualty, by our bombs, rifles, and
machine-guns. Nothing worse overtook them, and the bill for their
five days’ turn was one man killed and ten wounded, of whom three did
not quit duty. But the mere strain was poisonous heavy. They handed
over thankfully to their opposite number, the Coldstream, on the
29th, and lay up in Ypres Gaol. “The prison is a fine example of the
resistance to shell-fire of brick walls if they are thick enough.”
Verdun forts, at the far end of the line, were learning by now that
the best and thickest stone-facings fly and flake beneath the jar of
the huge shell that the enemy used against them, while ancient and
unconsidered brick-work over deep earth cores, though it collapses
into lumps hardly distinguishable from mould, yet gives protection to
the men in the galleries beneath.
May-Day at Ypres opened with “a good exhibition” of German shooting.
The enemy spent the whole day shelling the water-tower—a metal tank
on a brick pedestal—close to the prison. Every shell fell within
fifty yards, till the sole object that escaped—for a while—was the
tower itself. The “weather being hot and dry,” some of our officers
thought good to bathe in the Canal, but, not being water-towers,
found it better to come out before a flight of “crumps” found them.
Looking back upon this, one of the bathers counted that bath as his
own high-water mark of heroism. (“There were things in the Canal, you
know.”)
They went up on the 2nd May, relieving the Coldstream in the same
evil sector, and the enemy machine-guns filling the dark with bullets
as effectively as and more cheaply than artillery, killed one of
our corporals and wounded a couple of the Coldstream. A hint of the
various companies’ works shows what they had to contend with nightly.
No. 2, which held the right front line “where enough of the trench
had been already reclaimed to accommodate the whole company” (it was
not superior accommodation), borrowed two platoons from No. 1 and
worked till dawn at finishing a traffic-trench behind the blown-in
front and at making parapets till “by morning it was possible to
get all along this trench, even with a good deal of crawling.” No. 4
were out wiring a post against flank and rear attack. It stood out
in a wilderness of utterly smashed trenches, which fatigue-parties
from the reserve battalions dealt with, by the help and advice of the
Sappers, and constructed a new trench (Wieltje Trench) running out on
the left flank of the weak and unsupported Wieltje salient. Here was
another desert of broken trenches, linked by shallow or wet sketches
of new ones. No. 3 Company worked at its own trench, and at the
repair of Cardoen Street which “had recently been blown in in several
places.” An improved trench could be walked along, without too much
stooping. Unimproved dittoes demanded that men should get out and run
in the open, steeple-chasing across wreckage of tinware and timber,
the bramble-like embraces of stray wire-ends, and that brittle and
insecure foothold afforded by a stale corpse, while low flights of
machine-gun bullets hastened their progress, or shrapnel overhead
hunted the party as hawks hunt small birds in and out of hedges. The
labour was as monotonous and barren to perform as it seems to record;
but it made the background of their lives and experiences. Some say
that, whatever future war may bring forth, never again can men be
brought to endure what armed mankind faced in the trenches in those
years. Certain it is that men, nowadays, thinking upon that past,
marvel to themselves that they could by any means have overcome it at
the time, or, later, have put it behind them. But the wonder above
all wonders is that, while they lived that life, it seemed to them
sane and normal, and they met it with even temper and cool heads.
On the 3rd May, Major Chichester, who had been suffering for some
time from the effects of a wound by a H.E. that burst within a
few feet of him, had to go sick, and Captain E. B. Greer was left
temporarily in command. Their own Commanding Officer, the Hon. L.
J. P. Butler, who had come out with them at the first and taken all
that the Gods had sent since, was on the 5th May translated to the
command of a Kitchener Brigade. Here is a tribute of that time, from
within the Battalion, where they were not at all pleased by the calls
of the New Army for seasoned brigadiers. “Butler, more than any
other man, has made this Battalion what it is. Also we all love him.
However, I am glad he has got a less dangerous job. He is too brave a
man ever to be safe.”
On that same day they were relieved and went into one of the
scattered wooden camps near Brandhoek for a whole week, which was
spoiled by cold weather and classes in wiring under an R.E. corporal
attached to them for that purpose. (“We were _not_ clever with our
hands at first go-off, but when it came to back-chat and remarks on
things, and no officers near, begad there was times when I could have
pitied a Sapper!”)
