the 18th June in an all but obliterated section of what had been
the Canadians’ second line and was now our first, running from the
Culvert, on the Menin road, west of Hooge, through Zouave Wood, and
into the north end of Sanctuary Wood. Four to eight hundred yards
lay between them and the enemy, who were settling down in the old
Canadian front line across the little swampy valley. The left of the
Irish Guards’ sector was, even after the Coldstream had worked on
it for three days, without dug-outs, and blown in in places, but it
offered a little cover. Their right line, for nearly half a mile,
was absolutely unrecognizable save in a few isolated spots. The
shredded ground was full of buried iron and timber which made digging
very difficult, and, in spite of a lot of cleaning up by their
predecessors, dead Canadians lay in every corner. It ran through what
had once been a wood, and was now a dreary collection of charred and
splintered stakes, “to the tops of which, blown there by shells,
hung tatters of khaki uniform and equipment.” There was no trace of
any communication-trenches, so companies had to stay where they were
as long as the light lasted. Battalion H.Q. lived in the brick-kiln
aforementioned, just west of the Zillebeke road, and company
commanders walked about in the dark from one inhabited stretch to the
next, trusting in Providence. So, too, did the enemy, whom Captain
Alexander found, to the number of six, ambling promiscuously in the
direction of Ypres. They challenged, he fired, and they blundered
off—probably a lost wiring-party. In truth, neither front line knew
exactly where the other lay in that chaos; and, both being intent
upon digging themselves in ere the guns should begin again, were glad
enough to keep still. Our observation-parties watched the Germans as
they crept over the ridge at dusk and dropped into the old Canadian
line, where their policies could be guessed at from the nature of the
noises they made at work; but no one worried them.
On the 20th June an unlucky shell pitched into No. 1 Company, killing
three, wounding two, and shocking five men; otherwise there was
quiet, and their brigadier came round the support-trenches that day
and complimented all hands on their honesty as craftsmen. As he said,
it would have been easy for them to have slacked off on their last
night in a position to which they were not returning, whereas they
had worked like beavers, and so the battalion which relieved them
(the Royal Canadian Regiment resting at Steenvoorde since Hooge where
it had lost three hundred men) found good cover and fair wire all
along the sector. The Canadians were late, for their motor-buses went
adrift somewhere down the road, and the Battalion only “just caught
the last train” out of Ypres and reached camp near Vlamertinghe at
dawn on the 21st June.
It had been a strange interlude of ash-pits and charnel-houses,
sandwiched between open-air preparations, for that always postponed
“spring meeting.” No troops are the better for lying out, unrelieved
by active reprisals, among shrivelled dead; and even the men, who
love not parades, were pleased at a few days of steady barrack-square
drill, when a human being walks and comports himself as though he
were a man, and not a worm in the mire or a slave bound to bitter
burdens and obscene tasks. At Vlamertinghe they found, and were glad
to see him, Captain FitzGerald, recovered after three weeks’ sickness
in England, and joyfully back before his time; and Lieutenant R.
McNeill, who had acted as Adjutant, returned to the command of No. 2
Company in the absence of Captain Bird, gone sick. They were busied
at Battalion H.Q. with the preparation of another raid to be carried
out on the night of the 2nd July “as part of the demonstration
intended to occupy the attention of the Germans in this locality
while more important events were happening elsewhere.” Lieutenant F.
Pym, a bold, daring, and collected officer, was chosen to command
the little action, and each company sent up eight volunteers and one
sergeant, from whom thirty men and one sergeant were finally picked
and set to rehearsing every detail.
On the 28th June they moved up to within four miles of the front and
lay at Elverdinghe—two companies and Battalion H.Q. in the château
itself, where they were singularly comfortable, and two in the canal
bank, in brick and sand-bag dug-outs. It was true that all furniture
and pictures had gone from the château with the window-glass, and
that swallows nested in the cornices of the high, stale-smelling
rooms, but the building itself, probably because some trees around
blocked direct observation, was little changed, and still counted
as one of the best places in the line for Brigade reserves. Their
trenches, however, across the battered canal presented less charm.
