seventeen strong; lay, nominally in reserve, but actually finished
for the time being, along the La Justice-Graincourt road till one
company of the 2/5th Leicesters took over. Their losses seemed to be
enough to justify their resting a little, which they did at Ribecourt
and, next day, the 29th November, moved on to a camp, at Bertincourt,
of Nissen huts, crowded but comfortable, where they thought to relax
and take full stock of their hurts, and fill their ranks again from
the divisional reserve. [It is to be remembered that battalions went
into action with only three officers per company and platoons reduced
to practically half strength.] They had been warned by prisoners
that the enemy had at least three battalions ready with which they
intended to attack, but put the matter out of their collective minds
as one to be attended to by their neighbours. All they desired were
the decencies of a rest-billet far behind the infernal noise of the
guns. But on the dawn of the 30th that irregular noise turned into
the full-mouthed chorus which heralds a counter-attack. The Third
Army Corps was being hammered somewhere towards Gonnelieu a few
miles to the southward, and the orders were for the whole of the
Guards Division to get thither with every speed; for it looked as
though the bottom were all out of the Cambrai fight. The 2nd Guards
Brigade were away from Bertincourt ere noon, and, preceded by the
1st Scots Guards, moved in artillery formation straight across the
country-side to the ridge in front of Gouzeaucourt Wood—there are
two ridges between Metz and Gouzeaucourt village—where they were
told to dig in and lie up as reserve. They noticed in their progress
that the landscape was fairly full of retiring troops to whom they
occasionally addressed remarks of an encouraging nature. (“After
what we had took in bloody Bourlon ’twas great comfort to see that
there was others not making any picnic of it either.”) But they also
observed with satisfaction that the 1st and 3rd Guards Brigades were
ahead of them, making almost a parade movement of their advance
against the machine-guns of the village. It was abominably cold,
they were without greatcoats for the most part, and they had to dig
in in frozen chalk, and whenever there was a block on the road, the
enemy shelled it. Occasionally, the shells got in among their own
prisoners, of whom small detachments were already being gathered, and
sent back. The Battalion had been made up to four hundred rifles at
that time, and when on the evening of the 1st December they moved to
the western outskirts of Gouzeaucourt they relieved one company of
the 2nd Coldstream and a company of the 1st Battalion Irish Guards in
the support-line beyond Gouzeaucourt railway station. Gouzeaucourt,
and the situation, had been saved by the Guards Division. The 1st
and 3rd Guards Brigade had attacked and, as we know, captured Gauche
Wood to the east of Gouzeaucourt on the 1st, and the supporting
brigade was not called upon to do more than sit in its trenches and
take a not too heavy overflow of enemy’s shelling. Altogether the
Battalion’s casualties were under half a dozen. An attack, which they
were told would be sprung on them on the 2nd, did not arrive, and on
the 4th December the 1st South African Infantry Regiment relieved
the whole of the 2nd Brigade without a hitch, and the men moved off
to bivouac in Gouzeaucourt Wood. Their bitter cold shelters lay
among our vociferous batteries, which worked all night. At three in
the morning 4.2’s began to fall among the officers’ tents so that
the disgusted inmates had to move. One officer’s pillow was blown
away almost immediately after he had quitted it, and it is reported
that the C.O. and Adjutant “took refuge” behind a tent where they
delivered their minds about the horrors of “sleeping with the guns.”
The incoming brigade relieved them of their last responsibilities on
the night of the 5th, and they would have rested at Fins, whose field
railways they had helped to build in the pleasant summer days, but
that a long-range gun was attending to the hutments there, and it was
judged safer to push on several more weary miles to Etricourt which
they reached at one in the morning.
Battles are like railway journeys in that the actual time of transit
is as nothing compared to that wasted in getting from door to door.
They were marched off to Etricourt Station at eight on the morning
of their arrival, where they waited till eleven for a train that had
run off the line, and it was late in the dark of the evening when,
after passing Ginchy and the old battlefield of Transloy and Lesbœufs
which they fought over on the 15th and the 26th of September the year
before, and through Trônes Wood, of immortal and unhappy memories,
they reached at last Beaumetz close to their billets at Simencourt
where, with one day’s rest, the companies were “handed over to
company commanders for reorganisation, inspection, etc.”
On review the last tour (everything between rests was a “tour” in
those days) had not been very glorious, but there was no denying
it was very much up to Somme pattern. One came out of line and was
fatted up; one was “messed about,” thrown in, used up and thrown out
again, to be refatted for the next occasion with apparently small
results, except, always, the saving of the situation at Gouzeaucourt.
