Military Cross for a little more than the usual bravery that a doctor
has to exhibit in the ordinary course of his duty, and 2nd Lieutenant
Greer received the same honour for, incidentally, dealing with enemy
machine-guns in the advance of the 15th. General Feilding, on the
6th, also distributed ribbons of medals won, and said what he thought
of the work of the Guards Division during the previous month. The
formal acknowledgment of the commander of the Fourth Army (General
Rawlinson) arrived on October 17. He said that the “gallantry and
perseverance of the Guards Division in the battles of the 15th and
25th were paramount factors in the success of the operations of the
Fourth Army on those days.” Of the 15th September, specially, he
observed, “The vigorous attacks of the Guards in circumstances of
great difficulty, with both flanks exposed to the enfilade fire of
the enemy, reflect the highest credit on all concerned, and I desire
to tender to every officer, N.C.O., and man, my congratulations and
best thanks for their exemplary valour on that occasion.” They knew
that they had not done so badly, though every one above the rank of
drummer could say now how it could have been done much better; but
the official word was grateful to those who had lived, and cheering
for those about to die.
On the 23rd October they route-marched to a fair field south of
Aumont with their cookers and their water-carts (all the Division
more or less was being trained in that neighbourhood), met their 1st
Battalion, dined well together, and embarked on a football match
which the 1st won by two goals to nothing. “The men thoroughly
enjoyed meeting each other, and spent a very happy day.” It might be
a Sunday-school that the Diary describes, instead of two war-used
battalions drawing breath between engagements.
H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught was to inspect the Division on the 1st
of November, which meant rehearsals for the ceremonial—a ritual of
value for retaining a hold on “specialists,” and taken advantage of
by company officers and N.C.O.’s who held that it did men no harm
to disport themselves occasionally in slow time with a properly
pointed foot. The rain and break-up of autumn made training very
difficult, but, the Diary notes, though many denied it at the time,
“We endeavoured to make every man a bomber rather than to concentrate
on the production of a number of specialists.” The inspection
rewarded the trouble taken—there was nothing their sternest critics
could lay a finger on—and at the end of it, those officers and men
who had won decorations in the war lined up before the Duke who
addressed them. Méricourt days ended with a Battalion dinner in
the 1st Battalion billets at Hornoy to General Butler, their old
commandant whose brigade was in rest near by. Somehow the memory
of such dinners remains with the survivors long after more serious
affairs, as it seemed then, have faded. (“It’s a curious thing that,
on those occasions, one was drunk before one sat down—out of sheer
good-fellowship, I suppose, and the knowledge that we were all for
it, and had all come through it so far. The amount of liquor actually
consumed has nothing to do with the results. I’ve put away four times
as much since Armistice and only got the deuce of a head.”)
On the 10th and 11th of November the Division returned to school.
They were to take over a stretch of the Fourteenth Corps’ front
near Gueudecourt and Lesbœufs. For tactical purposes the Division
was now divided into two “groups” of six battalions each. The right
group was made up of the 1st Guards Brigade as a whole, with the 1st
Coldstream and the 2nd Irish Guards additional. The left was the 3rd
Guards Brigade plus the 3rd Grenadiers and the 1st Scots Guards,
so that the 2nd Brigade was absorbed for the while. The Battalion
left Méricourt-en-Vimeux “with considerable regret” for it was good
billets and was packed into a large fleet of French motor-buses, many
of which were driven by Senegalese—“an example of the Frenchman’s
ability in saving up their men. A particularly engaging ape was
the conductor of the officers’ bus. He was fed by the adjutant on
chicken legs which he greatly appreciated and entirely devoured. He
appeared to speak no word of any human language.” Medals should have
been awarded for this affair; to be driven forty miles by Senegalese
chauffeurs is an experience deadly almost as warfare. Méaulte, their
destination, was then an “entirely unattractive town.” Gangs of Hun
prisoners shovelled mud from roads a foot deep in grey reeking slime.
Every road was blocked with limbers and lorries that offered no way
to the disgusted infantry wedged up impatiently behind them. Their
billets were crowded and bad, and they regretted the flesh-pots
of Méricourt while they cleaned them or froze in tents beside the
Carnoy-Fricourt road where they kept warm by trying to make roads out
of frosty mud.
