scattered, distorted dead who grimaced at them over their victory,
and were laid off at Montauban next day, to be railway navvies
for a few weeks. Their camp had last been occupied by a “labour”
battalion. “It would be quite impossible to exaggerate the state
of filth in which we found this place. No tins had apparently been
burned or buried for months, and rotting matter lay all over the
ground.” Something like this has been observed before by other
battalions about labour corps. However, they mucked it out into
moderate decency, and went daily with the 3rd Grenadiers and the
4th Coldstream to make the broad-gauge line from Trônes Wood to
Rocquigny and eventually into Ypres. Eventually, when the Sappers
had taught them a little, they slapped it down at the rate of more
than half a mile a day. It meant at the last four hours’ marching
to reach railhead, and as many hours of strenuous work when they
got there. But “the men were quite happy in spite of the long
hours and the absolutely vile weather.” They could acquire all the
fuel they needed, and had no drills or parades. To toil with your
belts or braces disposed as you please; and to wear your cap at
outrageous civilian angles; to explain to your desk-bred N.C.O. (with
reminiscences, till he cuts you short) that you have had experience
on this job in civil life, repairing Dublin trams; to delve in a
clean dirt uncumbered by stringy bundles that have once been the
likes of yourself; to return, singing, down the road to bountiful
meals and a satisfactory “frowst” afterwards, are primitive pleasures
far above pay or glory.
Their navvying at one camp or another along the rail lasted till
almost the end of April. They were rather pleased with the country
round them near Rocquigny, because there was grass on it, and
they found passable football grounds. It was a queer, part rural,
part mechanical, part military life, in which people grew fat and
jovial, and developed sides of their character that the strain of
responsibility had hid. The Battalion made friendships, too, with
troops in the railway trade—men whom they met day after day at the
same place and job, just as though people on the Somme lived for
ever. They were taught how to ballast permanent ways, or lever the
eternally derailed troop- and construction-trains back on to the
sprawling metals.
On the 27th April they were all called in from their scattered
labours, reminded that they were guards once more, and promised a
long programme of field-training. Inevitably, then, the evening
after, came orders to strike their camp at Bois de Hem, pitch it on
the Lesbœufs road and get back to road-work between Ginchy, Lesbœufs,
and Le Transloy. The march was hot and dusty; which impressed them,
for they had forgotten heat. Camp lay close to where the right of the
2nd Guards Brigade had reached, in the battle of September 15, 1916.
Here is the picture. The site “had been under severe shell-fire all
the winter, so little burying could be done. Before we could pitch
the camp we had to get rid of several dead men, and all the country
between Lesbœufs and Le Transloy, as well as towards Morval, was
dotted with corpses. In one morning, No. 4 Company, incidental to its
work on the roads, buried no less than seventy Germans, English, and
French. On Ginchy crest we found the body of Lieutenant Montgomery.
He had been killed commanding No. 2 Company on September 13 of last
year” (that was when No. 2 was wiped out on the eve of the battle of
the 15th), “but we had never been able to find him. He was buried on
the crest.”
The desolation struck them with continuous horror. Most of the troops
had been moved on into the comparatively unspoiled country to the
eastward, but the Battalion was forced to sit down among the dead
in “mile on mile of tumbled earth, collapsing trenches with their
fringe of rotting sand-bags, tangles of rusted wire, and everywhere
little crosses. For variety, an occasional wood, in which the trees
were mere skeletons, shattered stumps with charred branches.” It is
a perfect etching of the Somme. They were impressed, too, by the
fiendish forethought and thoroughness with which all signs of civil
life and work, and, as far as might be, all means of reviving them,
had been wiped out, burned up, blasted off, cut down, or removed by
the Hun. Details of destruction and defilement, such as would only
occur to malignant apes, had been attended to as painstaking and
lovingly in the most unlikely corner of some poor village, as in the
fields and among the orchards and factories. They had to fill all
shell-holes in camp to make even standing ground for themselves, and,
of course, a football “field” came next. Every man returning from
work brought back his load of timber or iron out of the pitiful old
trenches, not to mention flowers from wrecked gardens, and “we built
a regular village.” Their road-mending consisted in digging out the
shell-holes till they reached firm ground, filling up with timber
and brick (“easy to find).” By this time specialisation had run its
course by rail. And thus they worked till the 9th May. But this was
the last that was required of them in that form.
