for inspection by their major-general next day. A philosopher of
the barracks has observed: “When there’s ceremonial after rest and
fat-up, it means the General tells you all you are a set of heroes,
and you’ve done miracles and ’twill break his old hard heart to
lose you; and _so_ ye’ll throt off at once, up the road and do it
all again.” On the afternoon of that next day, when the Brigade had
been duly complimented on its appearance and achievements by its
major-general, a message came by motor-bicycle and it was “ordered
to proceed to unknown destination forthwith.” Buses would meet it on
the Arras-Tinques road. But the Battalion found no buses there, and
with the rest of its brigade, spent the cool night on the roadside,
unable to sleep or get proper breakfasts, as a prelude next morn to
a twelve-hour excursion of sixty kilometres to Pradelles. Stripped
of official language, the situation which the 4th Guards Brigade
were invited to retrieve was a smallish but singularly complete
debacle on Somme lines. Nine German divisions had been thrown at our
front between Armentières and La Bassée on the 9th April. They had
encountered, among others a Portuguese division, which had evaporated
making a gap of unknown extent but infinite possibilities not far
from Hazebrouck. If Hazebrouck went, it did not need to be told that
the road would be clear for a straight drive at the Channel ports.
The 15th Division had been driven back from the established line we
had held so long in those parts, and was now on a front more or less
between Merville and Vieux-Berquin south-east of Hazebrouck and the
Forest of Nieppe. Merville, men hoped, still held out, but the enemy
had taken Neuf Berquin and was moving towards Vierhoek. Troops were
being rushed up, and it was hoped the 1st Australian Division would
be on hand pretty soon. In the meantime, the 4th Guards Brigade would
discover and fill the nearest or widest gap they dropped into. It
might also be as well for them to get into touch with the divisions
on their right and left, whose present whereabouts were rather
doubtful.
These matters were realised fragmentarily, but with a national
lightness of heart, by the time they had been debussed on the
night of the 11th April into darkness somewhere near Paradis and
its railway station, which lies on the line from the east into
Hazebrouck. From Paradis, the long, level, almost straight road runs,
lined with farmhouses, cottages, and gardens, through the villages
of Vieux-Berquin, La Couronne, and Pont Rondin, which adjoin each
other, to Neuf Berquin and Estaires, where, and in its suburb of
La Gorgue, men used once to billet in peace. The whole country is
dead flat, studded with small houses and cut up by ten-foot ditches
and fences. When they halted they saw the horizon lit by distant
villages and, nearer, single cottages ablaze. On the road itself
fires of petrol sprang up where some vehicle had come to grief or
a casual tin had ignited. As an interlude a private managed to
set himself alight and was promptly rolled in some fresh plough.
Delayed buses thumped in out of the night, and their men stumbled
forth, stiff-legged, to join the shivering platoons. The night air
to the east and southward felt singularly open and unwholesome. Of
the other two battalions of the Brigade there was no sign. The C.O.