(“If that thing had happened one day later an’ the Division in rest
miles back instead of being on top of it, Saints know the whole line
might have gone.”) Otherwise the Somme seemed as large, as sticky,
and as well-populated with aggressive enemies as ever before. The
bodies and the uniforms of the dead of past years had withered down
somewhat on the clawed and raked fields; but to the mere soldier’s
eye, uninfluenced by statements of the Press, there was no reason
under the grey heavens why their past performances should not be
repeated, as part of the natural order of things for ever and ever.
Cambrai may have given hope and encouragement in England, but those
who had been through it remained Sadducees.
There were those who said that that hour was the psychological one
to have gone on and taken advantage of the moral effect of breaking
the Hindenburg Line, but this theory was put forward after the event;
and a total of eleven thousand prisoners and a hundred and forty-five
German guns for three weeks’ fighting seems small foundation for such
large hopes. Every one on the field seems to have been agreed as to
the futility of trying to work with, and making arrangements for
the keep of, masses of cavalry on the chance that these might break
through and overrun the enemy in the background.
That autumn Russia deliquesced and began to pass out of civilisation,
and the armed strength of Germany on that front was freed to return
and rearrange itself on the western border, ready for the fourth
spring of the War. We are told with emphasis that that return-wave
was foreseen, and to some extent provided for, by increasing the
line for which our armies were responsible, and by reorganising
those armies so that divisions stood on a ten-battalion as against
a thirteen-battalion basis.[3] We may once more quote Sir Douglas
Haig’s despatches on this head. “An unfamiliar grouping of units was
introduced thereby, necessitating new methods of tactical handling
of the troops and the discarding of old methods to which subordinate
commanders had been accustomed.” But the change was well supported in
the home Press.
Meantime, as far as possible, the war stood still on both sides. The
Battalion was encouraged to put on fat and to practise cleanliness,
kit inspections, and inter-regimental and company football matches
till the end of the year. During the month of December, at
Simencourt, Captain the Hon. H. B. O’Brien arrived and took over No.
1 Company; Lieutenant B. Levy, M.C., joined from the 4th Army School,
and 2nd Lieutenants J. C. Maher and T. Mathew also joined. The
Christmas dinners were good and solid affairs of pork, plum-pudding,
plum-dough (a filling and concrete-like dish), three bottles of Bass
per throat and a litre of beer, plus cigars and tobacco. The C.O.
had gone into Amiens to make sure of it and of the Headquarters’
Christmas trees which, next day, were relighted and redecorated with
small gifts and sweets for the benefit of the village children.
A moral victory over Eton crowned the year. The officers of the 2nd
Battalion played the officers of the 1st Coldstream at Eton football
at Wanquetin. They lost by a goal to two goals and a rouge, but their
consolation was that their C.O., an Harrovian, scored their goal and
that half the Coldstream’s goals were got by Harrow. It was a small
thing but it made them very happy in their little idleness after
“Bloody Bourlon.”
1918
ARRAS TO THE END
Assuming that the information of our Intelligence Department was
correct, the weight of the coming German attack would be delivered
to the south of Arras; and that town would be the hinge on which it
would turn. Elsewhere along the Somme front, ground might be given
if required, but between Arras and Amiens the line, at all costs,
must stand; and we are told that, months before the spring of the
year, attention was given to strengthening the systems of defence in
the rear. It is difficult to discover how many of the precautions
taken were made with serious expectation of trouble, and how many
were, so to say, fitted into statements published after the events.
Men who were on that front speak of most of the back-trenches and
reserve-lines as inadequate. The truth may be that no one believed
the British collapse would be so swift or so catastrophic as it was.