Mud, filth, cold, exposure, and the murderous hard work necessary to
mere existence, were their daily and nightly fare from now on. It
must be duly set down for that reason, and that the generations to
come may judge for themselves what the war of a people unprepared,
against a race that had made provision for war, cost in the mere
stage-setting and scene-shifting of actual warfare.
On the 18th November they were shifted from their chill tents at
“Mansell Camp” to Camp A, only four miles off, at Trônes Wood.
The roads which were not roads and the traffic that was trying to
treat them as such, made this a matter of three and a half hours’
continuous marching, mainly in single file. They found themselves at
last in dark and pouring rain, hunting across a morass for holes in
the ground inadequately covered with pieces of tarpaulin and five
hundred yards away from any firm foothold. This was the “camp.” The
cookers frankly dared not leave the road and the men had to flounder
across the bog to get their teas. For that reason, the next day being
fine and all hands, “thoroughly wet and uncomfortable,” they “sang
loudly as they slopped about in the mud.”
Their wholly unspeakable front line was five miles distant from this
local paradise. You followed a duck-board track of sorts through
Trônes Wood, between ghastly Delville and the black ruins of Ginchy,
and across the Ginchy ridge where the chances of trouble thickened,
through a communication-trench, and thereafter into a duck-boarded
landscape where, if you were not very careful, the engulfing mud
would add you to its increasing and matured collection of “officers
and other ranks.” These accidents overcome, you would discover that
the front line was mud with holes in it. If the holes were roundish
they were called posts; if oblong they were trenches with names, such
as Gusty Trench and Spectrum Trench. They connected with nothing
except more mud. Wiring peered up in places, but whether it was
your own or the enemy’s was a matter of chance and luck. The only
certainty was that, beyond a point which no one could locate, because
all points were wiped out by a carpet-like pattern of closely set
holes, you would be shelled continuously from over the bleak horizon.
Nor could you escape, because you could never move faster than a man
in a nightmare. Nor dared you take cover, because the mud-holes that
offered it swallowed you up.
Here, for instance, is what befell when No. 1 Company went up to
relieve a grenadier company on the night of the 19th November. They
started at 3 P. M. in continuous mud under steady shelling. Only
three out of their four platoon guides turned up. The other had
collapsed. Ten men were hit on the way up; a number of others fell
out from sheer exhaustion or got stuck in the mud. The first man who
set foot in the front-line trench blocked the rest for a quarter
of an hour, while four of his comrades were hauling him out. This
was five hours after they had begun. The two Lewis-guns and some
stragglers, if men hip-deep in mud and water can straggle, were still
unaccounted for. Lance-Sergeant Nolan brought them all in by hand at
three in the morning under shell-fire. Then they were heavily shelled
(there was hardly any rifle-fire), and three men were wounded.
Luckily shells do not burst well in soft dirt. It was Private
Curran’s business to shift two of them who were stretcher-cases to
Battalion Headquarters one mile and a half distant. This took two
relays of eight men each, always under shell-fire, and Curran’s round
trip was completed in nine hours. When they were relieved by the
soft-spoken Australians, on the evening of the 21st, they spent the
whole of the night, from 8 P. M. to 6 A. M., getting back to camp,
where it is not surprising that they arrived “utterly exhausted.”
Owing to an orderly losing his way, one isolated trench or hole held
by Sergeant Murphy, Lance-Sergeant Nolan and seven men, was not
relieved, and they stayed on for another twenty-four hours. No. 2
Company, a few hundred yards away, were fairly dead to the world by
the time they had worked their way to their line, which possessed,
nominally, a trench and some posts. The trench was a gutter; their
posts had no protection at all from shells, and when they arrived
they found that no sand-bags had been sent up, so they had nothing to
work with. They also spent their time pulling men out of the mire.