went off to see if he could discover what had happened to them,
while the Battalion posted sentries and were told to get what rest
they could. “Keep a good look-out, in case we find ourselves in
the front line.” It seemed very possible. They lay down to think
it over till the C.O. returned, having met the Brigadier, who did
not know whether the Guards Brigade was in the front line or not,
but rather hoped there might be some troops in front of it. Battle
order for the coming day would be the Battalion in reserve, 4th
Grenadiers on their left, and 3rd Coldstream on the right. But as
these had not yet come up, No. 2 Company (Captain Bambridge) would
walk down the Paradis-Vieux-Berquin road southward till they walked
up, or into, the enemy, and would also find a possible line for
the Brigade to take on arrival. It was something of a situation to
explain to men half of whom had never heard a shot fired off the
range, but the personality behind the words conveyed it, they say,
almost seductively. No. 2 Company then split in two, and navigated
down the Vieux-Berquin road through the dark, taking special care
to avoid the crown of it. The houses alongside had been abandoned,
except that here and there an old woman still whimpered among her
furniture or distracted hens. Thus they prowled for an hour or so,
when they were fired at down the middle of the road, providently left
clear for that purpose. Next they walked into the remnants of one
or two North Country battalions lying in fresh-punched shell-holes,
obviously trying to hold a line, who had no idea where they were
but knew they were isolated and announced they were on the eve of
departure. The enemy, a few hundred yards away, swept the road afresh
with machine-gun fire, but made no move. No. 2 Company lay down in
the shell-holes while Bambridge with a few men and an officer went
on to find a position for the Brigade. He got it, and fell back with
his company just as light was breaking. By this time the rest of the
Battalion was moving down towards Vieux-Berquin and No. 2 Company
picked them up half an hour later. The Grenadiers and Coldstream
appeared about half-past three, were met and guided back by Bambridge
more or less into the position originally chosen. There had been some
notion originally of holding a line from Vieux-Moulin on the swerve
of the Vieux-Berquin road where it straightens for Estaires, and the
college a little north of Merville; but Merville had gone by now,
and the enemy seemed in full possession of the ground up to Vierhoek
and were spreading, as their machine-gun fire showed, all round the
horizon. The two battalions adjusted themselves (they had hurried
up in advance of their rations and most of their digging tools) on
a line between the Le Cornet Perdu, a slight rise west of the main
Vieux-Berquin road, and L’Epinette Farm. The 2nd Irish Guards lay
behind them with Battalion Headquarters at Ferme Gombert—all, as has
been said in dead flat open country, without the haziest notion of
what troops, if any, lay within touch.
The morning of April 12th broke hot and sunny, under a sky full of
observation-balloons that seemed to hover directly above them. These
passed word to the German guns, and the bombardment of heavies and
shrapnel began—our own artillery not doing much to keep it down—with
a careful searching of all houses and shelters, and specially for
Battalion Headquarters. The Battalion, imperfectly dug in, or to the
mere leeward of cottages and fences, suffered; for every movement was
spotted by the balloons. The officers walking about between cottage
and cottage went in even greater peril; and it was about this time
that Lieutenant M. B. Levy was hit in the head by shrapnel and killed
at once.
Meantime, the Coldstream on the right and the Grenadiers on the left,
the former trying to work south towards Vierhoek and the latter
towards Pont Rondin through the houses along the Vieux-Berquin road,
were being hammered and machine-gunned to pieces. The Grenadiers in
particular were enfiladed by a battery of field-guns firing with
open sights at three hundred yards down the road. The Coldstream
sent back word about ten o’clock that the 50th Division, which
should have been on their right, was nowhere in view and that their
right, like the Grenadiers’ left, was in the air. Two companies were
then told from the 2nd Irish Guards, No. 3 Company, under Captain
Maurice FitzGerald, in support of the Grenadiers, and No. 2, Captain
Bainbridge, to the Coldstream. No. 3 Company at first lay a little
in front of Ferme Gombert, one of the Battalion Headquarters. It
was wiped out in the course of that day and the next, with the 4th
Grenadiers, when, of that battalion’s nineteen officers, but two
(wounded) survived and ninety per cent of the rank and file had gone.
No. 2 Company’s road to the Coldstream lay across a couple of
thousand yards of ploughed fields studded with cottages. Their
officer left his people behind in what cover offered and with a
few men made a preliminary reconnaissance to see how the passage
could be run. Returning to find his company intact, he lectured
them shortly on the situation and the necessity of “adopting an
aggressive attitude”; but explained that the odds were against
their reaching any destination unless they did exactly as they
were told. So they advanced in four diamonds, working to word and
whistle (“like sporting-dog trials”) under and among and between
shrapnel, whizz-bangs that trundled along the ground, bursts of
machine-gun fire and stray sniping. Their only cover was a few
willows by the bank of the Bourre River which made their right
flank, an occasional hedge or furrow, and cottages from which they
noticed one or two old women called out. They saw, in the intervals
of their earnest death-dance (“It must have looked like children’s
games—only the sweat was dripping off us all”), cows and poultry
at large, some peasants taking pitiful cover behind a fence, and a
pair of plough-horses dead in their harness. At last the front was
reached after only four killed and as many wounded; and they packed
themselves in, a little behind the Coldstream.