They were turned down to training camp at Curlu, almost on the
banks of the Somme, in a clean and cleaned-up country where “dead
men, even, were hard to find.” By this time specialization had run
its course through our armies till the latest platoon-organisation
acknowledged but one section that was known as a “rifle” section. The
others, although behung with the ancient and honourable weapons of
their trade, were bomb, Lewis-gun, and rifle (sniper) sections. But
the Battle of Arras had proved what angry company commanders had been
saying for months past—that infantry lived or died by their knowledge
of the rifle. These Somme officers were accordingly told that most
of their time should be given to platoon-training, fire direction,
and musketry. (“We did what we were told, but we always found out
when it came to a pinch—suppressing machine-guns in a pill-box and
stuff of that kind—if you could rush your men into proper position,
good shooting did the rest.”) And just as they were buckling down to
the new orders, word came, on Sunday, May 13, that they had better
prepare for an inspection by the King of the Belgians on Tuesday, May
15. The Brigade put up one long “agony” of rehearsal, and to its own
surprise managed to achieve a creditable parade. Unlimited British
generals attended the royal visitor, and for the first time in the
Battalion’s history their pipers in their Celtic kilts were present.
These had arrived about a fortnight before, when the Battalion
solemnly invited Captain Hugh Ross of the Scots Guards to tea in his
capacity of a “pipe expert” to pronounce on their merits. And civil
war did not follow!
On the 17th May they set out _via_ Billon Farm camp to Méricourt
l’Abbé, where for the first time in six months, barring a few days
at Corbie in January, they were billeted in real houses such as
human beings use. Méricourt in summer is quite different from the
cramped, windy, damp Méricourt of winter. All the land smiled with
the young crops that the old, indefatigable French women and men were
cramming it with. Here, while the Guards Division was concentrating
preparatory to their move into war again, the battalions were trained
hard but _not_ as specialists.
General Ivor Maxse, commanding the Sixteenth Corps (none but corps
generals can say certain things in public), lectured on some of the
teachings of the Battle of Arras. He gave instances of what comes
of divorcing the soldier from his rifle. On one occasion, said he,
men were met sidling down a road with the simple statement that the
Germans were advancing to counter-attack them, and that they were
retiring “because their own supply of bombs had run out.” Patrols
sent up to verify, found the counter-attack was being made by four
Huns furiously trying to surrender to some one. Again, a company
was heavily fired on from a wood about two hundred yards off. Not
a man returned the fire. They simply shouted down the trench, “Pass
the word for the snipers.” All of which proves what every company
commander knows, that the human mind under stress of excitement
holds but one idea at a time, or, as the drill books of forty years
ago laid down, “men will instinctively act in war as they have been
trained to act in peace.”
In spite of the growing crops and intense agriculture, the Battalion
found rifle ranges and did “a great deal of much-needed musketry.”
They wound up their stay at Méricourt in great glory at the Brigade
sports, sweeping off everything in sight—flat races, steeple-chase,
tug-of-war, and the rest, and winning their brigadier’s trophy to
the corps with the greatest number of firsts by a clear “possible”
against the whole Guards Division. (“’Tis this way. A good battalion
will do what is wanted; but a happy battalion, mark you, takes on
from that. Did we work at the Sports? Remember, we was all in the
pink, trained on that dam’ railway an’ fatted up for Boesinghe. What
chance had the rest of the Division against us at all?”)
THIRD YPRES AND BOESINGHE
They entrained on the 30th May as part of the vast concentration
that was crystallising itself for the Third Battle of Ypres, and,
after twelve hours, breakfasted at Arques, near St. Omer, and
marched all day to their crowded billets, which, like the rest of
the landscape, were loaded up with crops and difficult to train in.