The front line was “dry on the whole,” but shallow; the support quite
good, but the communication-trenches (it was the Battalion’s first
experience of Skipton Road) were variously wet, blown in, swamped,
or frankly flooded with three feet of water. Broken trenches mean
broken companies and more work for company commanders, but some of
the platoons had to be scattered about in “grouse butts” and little
trenches of their own, a disposition which tempts men to lie snug,
and not to hear orders at the first call.
THE RAID OF THE 2ND JULY
All through the 1st of July our guns bombarded their chosen front
with the object of cutting, not too ostentatiously, the wire where
our raid was going to take place, and of preparing the way on the
right for an attack by the 3rd Guards Brigade on a small German
salient that had to be reduced. The enemy answered with a new type
of trench-mortar shell, nine inches in diameter, fired from a rifled
mortar of high trajectory at a thousand yards’ range. The shock
and smash of it were worse than a 5.9, and did much damage to Nile
Trench, but caused no casualties. The 2nd July was the day for the
raid itself, and just as Battalion Headquarters were discussing the
very last details, an urgent message from Brigade Headquarters came
in to them—“Please hasten your report on pork and bean rations.”
The notion was that our 18-pounders and 4.5 hows. with a couple of
trench-mortars, would open heavily at twenty minutes to ten. Ten
minutes later, the Stokes mortars were to join in. At ten the guns
would lift and make a barrage while the Stokes mortars attended to
the flanks of the attack. It was a clear evening, so light, indeed,
that at the last minute the men were told to keep their jackets
on lest their shirts should betray them. (It was _then_, men said
later, that the raid should have been postponed.) Everything was
quite quiet, and hardly a shot was being fired anywhere, when the
party lined up under Lieutenant F. Pym. Our bombardment opened
punctually, but drew no answer from the enemy for ten minutes. Then
they put down a barrage behind our front line, which was the origin
of all the trouble to come. At the last minute, one single unrelated
private, appearing from nowhere in particular, was seen to push his
way down the trench, climbing over the raiders where they crouched
waiting for the life-or-death word. Said an officer, who assumed that
at the least he must bear vital messages: “Who are you?” “R.F.A.
trench-mortar man, sir,” was the reply. Then, “Where the devil are
you going?”—“Going to get my tea, sir.” He passed on, mess-tin in
hand, noticing nothing that was outside of his own immediate show;
for of such, mercifully, were the armies of England.
Meantime the enemy barrage increased on Nile Trench, and the front
trenches began to gap badly. There was still light enough to give
a good view of the German parapets when our raiders went over the
top, and several machine-guns opened on them from the enemy second
line. This was a bad kick-off, for, with our leading raiders out in
the open, it would have been murder to have held the rest back. They
all went on into the barrage and the machine-gun fire, and from that
point the account of what actually, or supposedly, happened must, as
usual, be collected from survivors. The whole attack seems to have
reached the German wire which was “well cut in places.” Here our
men were checked by machine-gun fire (they probably ran up to the
muzzles of them) and some bombing. They stopped and began to bomb
back. Pym rushed forward through the leading men, jumped into the
trench, landed in an empty German bay, shouting to them to follow,
turned left with a few men, reached the door of a machine-gun dug-out
with its gun in full blast, broke in, found two men at work, knocked
one of them off the gun and, with the help of Private Walshe, made
him prisoner. Our bombers, meantime, had spread left and right, as
laid down, to hold each end of the captured section, but had further
to block a communication-trench which entered it about the middle,
where the enemy was trying to force his way in. It is difficult
to say whether there was not an attack on both flanks as well. At
any rate, a general bomb-scuffle followed, in which our men held
up the enemy and tried to collect prisoners. The captured section
of trench only contained one dead and five living. One of these
“proved unmanageable and had to be killed.” Four were hurried back
under escort for samples, but two of these were killed by their own
shell-fire on the road. The R.E. officer looked round, as his duty
was, to find things to demolish, but the trench was clean and empty.
He was hit twice, but managed to get back. Three gas-experts had
also been attached to the expedition. Two of them were wounded on
the outward run. The third searched the trench but found no trace
of gas engines. Some papers and documents were snatched up from the
dug-outs, but he who took charge of them did not live to hand over.
The barrage grew heavier; the machine-gun fire from the enemy second
line never ceased; and the raiders could see the home-parapet going
up in lumps. It was an exquisitely balanced choice of evils when, at
about ten past ten, Lieutenant Pym blew his horn for the withdrawal.