The enemy all this while were well content with their artillery
work, as they had good right to be; and when morning, checked it
with machine-gun fire. One account of this period observes “there
seemed to be nobody on the right or left of the Brigade, but all
the morning we saw men from other divisions streaming back.” These
headed, with the instinct of animals, for Nieppe Forest just behind
the line, which, though searched by shell and drenched by gas, gave
a semblance of shelter. Curiously enough, the men did not run. They
walked, and before one could question them, would ask earnestly for
the whereabouts of some battalion or division in which they seemed
strangely interested. Then they would hold on towards cover.
(“They told us the Huns were attacking. They weren’t. _We_ were. We
told ’em to stop and help us. Lots of ’em did. No, they didn’t panic
a bit. They just seemed to have chucked it quietly.”)
About two-thirty the enemy attacked, in fairly large numbers, the
Coldstream and the division on its right which latter gave—or had
already given. No. 2 Company of the Irish Guards had made a defensive
flank in view of this danger, and as the enemy pressed past punished
them with Lewis-gun fire. (The German infantry nowhere seemed
enthusiastic, but the audacity and bravery of their machine-gunners
was very fine.) None the less they got into a little collection of
houses called Arrewage, till a counter-attack, organised by Bambridge
of the 2nd Irish Guards, and Foster of the Coldstream, cleared them
out again. In this attack, Bambridge was wounded and Captain E. D.
Dent was killed.
By dusk it would have puzzled any one in it to say where our line
stood; but, such as it was, it had to be contracted, for there were
not men enough for the fronts. Of No. 2 Company not more than fifty
were on their feet. No. 3 Company with No. 4 were still in support
of the 4th Grenadiers somewhere in front of Ferme Gombert (which had
been Battalion H.Q. till shelled out) and the Vieux-Berquin road; and
No. 1 Company, besides doing its own fighting, had to be feeding the
others. Battalion Headquarters had been shifted to a farm in Verte
Rue a few hundred yards back; but was soon made untenable and a third
resting-place had to be found—no easy matter with the enemy “all
round everybody.” There was a hope that the Fifth Division would that
evening relieve the 2nd Irish Guards in the line, but the relief did
not come; and Captain Moore, Second in Command of the Battalion, went
out from Verte Rue to Arrewage to find that division. Eventually,
he seems to have commandeered an orderly from a near-by battalion
and got its C.O. to put in a company next to the remnants of No. 2.
All the records of that fight are beyond any hope of straightening,
and no two statements of time or place agree. We know that Battalion
Headquarters were shifted, for the third time, to a farm just outside
the village of Caudescure, whose intact church-spire luckily drew
most of the enemy fire. No. 4 Company, under Heard, was ordered to
line along the orchards of Caudescure facing east, and No. 1 Company
lay on the extreme right of the line which, on the night of the 12th
April, was supposed to run northward from Arrewage and easterly
through Le Cornet Perdu, where the 4th Grenadiers were, to the
Vieux-Berquin road. Whether, indeed, it so ran or whether any portion
of it was held, no one knew. What is moderately certain is that on
the morning of the 13th April, a message came to Battalion H.Q. that
the enemy had broken through between the remnants of the Coldstream
and the Grenadiers, somewhere in the direction of Le Cornet Perdu.
Our No. 3 Company (Captain M. FitzGerald) was despatched at once
with orders to counter-attack and fill the gap. No more was heard of
them. They went into the morning fog and were either surrounded and
wiped out before they reached the Grenadiers or, with them, utterly
destroyed, as the enemy’s line lapped round our left from La Couronne
to Verte Rue. The fighting of the previous day had given time, as was
hoped, for the 1st Australian Division to come up, detrain, and get
into the Forest of Nieppe where they were holding the edge of the
Bois d’Aval; but the position of the 4th Guards Brigade outside the
Forest had been that of a crumbling sandbank thrust out into a sea
whose every wave wore it away.