They knew nothing of what was expected of them till 11th June, when
C.O.’s were told at Brigade Headquarters that they were to practise
assaults from trench to trench instead of “open warfare.” A battle,
including earthquakes, had taken place at Messines which had unkeyed
the situation to a certain extent, and the Guards Division would be
needed to develop it.
The screw would be applied next in the Salient, and they would go
up to Elverdinghe, on a sector that had long been notoriously quiet.
But they were assured that as soon as “Jerry” had word of their
arrival they would not feel neglected. All this on the top of their
open-warfare exercise was disappointing. They knew more than they
wanted to about the Ypres areas, and had hoped that something was
going to crack on the high and windy Somme and let them triumphantly
into Cambrai. “Fatted troops” are ever optimistic.
Their march towards their new ground was a hot and villainously dusty
one, with packs and steel helmets, of eleven miles and the wind at
their backs, so they moved in a sweating pillar of cloud. Not a man
of theirs fell out, and the Brigade knew it, for the C.O. of the
3rd Grenadiers, who were bringing up the rear, sent along written
congratulations with word that he had not seen one single Irish
guardsman panting by the wayside. To have won that little record had
meant the hardest sort of work for officers and N.C.O.’s.
On the 15th June they lay at Cardoen Farm, in shelters and huts round
the place on which the enemy had no direct observation, though it
was not four miles behind the line. Brigade Headquarters was more or
less underground at Elverdinghe Château, and the enemy attended to it
the instant the Guards Division relieved the Thirty-eighth Division.
The front lines, as usual hereabouts, were too close together for
unrestricted artillery work; but supports, communications, railways,
and battery positions were open to him, and he dosed them by day and
night. The divisional sector had a frontage of about twelve hundred
yards, which ran from the point where our line bending back from the
Ypres salient, turned across the Yser Canal some five thousand yards
north-north-west of Ypres itself, and thence straight along the canal
bank to where the Belgians took on. The Battalion relieved the 1st
Coldstream on the 18th June, and found their front, which was on top
of the canal embankment and within fifty yards of the enemy’s, fairly
good. Owing to water showing at two feet, trenches were protected by
breast-works and well revetted, but liable, from their make, to be
badly blown by direct hits when, since it crowned the breast-works,
their own wire would hamper the occupants. The canal bed, empty
and overgrown with high grass and weeds, was all dead ground. The
most that could be said for the position was that it gave fair
protection against shell, but might be awkward to hold, as support
and back-lines were much too much under direct observation. Battalion
Headquarters were regularly shelled, and in Boesinghe village itself,
the most dangerous area of all, there was no cover, and one had to
skirmish about in the open, with both eyes and ears on what might
be coming next. The front, as usual, under these conditions was the
safest. They were so close to the enemy that they were not shelled
at all. What little stuff fell near them was the enemy’s own shorts,
upon receipt of which the German front line would loose protesting
rockets. Support and reserve companies were regularly shelled, with
the ration and water parties pushing supplies up the railway in
trucks from Elverdinghe to B.H.Q. The Battalion’s normal work was
repairing blown head-cover and breast-work, and reporting, with
oaths, that it was impossible to dig on account of subsoil water.
They indulged the enemy every early morning with five minutes’
“rapid” of Lewis-guns or rifles, and their Stokes mortars were busy
day and night. Machine-guns (nothing can keep a machine-gunner quiet
long) sprayed enemy dumps intermittently all night long. It was an
intimate, uneasy dog’s life of dodging and ducking; yet with reliefs
and all it only cost them twenty-four casualties, mostly slight, in
the four days’ turn. Their rest at Cardoen Farm afterwards meant
fatigues of carrying sand-bags and six casualties to show for it;
a brisk shelling of the camp; and a brawl between their Lewis-gun
battery and one of the wandering Hun planes with which the camps were
so infested that they were hardly noticed in reports or letters.