By the 12th May the Battalion was in reserve, their Brigade in the
line, Major P. L. Reid had assumed command and Lieutenant F. Pym and
2nd Lieutenants A. Pym and Close had joined. Then they began again to
consider raids of a new pattern under much more difficult conditions
than their Laventie affairs. The 2nd Grenadiers and the 1st
Coldstream were to do the reconnoitring for them, and “live Germans
were badly needed for purposes of intelligence.” The authorities
recommended, once more, two simultaneous raids symmetrically one from
each flank. Their C.O. replied, as at Laventie, that live Germans
meant stalking, and wished to know how it was possible to stalk to
a time-table, even had the ground been well reconnoitred, and if
several nights instead of one, and that a relief-night, had been
allowed for preparations. Neither of the raids actually came off,
but the projected one on the left flank ended in a most typical and
instructive game of blind-man’s buff. The idea was to rush a German
listening-post known to be held just north of the railway line on the
left of Railway Wood, and the point of departure for the Coldstream
reconnoitring patrol had been from a listening-post of our own, also
on the railway. The patrol’s report was perfectly coherent. They
had left our listening-post, gone up the railway line, turned half
right, crawled fifty yards, found German wire, worked along it,
discovered a listening-post “empty but obviously in recent use,” had
hurried back, recrossed the railway about a hundred yards above our
own listening-post, and fifty yards to the north of their crossing
had noted the outline of another German listening-post where men
were talking. (It is interesting to remember that the entire stage
of these tense dramas could almost be reconstructed in a fair-sized
garden.) This latter, then, was the post which the Battalion was to
attack. Accordingly, they rehearsed the play very carefully with ten
men under Lieutenant F. Pym, who had strict orders when they should
rush the post, to club the Germans, “trying not to kill them (or one
another).” They were to “collar a prisoner and hurry him back if well
enough to walk,” and, incidentally, as illustrating the fashion of
the moment, they were all to wear “brown veils.”
With these stage-directions clear in their mind, they went into the
line on the 16th May, after a quiet relief, and took over from the
Coldstream the sector from Railway Wood, the barricades across the
railway, the big dug-out which had been an old mine, under Railway
Wood, and disposed their reserves near Hell Fire Corner and the
Menin road. It was ground they knew and hated, but since they had
last eaten dirt there, our own listening-post, which had been the
point of departure for the Coldstream patrol, on whose reports the
raid would be based, had been withdrawn one hundred and fifty yards
down the railway line. Apparently no one had realised this, and the
captain (Platt) of the Coldstream Company, who had this sector when
the 2nd Irish Guards relieved, had been killed while out wiring a
couple of nights before. Consequently, that patrol had reconnoitred
_inside_ our own front; had mistaken our own wire for the German,
had followed it to one of our own disused posts, and had seen and
heard a listening-post of the 2nd Grenadiers which they, quite
logically, assumed to be German and reported as such. Everything
fitted in like a jigsaw puzzle, but all was based on a line which had
been shifted—as the Battalion perceived the moment they took over
the sector. So there was no attack with clubs and brown veils by
the 2nd Irish Guards on the 2nd Grenadiers’ listening-post then, or
afterwards, and the moral of the story was “verify your data.” (“No
living man could tell from one day to the next—let alone nights—which
was our line and which was Jerry’s. ’Twas broke an’ gapped and turned
round every way, and each battalion had its own fancy-trenches dug
for to make it worse for the next that took over. The miracle was—an’
how often have I seen it!—the miracle was that we did not club each
other in the dark every night instead of—instead of when we did.”)
The Battalion went on, sadly, with its lawful enterprises of running
wire and trench from the high ground under Railway Wood toward the
shifted barricade on the railway itself; and digging saps to unstable
mine-craters that had, some way or other, to be worked into their
ever-shifting schemes of defence. All this under machine-gun fire
on bright nights, when, as the cruel moon worked behind them, each
head showing above ground-level was etched in black for the snipers’
benefit. On their right flank, between their own division and the
Canadians, lay a gap of a quarter of a mile or so, which up till then
had been imperfectly looked after by alternate hourly patrols. (“And
in the intervals, any Germans who knew the way might have walked into
Ypres in quest of souvenirs.”) It had to be wired and posted, and, at
the same time, a huge, but for the moment dry, mine-crater directly
in front of the right company’s shattered trench, needed linking up
and connecting with another crater on the left. Many dead men lay in
the line of that sap, where, at intervals, enemy rifle-grenades would
lob in among the sickened workers. The moonlight made the Germans
active as rats every night, and, since it was impossible to wire
the far sides of the craters in peace, our people hit upon the idea
of pushing “knife-rests”—ready wired trestles—out in the desired
direction with poles, after dark. Be it noted, “This is a way, too
much neglected, of wiring dangerous places. Every description of
‘puzzy-wuzzy’ can be made by day by the eight company wirers, and
pushed out. Then on the first dark night, a few metal pegs and a
strand or two of wire passed through the whole thing, makes an
entanglement that would entangle a train.” (The language and emotions
of the fatigue-parties who sweated up the unhandy “knife-rests”
are not told.) Half the Battalion were used to supply the wants of
the other half; for rations and water could only creep to within a
couple of hundred yards of Hell Fire Corner, where the parties had
to meet them and pack them the rest of the way by hand. The work of
staggering and crawling, loaded with sharp-angled petrol-tins of
water along imperfect duck-boards, is perhaps a memory which will
outlast all others for the present generation. “The fatigues kill—the
fatigues kill us”—as the living and the dead knew well.