The enemy, after several minor attacks, came on in strength in the
afternoon of the 13th, and our line broke for awhile at Arrewage, but
was mended, while the Brigade Headquarters sent up a trench-mortar
battery under a Coldstream officer, for the front line had only
rifles. They were set between No. 4 and No. 2 Company in the Irish
Guards’ line. Later the C.O. arrived with a company of D.C.L.I. and
put them next the T.M.B. (It was a question of scraping together
anything that one could lay hands on and pushing it into the nearest
breach.) The shelling was not heavy, but machine-gun fire came from
every quarter, and lack of bombs prevented our men from dealing
with snipers in the cottages, just as lack of Very lights prevented
them from calling for artillery in the night. The Australians were
reported to be well provided with offensive accessories, and when
Battalion Headquarters, seeing there was a very respectable chance of
their being surrounded once more, inquired of Brigade Headquarters
how things were going, they were told that they were in strength on
the left. Later, the Australians lent the Battalion some smoke-bomb
confections to clean out an annoying corner of the front. That night,
Saturday 13th April, the men, dead tired, dug in as they could where
they lay and the enemy—their rush to Hazebrouck and the sea barred by
the dead of the Guards Brigade—left them alone.
Rations and ammunition came up into the line, and from time to time
a few odds and ends of reinforcements. By the morning of April 14th
the Australians were in touch with our left which had straightened
itself against the flanks of the Forest of Nieppe, leaving most of
the Brigade casualties outside it. Those who could (they were not
many) worked their way back to the Australian line in driblets. The
Lewis-guns of the Battalion—and this was pre-eminently a battle of
Lewis-guns—blazed all that morning from behind what cover they had,
at the general movement of the enemy between La Couronne and Verte
Rue which they had occupied. (“They was running about like ants,
some one way, some the other—the way Jerry does when he’s manœuvrin’
in the open. Ye can’t mistake it; an’ it means trouble.”) It looked
like a relief or a massing for an attack, and needed correction as
it was too close to our thin flank. Telephones had broken down, so a
runner was despatched to Brigade Headquarters to ask that the place
should be thoroughly shelled. An hour, however, elapsed ere our guns
came in, when the Germans were seen bolting out of the place in every
direction. A little before noon they bombarded heavily all along our
front and towards the Forest; then attacked the Guards’ salient once
more, were once more beaten off by our Lewis-guns; slacked fire for
an hour, then re-bombarded and demonstrated, rather than attacked,
till they were checked for the afternoon. They drew off and shelled
till dusk when the shelling died down and the Australians and a
Gloucester regiment relieved what was left of the 2nd Irish Guards
and the Coldstream, after three days and three nights of fighting and
digging during most of which time they were practically surrounded.
The Battalion’s casualties were twenty-seven killed, a hundred
missing and a hundred and twenty-three wounded; four officers killed
(Captain E. D. Dent, Acting Captain M. B. Levy, Lieutenants J. C.
Maher and M. R. FitzGerald); three wounded in the fighting (Captain
Bambridge, 2nd Lieutenants F. S. L. Smith and A. A. Tindall) as well
as Captain C. Moore on the 16th, and Lieutenant Lord Settrington and
2nd Lieutenant M. B. Cassidy among the missing.
Vieux-Berquin had been a battle, in the open, of utter fatigue and
deep bewilderment, but with very little loss of morale or keenness,
and interspersed with amazing interludes of quiet in which men found
and played upon pianos in deserted houses, killed and prepared to
eat stray chickens, and were driven forth from their music or their
meal by shells or the sputter of indefatigable machine-guns. Our
people did not attach much importance to the enemy infantry, but
spoke with unqualified admiration of their machine-gunners. The
method of attack was uniformly simple. Machine-guns working to a
flank enfiladed our dug-in line, while field-guns hammered it flat
frontally, sometimes even going up with the assaulting infantry.
Meanwhile, individual machine-guns crept forward, using all shelters
and covers, and turned up savagely in rear of our defence. Allowing
for the fact that trench-trained men cannot at a moment’s notice
develop the instinct of open fighting and an eye for the lie of land;
allowing also for our lack of preparation and sufficient material,
liberties such as the enemy took would never have been possible in
the face of organised and uniform opposition. Physically, those
three days were a repetition, and, morally, a repercussion of the
Somme crash. The divisions concerned in it were tired, and “fed-up.”
Several of them had been bucketed up from the Somme to this front
after punishing fights where they had seen nothing but failure, and
heard nothing but talk of further withdrawals for three weeks past.