A minute or two later, men began to trickle over our parapet through
the barrage, and here the bulk of the casualties occurred. Our guns
ceased fire at twenty past ten, but the enemy battered savagely at
our front line with heavies and trench-mortars till eleven. The
result was that “the front line, never very good, became chaotic, and
the wounded had to be collected in undamaged bays.” It was hopeless
to attempt to call the roll there, so what raiders could stand, with
the two surviving prisoners, were sent up to Brigade Headquarters
while the wounded were got across the open to Lancashire Farm and
the trolley-line there. Pym was nowhere to be found, and though some
men said, and honestly believed, that they had seen him re-enter our
lines, he was not of the breed which would have done this till he had
seen the last of his command out of the German trenches. He may have
got as far as the German wire on his way back and there, or in that
neighbourhood, have been killed; but he was never in our trench again
after he left it. Others, too, of that luckless party bore themselves
not without credit. For example, a signaller, name not recorded,
who laid his telephone wire up to the trench across No Man’s Land
and had it cut by a shell while he was seeking for Lieutenant Pym.
On his return he came across a man shot in the legs, and bore him,
under heavy shell and machine-gun fire, to our wire which was not
constructed for helpless wounded to get through. The signaller
dropped into the trench, calling on Sergeant O’Hagan, a busy man
that night, for stretcher-bearers, but these had all been hit. The
Sergeant suggested that he should telephone to Battalion Headquarters
and draw some from there. The telephonist—perhaps because a doctor
rarely uses his own drugs—preferred to put the case directly to a
couple of men in No. 2 Company, at the same time indicating the
position of the wounded man, and those three handed him down into the
very moderate safety that our front line then offered. And again,
when Sergeant Austen, the sergeant of the raid, was hit and fell in
German wire, one of the raiders stayed with him awhile, and finally
dragged him to our line, with the usual demand for bearers. This
time they were all busy, but he found Lieutenant F. Greer and that
officer’s servant, whom he had led forth, and “in spite of heavy
machine-gun fire,” they brought in the Sergeant. Unluckily, just
at the end of the German bombardment, Lieutenant Synge was very
badly hit while in the front line. The raid had been a fair, flat,
but heroic failure, due, as most men said, to its being loosed in
broad daylight at a fully prepared enemy. Outside the two prisoners,
nothing, not even a scrap of paper, was gained except the knowledge
that the Battalion could handle such affairs as these in their day’s
work, put it all equably behind them, and draw fresh lessons for
fresh to-morrows. (“We lost one dam’ good officer, and more good men
than was worth a thousand Jerries, but, mark you, we might have lost
just that same number any morning in the front line, as we _have_
lost them again and again, under the expenditure of half a dozen,
maybe one, shell the devil happened to be riding that time. And them
that it took would never have had even the exercise, let alone the
glory, of all them great doings of ours. So, ye see, everything in
war is good luck or bad.”)
Their brigadier had a little talk with the raiding-party next day
on the Canal Bank, when he made much of them, and told them that
he was very pleased with “their gallant behaviour under adverse
circumstances.” It was gratifying, because they had done all that
they could. But after every raid, as indeed after every action,
there follows interminable discussion from every point of view of
every rank, as to the “might-have-beens”—what would have happened
had you been there, or they been here, and whether the bay where
the raid wrecked itself against the barricade none suspected might
have been turned by a dash across the top, in the pauses of the
shifting and returning overhead machine-gun fire. The messes discuss
it, the estaminets where the men talk pick up those verdicts from
the mess-waiters and go over them again and again; the front line
scratches diagrams on the flank of sand-bags with bits of burned
stick, and the more they explain, argue, and asseverate, the deeper
grows the confusion out of which the historian in due time weaves the
accepted version—at which all who were concerned scoff.
The 4th July was a quiet day after a bombardment the night before
that had further enlarged the gap of untenable trench which the
furious reprisals for the raid had created. They spent their hours
repairing damage as much as possible till they were relieved by the
1st Coldstream, and a half of them got into billets at Elverdinghe
Château, and the rest in Canal Bank. By this time the enemy had
begun to turn their attention to the château, in spite of its
screening trees, and were in the habit of giving it a daily ration of
whizz-bangs, which disturb drill-formations. Troops of the Division
being fairly thick on the ground, one morning’s work (July 7) managed
to wound two machine-gunners of the 1st Coldstream and another of the
1st Irish Guards.
