of the tanks, some thirty of which were parked, trumpeting and
clanking, near their camp. At that date the creatures were known as
“creepy-crawlies” or “hush-hush birds” and were not as useful as they
learned to become later. Then came the Battalion’s last dispositions
as to the reserve of officers, who were to be held till needed with
the first-line transport. The C.O., Lieut.-Colonel Reid, was down in
hospital with _pukka_ trench-fever and a temperature to match, and
Lieutenant Nutting, sick with dysentery, had to be sent to England.
Lieutenant Dollar, who had rejoined a few days before on recovery of
the same disease, Captain Greer, and Lieutenant Brew represented the
Reserve, and even so (for the Somme was merciless throughout) Captain
Witts, who had fallen ill at Carnoy, had to change places with
Lieutenant Brew. Captain Alexander had rejoined the Battalion after
two days’ (jealously noted as “three nights”) Paris leave.
The field-wastage began at once. They relieved the 4th Grenadiers
on the evening of the 12th September in the new, poor, and shallow
trenches dug a few days before, as our troops had worked their way
into the German system, in the salient east of Ginchy; but ere that
relief was completed, 2nd Lieutenant Zigomala and ten men had been
wounded. Next day saw forty casualties from shrapnel and snipers, and
2nd Lieutenant Vaughan and several men in No. 1 Company were killed
by a single shell. The enemy, well aware of what was intended, did
all that they could to cripple, delay, and confuse, and waste the men
and material on our side. Their chief reliance was their “pocketed”
machine-guns with which the whole ground was peppered; and their
gunners’ instructions, most gallantly obeyed, were, on the withdrawal
of any force, to remain and continue killing till they themselves
were killed. Consequently it was necessary at frequent intervals to
hunt up these pests by hand rather as one digs out wasps’ nests after
dark.
On the night of the 13th September, it fell to the lot of the
Battalion to send out No. 2 Company upon a business of this
nature—machine-guns in a strong trench on their right. After a
bombardment supposed to have cut the wire, the company had to file
across a stretch of the open Ginchy-Morval road, and there were
enfiladed by machine-gun fire which killed 2nd Lieutenant Tomkins,
who had joined less than a fortnight before, and wounded a good
many of the men. This was while merely getting into position among
the cramped trenches. Next, it was discovered that our bombardment
had by no means cut enough wire, and when the attack was launched,
in waves of two platoons each, undisturbed machine-guns in a few
dreadful minutes accounted for more than three quarters of the little
host. Almost at the outset, Lieutenant Montgomery was killed close
to our own parapet, and those who were left, under 2nd Lieutenant
Hely-Hutchinson, lay down till they might crawl back after dark.
That wiped out No. 2 Company, and next day, its thirty survivors were
sent back to the first-line transport—a bleak prelude to the battle
ahead. But it passed almost unnoticed in the failure of an attack
launched at the same time by the 71st and 16th Infantry Brigades in
the direction of Leuze Wood. Names of villages and salient points
existed beautifully on such maps as were issued to the officers, and
there is no doubt that the distances on these maps were entirely
correct. The drawback was that the whole landscape happened to be one
pitted, clodded, brown and white wilderness of aching uniformity, on
which to pick up any given detail was like identifying one plover’s
nest in a hundred-acre bog.
GINCHY
But the idea of the battle of the 15th September was, as usual,
immensely definite. Rawlinson’s Fourth Army was to attack between
Combles and Martinpuich and seize Morval, Lesbœufs, Gueudecourt, and
Flers; the French attacking at the same time on the right, and the
Reserve Army on the left. Immediately after our objective had been
won the cavalry would advance and, apparently, seize the high ground
all round the Department, culminating at Bapaume. The work of the
Guards Division, whose views of cavalry at that particular moment
are not worth reproducing, was to support the cavalry “on the above
lines.” The 2nd Guards Brigade would take the right of the attack
on Lesbœufs; the 1st the left, with the 3rd Brigade in Reserve, and
the 71st Infantry Brigade on the right of the 2nd Guards Brigade.