The only marvel is that they retired in any effective shape at all,
for they felt hopeless. The atmosphere of spent effort deepened and
darkened through all the clearing-stations and anxious hospitals,
till one reached the sea, where people talked of evacuating the whole
British force and concentrating on the Channel ports. It does not
help a wounded man, half-sunk in the coma of his first injection, to
hear nurses, doctors, and staff round him murmur: “Well, I suppose
we shall have to clear out pretty soon.” As one man said: “’Twasn’t
bad at the front because we knew we were doing something, but the
hospitals were enough to depress a tank. We kept _on_ telling ’em
that the line was holding all right, but, by jove, instead of them
comforting us with wounds all over us, we had to hold _their_ hands
an’ comfort ’em!”
As far as the Guards Division was concerned, no reports of the
fight—company, battalion or brigade—tally. This is inevitable,
since no company knew what the next was doing, and in a three days’
endurance-contest, hours and dates run into one. The essential fact
remains. The 4th Guards Brigade stopped the German rush to the sea
through a gap that other divisions had left; and in doing so lost
two thirds at least of its effectives. Doubtless, had there been due
forethought from the beginning, this battle need never have been
waged at all. Doubtless it could have been waged on infinitely less
expensive lines; but with a nation of amateurs abruptly committed
to gigantic warfare and governed by persons long unused even to the
contemplation of war, accidents must arise at every step of the game.
Sir Douglas Haig, in his despatches, wrote: “The performance of all
the troops engaged in the most gallant stand,” which was only an
outlying detail of the Battle of the Lys, “and especially that of the
4th Guards Brigade on whose front of some 4000 yards the heaviest
attacks fell, is worthy of the highest praise. No more brilliant
exploit has taken place since the opening of the enemy’s offensive,
though gallant actions have been without number.” He goes on to
say—and the indictment is sufficiently damning—that practically
the whole of the divisions there had “been brought straight out of
the Somme battlefield where they had suffered severely, and been
subjected to great strain. All these divisions, without adequate
rest and filled with young reinforcements which they had had no
time to assimilate, were again hurriedly thrown into the fight,
and in spite of the great disadvantage under which they laboured,
succeeded in holding up the advance of greatly superior forces of
fresh troops. Such an accomplishment reflects the greatest credit
on the youth of Great Britain as well as upon those responsible for
the training of the young soldiers sent from home at the time.” The
young soldiers of the Battalion certainly came up to standard; they
were keen throughout and—best of all—the A.P.M. and his subordinates
who have, sometimes, unpleasant work to do at the rear, reported that
throughout the fight “there were no stragglers.” Unofficial history
asserts that, afterwards, the Battalion was rather rude to men of
other divisions when discussing what had happened in the Forest.
On their relief (the night of the 14th-15th April) they moved away
in the direction of Hazebrouck to embus for their billets. There was
a certain amount of shelling from which the Coldstream suffered, but
the Battalion escaped with no further damage than losing a few of
the buses. Consequently, one wretched party, sleeping as it walked,
had to trail on afoot in the direction of Borré, and those who were
of it say that the trip exceeded anything that had gone before. “We
were all dead to the world—officers and men. I don’t know who kicked
us along. Some one did—and I don’t know who _I_ kicked, but it kept
me awake. And when we thought we’d got to our billets we were sent on
another three miles. That was the final agony!”
What was left of the Brigade was next sorted out and reorganised.
The 12th (Pioneer) Battalion of the K.O.Y.L.I., who had borne a
good share of the burden that fell upon our right, including being
blown out of their trenches at least once, were taken into it; the
4th Grenadiers and 3rd Coldstream, of two weak companies apiece,
were, for a few days, made into one attenuated battalion. The 2nd
Irish Guards, whose companies were almost forty strong, preserved
its identity; and the enemy generously shelled the whole of them and
the back-areas behind the Forest on the 16th April till they were
forced to move out into the fields and dig in where they could in
little bunches. Captain C. Moore, while riding round the companies
with Colonel Alexander, was the only casualty here. He was wounded by
shrapnel while he was getting off his horse.