Supervision of any sort was impossible. It took the officer three
hours to get from the left to the right of his short line. The posts
could not be reached by daylight at all, and during bombardments of
the trench “it often seemed as though what little there was must
disappear, and (the Battalion, as we know, was mostly new hands)
the coolness of the young N.C.O.’s was invaluable in keeping up the
spirits of the men.” There was one time when a sergeant (Lucas)
was buried by a shell, and a brother sergeant (Glennon) “though he
knew that it meant almost certain death” went to his aid, and was
instantly killed, for the enemy, naturally, had the range of their
own old trenches to the inch. To be heroic at a walk is trying
enough, as they know who have plowtered behind the Dead March of a
dragging barrage, but to struggle, clogged from the waist down, into
the white-hot circle of accurately placed destruction, sure that if
you are even knocked over by a blast you will be slowly choked by
mud, is something more than heroism. Equally, to lie out disabled
on an horror of shifting mud is beyond the sting of Death. One of
our corporals on patrol heard groaning somewhere outside the line.
It proved to be a grenadier, who had lain there twenty-four hours
“suffering from frost-bite and unable to move.” They saved him. Their
stretcher-bearers were worn out, and what sand-bags at last arrived
were inadequate for any serious defence. “We were fighting purely
against mud and shells, as the German infantry gave us no trouble.”
When No. 2 was relieved at the same time as No. 1 Company, they
dribbled into camp by small parties from two till ten in the morning,
and three of the men never turned up at all. The Somme mud told no
tales till years later when the exhumation parties worked over it.
The Australians, of whom it is reported that the mud dragged every
national expletive out of them by the boots, relieved the Division
as a whole on the 22nd November, and, pending the new arrangements
for taking over more of the French line, the Guards were transferred
first to a camp between Carnoy and Montauban, which for those parts
was fairly comfortable. At all events, the huts though stoveless were
water-tight, and could be “frowsted up” to something like warmth. For
ten days they worked, two days out of three, on the Carnoy-Montauban
road in company with a labour battalion surnamed “The Broody Hens,”
owing to their habit of scuttling at the very last moment from under
the wheels of the multitudinous lorries. “On off days we made paths
through the mud for ourselves.” But these were dry, and by comparison
clean.
The trench-line taken over by the Guards Division ran, roughly, from
Morval to Sailly-Saillisel (locally “Silly-Sally”) when their groups
were split into two (right and left) sections. The right, to which
the Battalion was attached, was made up of themselves, their sister
battalion, and the 2nd Grenadiers. A spell of hard winter weather had
frozen the actual trenches into fairly good condition for the minute,
but there were no communications, nor, as they observed, much attempt
at fire-steps. The French trusted more to automatic rifles—the
battalions the Irish relieved had thirty-two each—and machine-guns
than to infantry, and used their linesmen mainly as bombers or
bayoneteers. Accommodation was bad. When not on tour, two companies
were billeted in old dug-outs that contained the usual proportion
of stale offences, on the west side of Combles; one in cellars and
dug-outs in the town itself; and one in dug-outs in Haie Wood three
thousand yards behind the front. Their front line ran along the
east edge of the obliterated village, their support a hundred yards
or so behind it through the mounds of brick and earth of the place
itself, while the reserve company lay up in mildewy dug-outs in a
chalk quarry three quarters of a mile back. (One peculiarity of the
Somme was its most modestly inconspicuous cave-dwellings.) For the
rest, “The whole area was utterly desolate. West of the village,
rolling ground, the valleys running east and west a waste of mud
with shell-holes touching one another. Here and there the charred
stumps of trees. Equipment, French and German, dotted the ground,
and rifles, their muzzles planted in the mud, showed where, in some
attack, wounded men had lain. The village was just mounds of earth or
mud and mere shell-holes.” Later on even the mounds were not suffered
to remain, and the bricks were converted into dull red dust that in
summer blew across the dead land.
The Battalion was not in position till the 11th December, when it
relieved the 2nd Grenadiers after three or four days’ rain which
wiped out what communication-trenches had been attempted, and pulped
the front line. As to the back-breaking nature of the work—“Though
the first company (on relief) passed Haie Wood about 4 P. M. it was
11.30 before they had floundered the intervening 3000 yards.” One
of the grenadiers whom they relieved had been stuck in the mud for
forty-three hours. Unless the men in the trenches, already worn out
with mud-wrestling to get there, kept moving like hens on hot plates,
they sank and stuck. (“It is funny, maybe, to talk about now, that
mud-larking of ours; but to sink, sink, sink in the dark and you not
sure whether they saw ye or could hear you, puts the wind up a man
worse than anything under Heaven. Fear? Fear is not the word. ’Twas
the Somme that broke our hearts. Back, knees, loins, acrost your
chest—you was dragged to pieces dragging your own carcase out of the
mud. ’Twas like red-hot wires afterwards—and all to begin it again.”)