The 3rd Grenadiers and 1st Coldstream were respectively right and
left leading battalions, with the 1st Scots Guards and the 2nd Irish
Guards as right and left supporting battalions; each advancing in
four waves of single rank; two machine-guns accompanying each leading
battalion and four each the supporting ones. Three other machine-guns
were to bring up the rear flanked, on either side, by two Stokes
mortar-guns. The Brigade’s allotted front was five hundred yards to
the north-east of Ginchy, and since the normal enemy barrage between
Guillemont and Ginchy was a thing to be avoided if possible, they
were assembled east of the latter village and not behind it. Their
objectives were duly laid down for them in green, brown, blue, and
red lines on the maps, or as one young gentleman observed, “just
like a game of snooker except that every one played with the nearest
ball as soon as the game began.” But every one understood perfectly
the outlines of the game. Their predecessors had been playing it by
hundreds of thousands since the 1st of July. They knew they would all
go on till they were dropped, or blown off the face of the earth.
They dug themselves in on the night of the 14th in shallow trenches
about ten paces apart, a trench to each wave which was made up of
two half companies. The 2nd Irish Guards having expended one (No. 2)
company on the 13th September, their No. 3 Company was distributed
between Nos. 1 and 4 who accordingly went over in two enlarged waves.
The Brigade lost hardly a man from enemy bombardment during the
long hours that passed while waiting for the dawn. At six o’clock
on the 15th our heavies opened; and, as far as the 2nd Brigade was
concerned, brought down the German barrage exactly where it was
expected, between Guillemont and Ginchy, which, by German logic,
should have been crowded with our waiting troops. Thanks, however,
to the advice of Major Rocke and Captain Alexander as to the
massing-point, that blast fell behind our men, who thus lived to
progress into the well-laid and unbroken machine-gun fire that met
them the instant they advanced. Their first objective (green line)
was six hundred yards away through the mists of the morning and
the dust and flying clods of the shells. A couple of hundred yards
out, the 3rd Grenadiers and 1st Coldstream came upon a string of
shell-holes which might or might not have started life as a trench,
filled with fighting Germans, insufficiently dealt with by our guns.
This checked the waves for a little and brought the Irish storming
into the heels of the leading line, and as the trench lay obliquely
across the advance, swung the whole of the 2nd Brigade towards the
left, and into the 1st Brigade, who had already met a reasonable
share of trouble of their own. Indeed, during this first advance,
one party of the 2nd Irish Guards, under Major Rocke and Lieutenant
G. Bambridge and 2nd Lieutenant Mylne found themselves mixed up
among the men of the 1st Battalion. Moreover, the attack of the
Sixth Division which was taking place on the right of the 2nd Guards
Brigade had been held up, and it seemed as though the whole of the
machine-gun fire from the low fortified quadrilateral dominating that
end of the line was sweeping like hail into the right of the 2nd
Guards Brigade. This still further, though they were not aware of it
at the time, turned them towards the left.
The Battalion, without landmarks to guide, did what they could.
Under Captain Alexander and 2nd Lieutenant Greer, the Germans in
the first unexpected trench were all accounted for. Greer also shot
down and put out of action an enemy machine-gun, and the thinned
line went on. There had been instructions, in Brigade Orders, as
to the co-operation of nine tanks that were to assist the Guards
Division that day and would, probably, “start from each successive
line well in advance of the attacking troops.” Infantry were warned,
however, that their work “would be carried out whether the tanks are
held up or not.” It was. The tanks were not much more in evidence
on that sector than the cavalry which, cantering gaily across the
shell-holes, should have captured Bapaume; and long before the
Brigade were anywhere near their first objective, companies and
battalions were mixed up, in what with other troops would have been
hopeless confusion; but the Guards are accustomed to carry on without
worrying whether with their own units or not. In due time, and no
man can say what actually happened outside his own range of action,
for no man saw anything coherently, their general advance reached
the German trench which was their first objective. Its wire had not
been cut properly by our guns, and little gasping, sweating parties
dodged in and out and round the wings of it, bombing enemies where
they sighted them. There were many Germans, too, in the shell-holes
that they overpassed who fired into their backs, and all the while
from their right flank, now wholly in the air, came the lashing
machine-gun fire of the quadrilateral which was so effectively
holding the Sixth Division. So the wrecked trench of the first
objective was, as one man said, “none too bad a refuge even if we had
to bomb ourselves into it.”