On New Year’s Day, Colonel Alexander, commanding, went on leave, and
was succeeded by Major R. H. Ferguson. The Battalion, reconstituted
and replenished, marched to Arras Gaol, which was always regarded
as a superior billet in cold weather, as the only shelling that
mattered took the south-east end of the town. Their work for the
next few weeks was to occupy and prevent the enemy from raiding
into the system of trenches and posts on the Scarpe to the east of
Arras at and round Fampoux and Rœux. Their experiences there were
precisely the same as those of the 1st Battalion. It was, as we know,
a variegated, swampy, and in places overlooked, stretch of works
which had been used as a front line almost since the beginning of
the War, and was paved with odds and ends of ancient horrors as
well as thoroughly soaked with remains of tear and other gas in the
support-lines. Their first turn began on the 2nd January when they
relieved a battalion of Gordon Highlanders in bitter cold weather,
and settled down to the business of wiring and cleaning-up. A small
excitement was the shelling of the left company by trench-mortars,
to which our guns replied but in their zeal cut our own wire. The
frost so far kept the trenches standing up, but, as none of them were
revetted, it was obvious that the next thaw would bring them all
down. Then the duck-boards froze and turned to ice, and the C.O.,
slipping on them, fell and strained himself so badly that he had
to go to hospital. Food apart, there was little comfort or decency
in that work of shovelling and firming dirt, and shivering day and
night in their dry or sodden clothing. Their rests at Arras were
complicated by the necessity of looking out for enemy aeroplanes,
which forbade them drilling more than one company at a time; and men
grow vastly wearied of standing about and fiddling with small duties
in a constricted town. The Battalion was so reduced in strength,
too, that two companies together made little more than an ordinary
platoon. However, in spite of knowing each other to the limits of
boredom, they found a certain amount of amusement in respirator drill
for all cooks, Headquarters details and the like (one cannot afford
to have cooks and storemen gassed) under the company gas N.C.O. At
the end of it, the Sergeant-Major, without mask, drilled them where
they stood, when their boomings and bellowings as they numbered off
delighted every one. Gas was always a nuisance. Broadly speaking,
a good scenting day would be good for gas, both old and new; but,
without direct orders, the men loathed casing themselves in their
masks, and company officers, sniffing the faint familiar flavour of
ether or rotting leaves in Northumberland or Shaftesbury Avenue, had
to chase them into the apparatus.
Then came a time when, on most of the sectors, the wet trenches went
out of commission altogether, and both sides, if they wished to move
about, had to climb out in full view of each other. At last, they
practically abandoned the front line and fell back on the support.
It made little difference, since the enemy was quiet except for
occasional salvoes of trench-mortar gas-bombs. Even when a dummy raid
on their left caused him to put down a hot barrage for an hour, there
were no casualties. The main trouble was the gas-shells in which the
enemy, with an eye to the near future, specialised and experimented
freely.
So passed January ’18, and on the 10th February began the transfer
of the newly formed 4th Guards Brigade, of three lean battalions
(2nd Irish Guards, 3rd Coldstream, and 4th Grenadiers), to their new
division and companions.
The officers of the Brigade were conducted to Vimy Ridge that they
might well look over the rear-line defences, in case it should
be necessary to fall back there. It took them into the territory
of the First Corps and a world where they were divorced from all
their tired associates and had to learn the other ways that suited
the other people among whom their lot would be cast. All Battalion
Headquarters dined together at the Hôtel de l’Univers next day, after
Brigadier-General Sergison-Brooke, commanding their old brigade, had
said good-bye and thanked them all for all they had done while they
had been with him. They were played out of barracks at Arras by the
regimental band and the drums of the Welch Guards. “The Battalion
marched past our late Brigadier at the Rond Point in column of route.
Thus we left the Guards Division.” No one was overelated at the
change; and none could foresee that they were within a few weeks of
their death as a battalion.
Their first destination was at Bray beneath the little hill above
the Scarpe south of the long pavé to Villers-au-Bois, and their
first duty was rehearsal for ceremonial parade on St. Valentine’s
Day before their new corps commander. He complimented them on
their looks and expressed his sense of the honour of having a
Guards Brigade with him. After which came immediate conference on
taking over the new ground assigned them, from troops of the Line.
It was a sector of the line between Lens and Arras that had never
shifted since the War was young—the Bailleul-Willerval stretch,
about five miles north of their old sector at Fampoux, that ran
up to Arleux-en-Gohelle and looked directly towards inaccessible
Douai. It was worked on a different system from the old pattern—the
brigade front of 2000 yards being lightly held by widely spaced
fortified posts; with a strong support-trench known as the Arleux
Loop a thousand yards in the rear. Their brigade went up in the
night of the 17th, the 2nd Irish Guards in support. The enemy, quite
aware there were new troops up, began to fish for samples. The 4th
grenadiers held the front line on the 19th February. The C.O. of the
2nd Irish Guards had been up that afternoon to look at the lie of
the land as the Battalion were going to take it over in a couple of
days. Everything was quiet—too quiet to be healthy, indeed, till late
in the evening when a heavy bombardment preluded a scientifically
thought-out German raid for identification purposes. It failed,
for the Grenadiers dealt rudely with the raids; but it lasted for
a couple of hours from the time that the first SOS was sent up,
and served the battalion, who stood to, but were not needed, as an
excellent rehearsal for emergencies. Likewise, the enemy barrage
knocked the front-line trenches about, and in the confusion of things
an SOS went up from too far on the left of the assaulted line, so
that our protective barrage came down where there was no enemy and
had to be shifted.