A mystery turned up on the night of the 12th December in the shape
of a wild-looking, apparently dumb, Hun prisoner, brought before
Captain Young of the Support Company, who could make naught of him,
till at last “noticing the likeness between his cap and that affected
by Captain Alexander”[1] he hazarded “Russky.” The prisoner at once
awoke, and by sign and word revealed himself as from Petrograd. Also
he bolted one loaf of bread in two counted minutes. He had been
captured at Kovel by the Huns, and brought over to be used by them
to dig behind their front line. But how he had escaped across that
wilderness that wild-eyed man never told.
They got back on the 13th December to a hideous tent-camp near Trônes
Wood. Thence, thoroughly wet, they were next day solemnly entrained
at Trônes Wood, carted three miles by train to Plateau and thence,
again, marched two more to Bronfay. There, done to the last turn,
chilled to the marrow, and caked with mud, they found the huttage
allotted them already bursting with a brigade of artillery. Short of
turning out themselves, the gunners did their kindest to help the
men dry and get their food, while the various authorities concerned
fought over their weary heads; some brilliant members of the Staff
vowing that the camp intended for them had not even been built; which
must have been vast consolation to the heavy-eyed, incurious sick,
of whom there were not a few after the last tour, as well as to the
wrathful and impeded cooks and sergeants. They got their sick away
(the Adjutant, Captain, J. S. N. FitzGerald and Lieutenant D. Gunston
among them), and somehow squashed in all together through another day
of mere hanging about and crowded, cold discomfort, which does men
more harm and develops more microbes than a week’s blood and misery.
On the 16th December they returned afoot through eight miles of
snow-storm to “some of the most depressing scenery in Europe.” The
“men had had but little rest and few of them had got any of their
clothes in the least dry.” But they were left alone for one blessed
night at Combles and Haie Wood in their cellars and their dug-outs,
and they slept where they lay, the stark, corpse-like sleep of men
too worn out even to mutter or turn.
Except that shelling was continuous over all back-areas and
approaches, the enemy as a fighting force did not enter into their
calculations. Or it might be more accurate to say, both sides were
fighting ground and distance. The sole problem of the lines was
communication; for every stick, wire, and water-tin had to be backed
up by brute bodily labour across the mud. All hands were set to
laying trench-boards from the support and reserve-lines and Haie
Wood. Without these, it had taken two and a half hours to carry a
load eight hundred yards. With them, the same party covered the
same distance under an equal burden in twenty minutes. The enemy
used their prisoners and captives for these ends. Ours were well
tended, out of harm’s range, while His Majesty’s Foot Guards took
their places. The front line—they relieved the 2nd Grenadiers there
on the 17th—was “mere canals of mud and water with here and there a
habitable island.” The defences had been literally watered down to a
string of isolated posts reached over the top across stinking swamp,
and the mounds and middens called parapets spread out dismally and
collapsed as they tinkered at them.
All dirt is demoralising. The enemy’s parapets had melted like ours
and left their working-parties exposed to the waist. Since the lines
were too close to be shelled by either artillery, the opposing
infantry on both sides held their hands till there grew up gradually
a certain amount of “live and let live,” out of which, but farther
down the line, developed attempts at fraternisation, and, in front
of the Guards, much too much repair work and “taking notice” on the
part of the enemy. The Hun never comprehends unwritten codes. Instead
of thanking Heaven and the weather for a few days’ respite, he began
to walk out on the top of his mounds and field-glass our wire.
Therefore, on the 19th December, the dawn of a still freezing day,
two obviously curious Germans were “selected and shot” by a sniper
who had been detailed for that job. “The movement then ceased,”
and doubtless our action went to swell the wireless accounts of
“unparalleled British brutalities.”
Their next tour, December 23, which included Christmas Day, saw them
with only seven officers, including the C.O. and the Acting-Adjutant,
Lieutenant Denson, fit for duty. Captain Bambridge and Lieutenant
Hely-Hutchinson had to be left behind sick at the Q.M. stores in
Méricourt, and two officers had been detached for special duties.