On the 5th July Major C. A. Rocke arrived and took over the duties of
Second in Command. On the 7th Captain R. McNeill left the Battalion
sick, and Lieutenant R. Nutting took over command of No. 2 Company.
On the 8th they moved up to their old position, relieving the 1st
Coldstream across the canal without casualties, three companies in
the front line that had been a little repaired since their raid,
and the fourth (No. 2) in support in Nile Trench. Three quiet days
and nights followed, when they could work undisturbed. On the 11th
July a happy party was chosen to attend the 14th July celebrations
at Paris. The adjutant, Captain J. S. N. FitzGerald, commanded them,
all six, and their names were: Drill-Sergeant Harradine, Sergeants
Reid, Glennon, and Halpin, and Privates Towland and Dunne. Rumour,
which respects naught, said that they were chosen with an eye to
the credit of the Battalion at any inter-allied banquets that might
be obligatory, and that they did not fail. On the 12th, after a
quiet night, forty large-size shells were sent into Canal Bank,
as retaliation, they presumed, for some attentions on the part of
our 9.2’s, the afternoon before. The Battalion was unhurt, but the
1st Scots Guards had several casualties. Their tour ended next day
without trouble, and they were back by Elverdinghe Château for two
days’ light and mostly ineffective shelling preparatory to their move
on the 15th July to Camp P. some three miles north of Poperinghe.
During this time, 2nd Lieutenant Mylne arrived and was posted to No.
4 Company, and 2nd Lieutenants C. Hyne and Denson to No. 2 Company.
Second Lieutenant Hordern also rejoined and was posted to No. 1.
Every one understood, without too much being said, that that sector
would see them no more till after the great “spring meeting,” now
set for the autumn, which many believed would settle the war. It
was a small interlude of “fattening up” before the Somme, which
included Battalion sports and company-drill competitions. There was,
too, a dinner on the anniversary of the raising of the Battalion,
16th of July, when General Ponsonby dined with the Battalion. (In
those ancient days men expected everything in the world except its
disbandment as soon as war should be over.)
On the 18th July Captain J. S. N. FitzGerald and his detachment
returned from Paris after one joyous week, and took over the
adjutancy again from the second in command; and Captain Greer, who
had sprained his ankle badly during the raid, was sent down to the
base for cure.
It is noted that on the 21st Captain Lord Castlerosse, wounded in the
far-off days at Villers-Cotterêts with the 1st Battalion, joined the
Battalion from G.S. Ninth Corps. The wild geese were being called in
preparatory to their flight for the Somme.
THE SOMME
It began in the usual way, by definite orders to relieve a battalion
in the front line. These were countermanded next day and, the day
after, changed to orders to move to Bollezeele, where on the 25th
they “received a great welcome from the inhabitants,” doubtless for
old sakes’ sake. Then came the joining up of the last subalterns, and
three days’ steady route-marching to toughen tender feet. Lieutenant
Montgomery rejoined, and was posted to No. 2 Company, and, with him,
2nd Lieutenant Budd; Lieutenant Brew, not without experience in
raiding, also arrived and was posted to No. 4 Company. This finished
the tale, and on the 29th, the last Sunday of the month, they cleared
personal accounts at mass and Church of England services; and on the
30th marched out to Esquelbecq, where they entrained all together,
with their first-line transport, and were shifted, _via_ Hazebrouck,
Berguette, and St. Pol, to Petit Houvain five miles south of the
latter town, or, broadly speaking, from the left to the right of
the British line. That small trip lasted till evening, after which
they marched fourteen miles to Lucheux on the Grouches River above
Doullens, into a new world of camps and hutments, at midnight. The
Diary says—on such points diaries are always particular, because
it touches the honour of company officers—“the Battalion marched
splendidly, only six men having to be carried for the last few miles.
These were mostly old or previously wounded men.” And the month of
July ends with the words, “There is nothing to record.”
There was, perhaps, not so very much after all.