When the Battalion took over from the 4th Grenadiers (they could
relieve all but two of the posts in daylight, thanks to the formation
of the ground) Brigade Headquarters in its turn wanted samples
from the German lines where had been recent reliefs. Nos. 1 and 2
Companies of the Battalion accordingly sent patrols unavailingly
into No Man’s Land to see if they could catch any one. By the sheer
luck of the Irish, an enemy deserter in full uniform must needs come
and give himself up to our line in the afternoon. He was despatched
at once to Brigade Headquarters with the single word: “Herewith.”
The quarter-mile of chaos between the lines was so convenient that
they used quiet nights to train their young officers and N.C.O.’s in
patrolling; and as the brigades on their flanks were nearly half a
mile away, the young also received much instruction in night-liaison
work.
They were relieved, for the last time, in February by the 3rd
Coldstream and sent into Brigade Reserve to their division at Ecurie
Camp till the 2nd March, when they were despatched to dig and improve
a trench-line near Farbus under Vimy Ridge while the rest of their
brigade went into divisional reserve at Villers-Brulin. It cost a
week of heavy work, after dark, under intermittent shell-fire, varied
with fierce snow-storms, and ended in a return to the excellent
billets of Villers-Brulin for half the Battalion, while the other
half lay at Béthonsart near by—a dozen miles at the back of Arras.
Here they were cleaned up, drilled and lectured while the great storm
gathered along the fronts. St. Patrick’s Day passed with the usual
solemnities and sports, the extra good dinner, and the distribution
of the shamrock. This last was almost superfluous as a large
proportion of the Battalion had ceased to be Irish, and they were
filled up with drafts from the Household Brigade and elsewhere.
On the 21st March they finished the finals in the divisional
sports—tug-of-war and boxing against the 15th West Yorkshires. At one
o’clock in the morning came word that the Battalion would probably
move by bus at eight directly into the battle, which promised to be
hot. As a matter of fact, they and their brigade found themselves
on the outskirts of it almost as soon as they left billets. The
enemy had begun a comprehensive shelling of all back-areas and they
could hear the big stuff skying above them all round St. Pol. Their
buses picked them up at St. Pol Fervent and headed for Beaumetz
where they were met by a member of the General Staff who explained
the local situation so far as they had been able to overtake it.
Clearer information was supplied by the sight of the burning canteen
stores at Boisleux-au-Mont, which, with vast food supplies, had
been set alight as a precautionary measure, though the enemy did
not arrive till some days later. There was no accurate news but any
amount of rumour, none comforting. The upshot, however, was that the
Thirty-first Division was to get into the line at once and hold the
ground west of St. Léger, which village was already in the enemy’s
hands. There would be an army line in the neighbourhood dug to a
depth of three feet—hardly what might be called a trench; but, such
as it was, they would go forth into the night (it was now past 11
P. M.) and occupy it. The column departed with these instructions,
marched through Hamelincourt, found the line, and settled down in
the face of an agitated and noisy landscape under a sky illumined
by strange lights and quivering to the passage of shell. The 4th
Battalion Grenadiers was on their right and they themselves, with the
3rd Coldstream in support, held a thousand yards of front running
down to the little Sensée River. Somewhere behind them was the
Arras-Bapaume road being generously shelled; and somewhere in front
and on the flank, felt to be all Germany with all its munitions.
The shelling, moreover, was mixed, big and little stuff together,
proving that the enemy field-guns were amazingly well forward. This
orchestra was enlivened with blasts and rips of machine-gun fire
from every unexpected quarter. All the 23rd of March was confusion,
heavy shelling, and contradictory orders from brigades and divisions
that lay near them; and a certain amount of shelling from our own
artillery, varied by direct attacks on the trenches themselves. In
these the enemy failed, were cut down by our directed musketry, and
left many dead. At the end of the day the Battalion was told to shift
to the right of the 4th Grenadiers and so relieve the 13th Yorkshire
and the 21st Middlesex who had suffered a good deal. They had hardly
got into their new place when firing was heard from Mory on their
right, and men were seen streaming down the road, with word that the
enemy were through at Mory Copse and in full cry for Ervillers. This
left the Battalion largely in the air and necessitated making some
sort of flank to the southward, as well as collecting what remained
of the Yorkshires and Headquarters details, and using them for the
same purpose, much as it had been with the 1st Battalion at First
Ypres, centuries ago. (“Yes, you may say that we made defensive
flanks to every quarter of the world. We was _all_ defensive flank
and front line at once and the same time. But if any one tells you
that any one knew what was done, or why ’twas done, in these days,
ye will have strong reason to doubt them. We was anywhere and Jerry
was everywhere, and our own guns was as big a nuisance as Jerry.