The M.O. also had gone sick, and those officers who stood up,
through the alternations of biting frost and soaking thaw, were
fairly fine-drawn. Whether this was the vilest of all their war
Christmases for the Battalion is an open question. There was nothing
to do except put out chilly wire and carry stuff. A couple of men
were killed that day and one wounded by shells, and another laying
sand-bags round the shaft of a dug-out tripped on a telephone wire,
fell down the shaft and broke his neck. Accidents in the front line
always carry more weight than any three legitimate casualties, for
the absurd, but quite comprehensible, reason that they might have
happened in civilian life—are outrages, as it were, by the Domestic
Fates instead of by the God of War.
The growing quiet on the sector for days past had led people to
expect attempts at fraternisation on Christmas. Two “short but very
severe bombardments” by our artillery on Christmas morning cauterised
that idea; but a Hun officer, with the methodical stupidity of his
breed, needs must choose the top of his own front-line parapet on
Christmas Day whence to sketch our trench, thus combining religious
principles with reconnaissance, and—a single stiff figure exposed
from head to foot—was shot. So passed Christmas of ’16 for the 2nd
Battalion of the Irish Guards. It had opened with Captain Young of
No. 1 Company finding, when he woke in his dug-out, “a stocking
stuffed with sweets and the like, a present from the N.C.O.’s and the
men of his company.”
They were relieved by the 1st Battalion on Christmas night, but
returned on the 29th to celebrate New Year’s Day by bailing out
flooded trenches and slapping back liquid parapets as they fell in.
The enemy had most accurately registered the new duck-board tracks
from the support-lines, and shelled the wretched carrying-parties
by day and night. (“If you stayed on the track you was like to be
killed; if you left it, you had great choice of being smothered.”)
The Acting-Adjutant (Lieutenant Denson) and the Bombing Sergeant
(Cole) attended a consultation with the Brigade Bombing Officer on
the morning of the 30th at Support Company’s Headquarters in the
Quarry. Business took them to the observation post in the wreckage of
the church; and while there, the enemy opened on the support-line.
They tried to get to the support company’s dug-out; but on the way
a shell pitched in among them, wounding the Brigade Bombing Officer
(Lieutenant Whittaker), the Sergeant and Lieutenant Denson. The
other two were able to walk, but Denson was hit all over the body.
Hereupon Lieutenant Black and his orderly, Private Savage, who were
in the Support dug-out, ran to where he lay, and, as they lifted him,
another shell landed almost on them. They did not dare to risk taking
Denson down the nearly vertical dug-out stairs, so Private Savage,
with a couple more men from No. 3 Company, in case of accidents,
carried him on his back six hundred yards to the dressing-station.
Thrice in that passage their track was blown up, but luckily none
of the devoted little party were hit. To be hunted by shell down
interminable lengths of slimy duck-board is worse than any attempt
on one’s life in the open, for the reason that one feels between the
shoulder-blades that one is personally and individually wanted by
each shouting messenger.
Another escaped prisoner, C.S.M. J. B. Wilson of the 13th East Yorks,
managed to get into our lines that night. He had been captured at
Serre on the 13th November, and had got away from a prisoners’ camp
at Honnecourt only the night before. He covered sixteen kilometres
in the darkness, steered towards the permanent glare over the front,
reached the German line at dawn, lay up in a shell-hole all through
the day and, finally, wormed across to us by marking down an N.C.O.
of ours who was firing some lights, and crawling straight on to him.
Seeing his condition when he arrived, the achievement bears out the
Diary’s tantalisingly inadequate comment: “In private life he was
a bank accountant, and seemed to be very intelligent as well as a
man of the greatest determination. We fed him and warmed him before
sending him on to Haie Wood whence an ambulance took him to Brigade
H.Q.”
So the year ended in storm and rain, the torn, grey clouds of the
Somme dissolving and deluging them as they marched back to Maltz Horn
camp, across an insane and upturned world where men of gentle life,
unwashen for months at a stretch, were glad to lie up in pigsties,
and where ex-bank-accountants might crawl out of shell-holes at any
hour of the hideous twenty-four.
1917
RANCOURT TO BOURLON WOOD