Their next tour, June 27 to 29, was in support behind the canal, in
dug-outs round Bleuet Farm; Battalion Headquarters in the remnants
of the farm itself. Our own artillery seemed, from the infantry
point of view, to be devoting its attention to building up dumps and
bringing in more guns; so the enemy had it rather their own way in
shelling working-parties and communications. The relief was a bad
one, and that tour worked out at nineteen casualties, of whom six
were dead.
They ended June in wet bivouacs at a camp near International Corner,
which had an unsavoury reputation for being shelled, and under the
shadow of a specially heavy fatigue of burying a cable in a forward
area. But—army fashion—nothing happened. No shells arrived; it was
too wet even for parades, and some other lucky battalion had that
cable-picnic all to itself.
On the 2nd July they were marched off twelve miles to Herzeele,
where as no billets were ready they dined in a field, and shook down
afterwards among a crowd of gunners. Many tales have been told of
happy Herzeele, for it boasted at that time no less than three town
majors, every one of them a colonel! Hence some small muddle as to
billets.
The immense preparations for what was to be the Third Battle of the
Ypres included, for the Guards Division, ten days’ special training
over trenches such as they would have to deal with when their turn
came. These were duly dug by fatigue-parties in an open stretch of
country near the town, and “the whole model was on the same scale
as the actual German front-line system.” Although the existing
features of the ground were puzzling at first, the model proved to be
extremely useful as teaching all ranks the lie of the land.
The only features not included were the hidden concrete “pill-boxes”
supporting each other behind his line, on which the enemy was basing
his new and unpleasant system of elastic defence. But, allowing
for inevitable unrealities, there is no doubt that training “on
the model” supplies and brings a battalion to hand better than any
other device. The men grow keen as they realise by eye what is to
be expected; talk it over afterwards (there are certain analogies
between trench-to-trench attack and “soccer”); the N.C.O.’s discuss
with the officers, and the battalion commander can check some
preventable errors before the real thing is loosed.
His Majesty the King came on the 6th July to watch a brigade attack
in the new formation. It was a perfect success, but the next week saw
them sweated through it again and again in every detail, till “as far
as the Battalion was concerned the drill of the attack was reduced
almost to perfection.” In their rare leisure came conferences, map-
and aeroplane-study, and, most vital of all, “explaining things
to the N.C.O.’s and men.” They wound up with a model of a foot
to a hundred yards, giving all the features in the Battalion’s
battle-area. The men naturally understood this better than a map, but
it was too small. (“’Twas like a doll’s-house garden, and it looked
you would be across and over it all in five minutes. But we was not!
We was not!”)
On the 14th, in hot weather, the move towards the cockpit began.
They bivouacked in certain selected woods that gave cover against
searching planes, who knew as much about it as the enemy staff did,
and bombed all movements on principle.
On the 17th they went into line “for a tour which proved to be one
of the most unpleasant and most expensive” since the Battalion came
to France. They held the whole of the 2nd Guards Brigade frontage,
with a battalion of the 3rd Guards Brigade on their left, so the
companies were necessarily broken up, as their platoons were detached
to the separate trenches. All No. 4 Company and two platoons of No.
3 were in the front line, and a platoon of No. 3 and Company H.Q. in
the support-line near Hunter Street. In Walkrantz Trench was another
platoon of No. 3; No. 1 Company was in an unwholesome support-trench;
and working with it, one platoon of No. 2. In Bleuet Farm were the
remaining three platoons of No. 2 Company; and Battalion Headquarters
were in Chasseur Farm, about a hundred and fifty yards behind No.
1 Company. Altogether, it might fairly be called a “hurrah’s nest”
to relieve, hold, or get away from. The enemy, even without being
stirred up by our first series of preliminary bombardments, which had
opened on the 15th, were thoroughly abreast of things. They began
by catching No. 2 Company coming up to Bleuet Farm in a barrage
of gas-shells, which meant putting on box-respirators in the dark
and going ahead blind. Only one man was knocked out, however. The
transport was gassed late at night on the Elverdinghe road, and
held up for two hours under fumes of lachrymatory and phosgene. But
transport is expected to get in, whatever happens, and the fact that
Lieutenant R. Nutting, its officer, was badly gassed, too, was an
incident. From the official point of view he should have put on his
respirator at the first, which is notoriously easy when rounding up
hooded men and panicky horses. So he suffered. But as he was the
only person who knew where Bleuet Farm might be in that poisonous
blackness, he lay on the mess-cart, and between upheavals, guided the
convoy thither. Next morn, after spending the night in a dug-out,
he had to be carried back to the dressing-station. That same night
2nd Lieutenant Lofting, while on patrol along the canal bank, was
slightly wounded in the leg.