They tumbled in, as they arrived, about a hundred and twenty of all
units of the Brigade with Captain Alexander of the Battalion, Captain
F. J. Hopley, 3rd Grenadiers, Lieutenant Boyd-Rochfort, Scots Guards,
Lieutenant M. Tennant, Scots Guards, attached to the machine-guns,
and 2nd Lieutenants Greer and Lysaght, of the Battalion. A few
minutes later Colonel Claude de Crespigny of the 2nd Grenadiers of
the 1st Brigade arrived with about fifty men. They had fairly lost
the rest of their Brigade in the dust and smoke, and had fetched up,
fragmentarily, among the 2nd Brigade, at what was fast becoming a
general rendezvous. Finding that the first objective still needed
a great deal more combing out, the mixed parties of officers and
men divided and began to bomb left and right along the trench. Then
Colonel Godman of the Scots Guards appeared (it was all one whirling
vision of breathless men and quickly passing faces), and took over
general command of the Brigade. With him were Lieutenant Mackenzie
and Captain the Hon. K. Digby, the adjutants of the 1st Scots Guards
and 1st Coldstream; while Captain FitzGerald, Lieutenant Keenan,
and 2nd Lieutenant Close of the Battalion were bombing and taking
prisoners up an offshoot of the trench in the direction of Lesbœufs.
The Germans who had fought so well among the shell-holes did not seem
to be represented here for they surrendered with ease. Their own
people machine-gunned them so purposefully as they scuttled towards
our lines that sometimes they bolted back to the comparative decency
of the trench whence they had been digged.
Meantime the situation did not clear itself. The uncut wire of the
first objective and the general drift of the whole attack to the left
had made a gap between the two front battalions of the 2nd Brigade’s
attack, that is to say, the 3rd Grenadiers and the 1st Coldstream. A
party of a hundred of the former battalion were pushed up into it,
and seem to have disappeared into the general maelstrom. At the same
time, the 3rd Grenadiers were trying to get touch with the Sixth
Division, on their sorely hammered right. Major Rocke, Lieutenant
Bambridge, and 2nd Lieutenant Mylne and their party of the 2nd Irish
Guards, were far out towards the left where the 2nd Brigade’s advance
had outrun that of the 1st, so much that the 1st Coldstream’s left
flank was in the air and there was a gap between the two brigades.
Here Major Rocke’s party found Colonel Guy Baring (he was killed a
little later) commanding the 1st Coldstream, and at his suggestion
formed a defensive flank on the left of the Coldstream until the 1st
Brigade drew level. This precaution was rewarded by a satisfactory
bag estimated at over two hundred Huns who, being incommoded by the
2nd Brigade’s action, were trying to slip through the gap between the
two brigades and escape round the rear of the 2nd Brigade, and who
were mostly killed by small-arm fire.
More men kept dribbling in to the first objective trench from time
to time (“Like lost hounds, only they’d been fighting every yard of
their way home”), and the remnants of the battalions of the Brigade
were sorted out and apportioned lengths of trench to hold. Thus:
“Grenadier Guards, 60 on the right; Scots Guards, 60 next; Irish
Guards, 40 next; Coldstream Guards, 10, on the left in touch with the
1st Brigade,” or, at least, as far as any touch could be made. The
fighting, of course, continued all round them, and various parties
devoted themselves to this as need arose. Everything was in the air
now, left and right flanks together, but the Guards Division, as an
extremely mixed whole, had pushed forward and taken the ground it had
been ordered to take, while the enemy, attacking here, bombing there,
and bolting across the shell-holes elsewhere, seemed to be desirous
to pull out of action and break away towards Bapaume. Our guns, of
which the fighting infantry were unconscious at the time, had helped
them towards this decision. There was some question and discussion
in the trench as to whether they should now push on to their second
objective or whether our artillery would, as originally laid down,
bombard that before a fresh move. But signs of German withdrawal
across the bare down and the sight of some of their field-guns
trotting back suggested a sporting chance of pushing on towards
Lesbœufs, which Captain Ian Colquhoun of the Scots Guards and Captain
Lyttelton of the 3rd Grenadiers thought worth taking. Their view
was shared by Major Rocke, Captain Alexander, and Lieutenant Mylne
of the Battalion, so between them they amassed some hundred men and
went out nearly half a mile into an unoccupied trench in a hollow,
with standing crops in front. Here they halted and sent back demands