The battle of the Somme had been in full blaze now from Maricourt
to Hébuterne and Gomiecourt, for one month; and after the
expenditure of no one had time to count how many men, our front
from Ovillers-la-Boisselle to Fricourt and below Montauban had been
advanced in places to the depth of three miles on a front of ten. It
was magnificent, for the whole of the Press said so; and it was also
extensively advertised as war.
From Ovillers-la-Boisselle to the north the German line, thanks to
its clouds of machine-guns, had not been shifted by our attack, and
the Battalion came, for the time being, under the orders of the
Twenty-fifth Division (7th Brigade) which lay against the southern
shoulder of the Gomiecourt salient just where the sweeping bare
uplands break back to the valley of the Authies. They were turned in
to dig trenches on the sector, four or five miles from their bivouac
in the little wood to the south of Mailly-Maillet. They left the
crowded Lucheux camp in lorries at three on the afternoon of the 1st
August (“In those days we knew we were for it, but we did not know
what the Somme was going to be”), reached bivouac at eight, marched
to their trenches and came back at daybreak with one N.C.O. and four
men wounded. It was a most gentle introduction to the scenes of their
labours. The enemy were using shrapnel mostly part of the 3rd August;
2nd Lieutenant Hordern was dangerously and eight men were slightly
wounded by one shell while at work. Second Lieutenant Vaughan joined
on this date and was posted to No. 2 Company. Whether, as some said,
the authorities did not know what to do with them for a few days,
or whether they were part of a definite scheme of attack, no one
cared. The machine had taken possession of their lives and fates, and
as they went from trench to bivouac and back again they could both
see and hear how extremely little a battalion, or for that matter
a brigade, mattered in the present inferno. The fortnight’s battle
that had opened on the 14th of July had finished itself among erased
villages and woods that were already all but stumpage, while the big
guns were pounding the camps and bivouacs that held our reserves, and
one stumbled on old and fresh dead in the most unlikely and absurd
places.
On the 6th August their turn ended, and they came back, for a
couple of days, to the 2nd Guards Brigade in the Bois du Warnimont
hutments—none too good—outside Authie. Here His Majesty the King
visited them on the 9th August, and, after three “quiet” days
spent in reconnoitring the trenches in front of Mailly-Maillet and
Auchonvillers, the Battalion on the 13th relieved the 1st Coldstream
in the front line.
It was a featureless turn of duty, barring some minenwerfer work by
the enemy once or twice in the dawns, which affected nothing.
They were relieved by a battalion of the K.O.Y.L.I. on the 15th,
and hutted in the wood near Mailly-Maillet. Here began their more
specialised training for the work that lay ahead of them. It included
everything that modern warfare of that date could imagine, from
following up drum-barrages at twenty-five yards’ distance, to the
unlovely business of unloading ammunition at railheads.
Domestically, there were not many incidents. Captain E. B. Greer
rejoined from the base on the 15th August. The Second in Command and
the Adjutant went sick on the 18th and 19th respectively. (These
ranks are not in the habit of noticing their personal complaints
when regimental life is crowded. They were back in ten days.) Second
Lieutenants Lysaght and Tomkins arrived from the base on the 30th,
and 2nd Lieutenant Zigomala on the 31st August.
One little horror of a life where men had not far to look for such
things stands out in the record of preparations that went on through
the clangour and fury of the Somme around them. On a windy Sunday
evening at Couin, in the valley north of Bus-les-Artois, they saw
an observation-balloon, tethered near their bivouacs, break loose
while being hauled down. It drifted towards the enemy line. First
they watched maps and books being heaved overboard, then a man in
a parachute jumping for his life, who landed safely. “Soon after,
something black, which had been hanging below the basket, detached
itself and fell some three thousand feet. We heard later that it
was Captain Radford (Basil Hallam). His parachute apparently caught
in the rigging and in some way he slipped out of the belt which
attached him to it. He fell near Brigade Headquarters.” Of those who
watched, there was not one that had not seen him at the “Halls” in
the immensely remote days of “Gilbert the Filbert, the Colonel of the
Nuts.”
Before the end of the month, they had shifted from their congested
camp near Bus-les-Artois to Méricourt under Albert, which they
reached circuitously by train, and there lay in Corps Reserve.
The weather was against drills. It rained almost every day, and
they slipped and swore through their rehearsals, wave-attacks, and
barrage-huntings across the deepening mud.