On the 18th May they were drenched with a five hours’ bombardment
of 4.2’s and “woolly bears.” It blew in one of their trenches (West
Lane) and killed two men and wounded an officer of the Trench Mortar
Battery there. But the height of the storm fell, as usual, round Hell
Fire Corner, never a frequented thoroughfare by daylight, and into
an abandoned trench. “They could hardly have put down so much shell
anywhere else in our line and have got so small a bag. Only one man
in the company was wounded.” The race is not always to the swift,
nor the battle to the strong; but a battalion that works strenuously
on its parapets and traffic-trenches gets its reward, even in the
Salient in ’16. Battalion Headquarters, always fair target for a
jest, is derided as taking “a severe fright from a shell that pitched
twenty yards away, but it was an obvious error in bowling, and was
not repeated.” Our guns fired throughout the next day, presumably
in retaliation, but, like all troops in trenches, the Battalion had
no interest in demonstrations that did not directly affect their
food and precious water-tins. They were relieved on the 21st of May
by the 6th Oxford and Bucks of the Twentieth Division, and went off
to camp near Proven for ten days’ Corps Reserve, when “almost the
entire Battalion was on fatigue, either building military railways or
cleaning up reserve-lines of trenches.”
AFTER HOOGE
On the 1st June they moved out of that front altogether, to billets
at the back of Wormhoudt fourteen miles away, and thence on the next
day, June 2, to Bollezeele westward, while the enemy were making
their successful attack on the Canadians at Hooge. (“Have ye noticed
there is always trouble as soon as you come out of the line; or,
maybe, being idle you pay the more attention to it. _Anny_way, the
minute _we_ was out of it, of course Jerry begins to play up and
so Hooge happened, and that meant more fatigue for the Micks.”)
Meantime, they were in “G.H.Q. Reserve” for a fortnight, busy on a
rehearsal-line of English and German trenches which the R.E. had laid
down for them to develop. Our G.H.Q. were thinking of the approaching
campaign on the Somme. The enemy were intent on disarranging our
plans just as our guns were moving southward. Hooge was their spoke
in our wheel. It came not far short of success; for it pinned a
quantity of shellable troops to weak ground, directly cost the lives
of several thousands of them and added a fresh sore to the Salient’s
many weaknesses in that it opened a fortnight’s fierce fighting,
with consequent waste, as well as diversion, of supplies. While that
battle, barren as the ground it won and lost, surged back and forth,
the Battalion at Bollezeele gained a glory it really appreciated by
beating the 3rd Grenadiers in the ring, six fights out of nine, at
all weights. Specially they defeated Ian Hague (late heavy-weight
champion of England) whom Corporal Smith of the Battalion settled
“on points.” There would be time and, perhaps, warning to attend to
Death when He called. Till then, young and active life was uppermost,
and had to be catered for. Indeed, their brigadier remarked of the
social side of that boxing entertainment that “it reminded him of
Ascot.”
But at the back of everything, and pouring in hourly by official or
unofficial word, was the news of the changing fortunes of Hooge.
Would that postpone or advance the date of the “spring meeting,” not
in the least like Ascot, that they had discussed so long? Whichever
way war might go, the Guards would not be left idle.
On the evening of the 13th June the order came “telling us that
we would move up next day to Hooge and take over a section of the
line from a Canadian brigade.” They went off in motor lorries,
and by the evening of the 15th the Battalion was once more in the
packed Infantry Barracks of Ypres where the Canadian officers made
Battalion Headquarters their guests till things could be sorted out.
Our counter-attack of the 13th June had more or less come to rest,
leaving the wrecked plinths of the houses of Hooge, and but very
little more, in the enemy’s hands, and both sides were living on the
last edge of their nerves. Proof of this came on the night of the
16th, when the Battalion in barracks was waiting its turn. An SOS.
went up in the dark from somewhere north of the Menin road, that
stony-hearted step-mother of calamity; some guns responded and, all
in one instant, both sides’ artillery fell to it full-tongued, while
“to make everything complete a gas-signal was given by one of our
battalions. A terrific bombardment ensued. Later in the night, the
performance was repeated, less the gas-alarm.”
The explanation was as simple as human nature. Both sides had
taken bad knocks in the past fortnight. Both artilleries, largely
increased, were standing by ready for trouble, and what else could
one expect—save a detonation? But local rumour ran that the whole
Gehenna had been started by one stray ration-party which, all
communication-trenches being blown in, was toiling to the front
line in the open and showed against the sky-line—quite enough, at
that tension, to convince the enemy that it was the head of a fresh
infantry attack. The rest came of itself: but the gas-alarm was the
invention of the Devil himself. It upset the dignity of all the
staffs concerned, for the Brigadier himself, the H.Q. Staff of the
Coldstream as well as the C.O. and company officers of the 2nd Irish
Guards who were visiting preparatory to taking over the sector, found
themselves in one tiny room beneath a brick-kiln, all putting on
their helmets at once, and, thereafter, all trying to explain their
views of the crisis through them. Some have since compared that
symposium to a mass-meeting of unemployed divers; others to a troupe
of performing seals.