for reinforcements. As they were utterly detached from an already
detached force, they might as well have indented for elephants. The
day went on, and the enemy, realising that our push had come to an
end, began to steal forward in small bodies which first outflanked
and then practically surrounded the detachment. At last a whole
company, hidden in the tall crops, made a rush which should have
killed or captured every one in the position. Somehow or other—and
again no coherent account was ever rendered, but it was probably
due to our controlled rapid fire—they failed. Our men fought their
way out and back to the main body with surprisingly few casualties;
and the enemy excitedly following them, came under a limited but
well-directed machine-gun fire from the main trench. The Diary enters
it as “a weak attack from Lesbœufs easily driven off, Lieutenant
M. Tennant doing good work with his machine-gun which was well
placed on the right.” But nothing is more difficult than to dissect
and sift out the times and the values of linked or over-lapping
episodes throughout one desperate day, where half a dozen separated
detachments are each profoundly certain that they, and they alone,
bear the weight or turn the tide of the local war. The minuteness
of the field of action adds to the confusion, when one remembers
that the distance from Ginchy to Lesbœufs was about the extreme
range of a service rifle and that the whole of that day’s work had
won them about eight hundred yards. For that advance they had paid
three hundred casualties among the men, and the following officers:
Captain Parsons, Lieutenants Purcell and Walters, both the latter
attached to the machine-gun company, killed; Major Rocke, Lieutenant
Brew (seriously), and 2nd Lieutenants M. R. FitzGerald, Mylne, and
Cutcliffe Hyne wounded. In addition 2nd Lieutenants Vaughan and
Tomkins, and Lieutenant Montgomery had been killed in the preliminary
work on the 13th September. A total of six officers dead and five
wounded.
A partially successful attempt on a German trench ahead of them by a
battalion of the Durham Light Infantry a little after dark brought
the very long day to an end. The night was quiet, while some units of
the Twentieth Division came up and dug themselves in outside their
parapet in readiness for the fresh attack which was to begin the next
morning. Men could not help admiring, even at the time, the immense
and ordered inhumanity of the system that, taking no count of aught
except the end, pushed forward through the dead and the débris of
war the fresh organisations which were to be spent next day as their
predecessors had been. (“Atop of it all, when a man was done with
he felt that he was in the road of the others. The same with the
battalions. When they was used they was heaved out of the road like a
broke lorry, and only too glad of it. But, as I was saying, when we
was expended, we all felt ashamed of blocking the traffic with our
wounds and our carcases. The only fun for us afterwards was telling
them that came up what was awaiting them. But they knew—they knew it
already!”)
The 16th September was an almost continuous bombardment of
whizz-bangs and 5.9’s on the trench where they still lay; but in
the intervals of the shelling men kept turning up and reporting
themselves with tales of adventure and extremity among the
shell-holes outside. They were relieved a little before midnight
and left their battered lair eighty-eight strong, _via_ Ginchy,
Guillemont, and Trônes Wood for the Citadel, which, when they reached
their total, had been increased by strays to one hundred and six.
Lieutenant Bainbridge, eminently capable of looking after himself
and his party, turned up later with another sixty. Next day, the
weary work of re-making the Battalion began. Lieutenant Dollar had to
be sent down to hospital with a return of the dysentery from which
he had reported himself recovered. This further reduced the few
available officers on their feet. A draft of a hundred and fifty men
came in. By absorbing the still effective digging-platoon into the
active line, a battalion of four companies of a hundred each was put
together and turned out for the next week in the Carnoy mud to drill
under new company commanders.
MUD-FIGHTING ON THE SOMME
The second move of the Guards Division opened on the 25th September,
and this time the ball was with the 1st Battalion. The work on the
15th of the month had carried the Fourteenth Division’s front on to
the naked ridge towards Morval and Lesbœufs where it had been held,
but without advance, for the past ten days. Now brigade orders came
“to renew the attacks” over what remained untaken of the ground.