When we had done all we could we fell back. We did not walk away
by platoons.”) They worked, then, at their poor little defensive
flanks, and, between shellings, saw the enemy streaming down into
the valley towards Béhagnies and Ervillers. Mory seemed to have gone
altogether, and north and south of the cut and pitted hills they
could hear the enemy’s riot all over the forlorn Somme uplands. At
evening came orders to fall back on the high ground from Courcelles
to Moyenneville, three or four miles to their rear. This was none the
less welcome because a battery of our own big guns had been dutifully
shelling Battalion Headquarters and the Sensée valley at large for
some hours past. Lieutenant Dalton and Captain the Hon. H. B. O’Brien
were both wounded. There must have been a good deal of unnecessary
slaughter on the Somme during those days. Gunners, of course, could
not always tell whether our people had evacuated a position or were
holding on; and at a few thousand yards’ range in failing lights,
mistakes are bound to happen.
Their new position, on a front of three thousand yards, had no
trenches. The C.O. himself sited for them and the men began digging
at midnight on the 26th. At five in the morning they were ordered
to move back at once to Ayette and leave what they had sketched out,
for a couple of other brigades to occupy. They next set about digging
in at the southerly end of Ayette village, but as they were few, and
their frontage was perilously long, could but hold the line in spots
and trust to the massed fire of machine-guns on the slopes behind it,
to dam back attacks.
On the afternoon of the 26th the enemy were in Moyenneville to
the north-east of them; so a company had to be despatched to dig
in at the other end of Ayette and were badly machine-gunned while
they worked, losing one officer and sixteen other ranks. At eleven
o’clock on the morning of the 27th the enemy barraged two retiring
brigades in the trenches which the Battalion had so kindly begun for
their use. At mid-day the enemy “attacked these two brigades, who
soon afterwards passed, leaving the 4th Guards Brigade once more
in the line.” Delicacy of diction could hardly go further. But the
situation was very curious. The enemy came up; our battered troops
went away. That was all there was to it. Panic and confusion broke
out occasionally; but the general effect upon a beholder who was
not withdrawing was that of the contagious “rot” that overtakes
cricket and football teams. Effort ceased, but morale in some queer
way persisted. The enemy after the “passing” of the two brigades
massed the two battalions by the aerodrome there, to press on the
attack. Our guns had due word of it, waited till the force was
well assembled and destroyed it so utterly in a few minutes that
there was no advance. Our line at Ayette was strengthened by the
arrival of two companies of Grenadier Guards and one hundred men
of the East Lancashires, which were all that could be got hold of.
Then—but nothing really seemed to matter in that scale of gigantic
disaster—Colonel Alexander, their C.O., had to take command of the
Brigade, as the Brigadier, Lord Ardee, had been gassed and forced to
go sick. Major P. S. Long-Innes arrived at midnight of the 27th and
took over command of the Battalion. On the 28th the enemy were well
into Ayette and sniping viciously, and our line, intact here, be it
remembered, drew back to the line of the Bucquoy-Ayette road while
our howitzers from behind barraged Ayette into ruin. One Hun sniper
in that confused country of little dips and hollows and winding
roads walked straight into our lines and was captured—to his intense
annoyance, for he expected to go on to London at least.
On the 31st of March they were relieved and went to rest-billets.
They had dug, wired, fought, and fallen back as ordered, for ten
days, and nights heavier than their days, under conditions that more
than equalled their retreat from Mons. Like their 1st Battalion
in those primeval days, they had lost most things except their
spirits. Filthy, tired, hoarse, and unshaven, they got into good
billets at Chelers, just ripe for clean-up and “steady drills.”
The enemy rush on the Somme had outrun its own effective backing
and was for the while spent. Our line there had given to the last
limits of concession and hung now on the west fringe of all that
great cockpit which it had painfully won in the course of a year and
lost in less than a fortnight. As far as the front could see, the
game was now entirely in Hun hands. Our business, possibly too long
neglected among our many political preoccupations, was to get more
troops and guns into France. A draft of two hundred and twenty-four
men reached the Battalion at Chelers on the 4th of April, under
Lieutenant Buller, who went on to join the 1st Battalion, and 2nd
Lieutenant Kent. A further draft of sixty-two, nearly all English,
came in on the 7th. Colonel Alexander resumed command after his turn
as brigadier, and Captain Charles Moore and Lieutenant Keenan also
arrived. The former was posted to No. 1 Company for a time, pending
action as Second in Command, and the latter attached to Battalion
Headquarters for the comprehensive duties of sniping, bombing and
intelligence. It was a hasty reorganisation in readiness to be used
again, as soon as the Battalion got its second wind.
VIEUX-BERQUIN