The next three days were one nightmare of stores of all kinds for
the battle-dumps pouring into the front line while the platoons
there stacked and sorted them out, under continuous fire. Our hourly
increasing force of heavies (the field-guns were not yet called upon)
took as much of the burden off our men as they could, but the enemy
were well set and knew just what they had to bowl at. The front-line
companies’ work was to repair a very great deal of trench damage;
make assembly-trenches for the coming attack; pile up the dumps,
praying that the next salvo would not send them all sky-high, and
keep the crawling communication-lines clear of corpses, wreckage,
wounded and traffic blocks.
The Diary puts it all in these cold words: “Some of the
carrying-parties under N.C.O.’s did very fine work under fire. In no
case did any party fail to perform the work set it.” Other pens have
described that tour as “house-moving in Hell.” They lost men in the
dark who were not missed till morning. On the night of the 18th,
probably through a misreading of the many lights which were going up
everywhere and might have been read as SOS’s, our big guns suddenly
put down a bitter barrage just behind the German front line. They
replied by one just behind ours, and a searching bombardment round
our wretched Battalion Headquarters. One shell went through the roof
of an officer’s dug-out in No. 1 Company trench and killed Lieutenant
James (he had joined the Battalion, for the second time, not a month
ago) and 2nd Lieutenant Wilson, only a few weeks joined. Lieutenant
Paget was also wounded in the knee. The casualties among the men
were heavy also; and next night, as our field-guns came into play, a
“short” from one of them killed an irreplaceable C.S.M.—Grimwood of
No. 4 Company—which on the eve of engagement is equivalent to losing
an officer.
On the morning of the 20th, No. 4 Company sent out four raiding
parties across the canal bank to see how strongly the enemy was
holding things, and, quaintly enough, to “accustom them to our
temporary occupation of their front line.” The inventive Hun had
managed to raise the water level of the canal, and two of the parties
had to abandon the attempt altogether. The others, led by their
sergeants, floundered across, sometimes up to their chins, found the
enemy line held, and came back with useful news and no casualties,
for which their corps commander and their brigadier congratulated
them. On the afternoon of the same day, the C.O. (Byng-Hopwood) and
Second in Command (Stephen Bruton) of the 1st Coldstream came up
to look at the line, and were both killed by the same shell in a
communication-trench.
On the 21st, at the discomfortable hour before earliest dawn, our
R.E. Company began to send over gas from four-inch Stokes mortars
and projectors, and our own two-inch Stokes in the front line strove
to cover the noise by separate rapid fire. Thanks to past practice
with the box-respirators, in which our perspiring men had at last
learned to work, there were no casualties when a gas “short” burst
just behind the front line. It was their first acquaintance with
gas-shells but, all told, only one officer and five men were gassed,
nearly all of whom returned to duty in a few days. The relief was a
small action in itself, for the companies had to be extricated one by
one, and “the dispositions of the relieving battalions were different
from ours.” Nor was it a clean departure, since the back-lines were
more and more crowded with fatigue-parties, each claiming right of
way, and the Battalion was held up in Hunter Street, which at its
widest was perhaps four feet and a half, by a couple of hundred men
shifting trifles such as mats and bridges towards the firing-line.
When they were getting away between Bleuet and Marguerite Farms,
Lieutenant Keenan was hit in the thigh by a splinter of shell.
That tour cost the Battalion six officers killed or wounded and
sixty casualties in other ranks. Considering the shelling, the
heavy traffic and the back-line “furniture removals,” the wonder
was that they had not suffered thrice as much; but for the eve of a
first-class engagement it was ample.