“The Guards Division will capture Lesbœufs. The 1st Guards Brigade
will attack on the right, the 3rd on the left,” while the Fifth
Division was to attack Morval on the right of the Guards Division
and the Twenty-First Division (62nd Brigade) would take Gueudecourt
on the left. The 2nd Guards Brigade would be in reserve; and the
Battalion hoped, as men may who know what war means, that they would
not be needed. Nor were they till the evening of the 26th September,
when they moved from Trônes Wood and its dead, to relieve the 1st
Battalion, used and broken for the second time in ten days, the day
before, with the 2nd Grenadiers who “after the attack on Lesbœufs
had dug themselves in to the east of that town.” Cæsar himself does
not equal the sublime terseness of the Diary. All their world from
the King downwards was to crown them with praise later on, but in
the meantime reliefs must be orderly conducted and touch must be
kept through the shell-tormented darkness with the battalions on
either side, while they themselves settled in the reeking front
line under certainty of vicious bombardment and the possibility of
suddenly launched counter-attack. They were shelled all that night
from their relief on and throughout the next day (the 27th) “by every
type of shell, but mostly by 5.9’s.” In the afternoon when it became
necessary to help an attack on their left by launching a creeping
barrage from in front of Lesbœufs towards Le Transloy, the enemy
retaliated with a barrage on the Battalion’s front that blew the
line in in several places. They received the same attentions on the
28th, and this in an uptorn isolated land where water was scarce;
but, on their demand, retaliation arrived in the shape of heavies
and some aeroplanes. “This had the effect of stopping the enemy’s
fire completely except for a few whizz-bangs.” For the rest of the
day they merely took their share of the general necessary shellings
on a vast and disputed front. Men grow quick to differentiate
between the punishment they should accept without complaint, and the
personal direct “hate” which sets the newly strung telephones buzzing
to Brigade Headquarters for the guns. But, even so, it is said, a
hypnotic sense of helplessness comes over troops which are being
shelled continuously, till sometimes they will sit and suffer, the
telephone under their hand, while parapets fly up and fall down on
them. Yet, one single small casualty may break that spell as suddenly
as it was cast, and the whole line, grumbling and uneasy, wants to
know whether their artillery are dead too.
The 1st Coldstream relieved them late at night and without one
single casualty on the 28th September, and they lay up in bivouac
in Trônes Wood on the 30th, their old C.O., Colonel, now General,
Butler lunched with them in the Headquarters dug-out, where they
compared experiences. The 3rd Londons relieved them, and an enemy
aeroplane bombed them, but without effect, on their way back to camp
in Carnoy Valley; and four officers, Lieutenant Gunstone and 2nd
Lieutenants Heard, Crawford, and Black, arrived on that uneventful
day. Naturally, in a district alive with troops, German aeroplanes
did all the harm they could in our back-areas, and nothing will
persuade harried infantry on the ground that our aircraft are
properly protecting them. A draft of fifty men came in on the 1st
October, a Sunday, and on the 2nd they withdrew altogether with the
Division out of the battle for intensive training. Their own camp
was Méricourt-en-Vimeux west of Amiens, but—more important than all
else—the leave-season opened.
It was an ordinary month of the ordinary work demanded by the war
conditions of the age. Steady drill was the background of it, and
specialist classes for Lewis-gunners, bombers, intelligence, and gas
filled the hours, varied by night and day outpost and wire work as
well as map-reading for officers. Company commanders, whose men were
taken from lawfully ordained parade, swore and complained, and not
without justification; for the suave, un-get-at-able shirker has a
much better chance of evading the burdens of mere battalion routine
when every one is a “specialist,” than when, as a marching unit, he
is under the direct eye of his own unimaginative N.C.O.’s. (“There
was times, if you will believe me, when we was sorry for platoon
sergeants. What with this and that and the other special trick, every
mother’s son of us Micks had the excuses of his life to his hands all
the time.”) Hence the disgraceful story of the sergeant who demanded
whether “those somethinged spe-_shy_-lists” could “lend him as much
as three wet-nurses, just to make a show with the platoon.”