3rd Australian Brigade and worked at improving a reserve line close
up to Hazebrouck. The enemy pressure was still severe, no one knew at
what point our line might go next, while at the bases, where there
was no digging to soothe and distract, the gloom had not lightened.
The Australians preserved a cheerful irreverence and disregard for
sorrow that was worth much. The Battalion relieved two companies of
them on the 19th in support-line on the east edge of the Forest of
Nieppe (Bois d’Aval) which was thick enough to require guides through
its woodland rides. Here they lay very quiet, looking out on the old
ground of the Vieux-Berquin fight, and lighting no fires for fear of
betraying their position. The enemy at Ferme Beaulieu, a collection
of buildings at the west end of the Verte Rue-La Couronne road and
on the way to Caudescure, did precisely the same. But, on the 21st
April, they gassed them most of the night and made the wood nearly
uninhabitable. Nothing, be it noted once more, will make men put on
their masks without direct pressure, and new hands cannot see that
the innocent projectile that lands like a “dud” and lies softly
hissing to itself, carries death or slow disablement. Gassing was
repeated on the 22nd when they were trying to build up a post in the
swampy woodlands where the water lay a foot or two from the surface.
They sent out Sergeant Bellew and two men to see if samples could be
gathered from Ferme Beaulieu. He returned with one deaf man who, by
reason of his deafness, had been sent to the Ersatz. The Sergeant had
caught him in a listening-post!
Next night they raided Ferme Beaulieu with the full strength of Nos.
2 and 4 Companies (eighty men) under 2nd Lieutenants Mathew and
Close. It seems to have been an impromptu affair, and their sole
rehearsal was in the afternoon over a course laid down in the wood.
But it was an unqualified success. Barrages, big and machine-gun,
timings and precautions all worked without a hitch and the men
were keen as terriers. They came, they saw, and they got away with
twenty-five unspoiled and identifiable captives, one of whom had been
a North-German Lloyd steward and spoke good English. He told them
tales of masses of reserves in training and of the determination of
the enemy to finish the War that very summer. The other captives
were profoundly tired of battle, but extremely polite and well
disciplined. Among our own raiders (this came out at the distribution
of honours later) was a young private, Neall, of the D.C.L.I. who
had happened to lose his Battalion during the Vieux-Berquin fighting
and had “attached himself” to the Battalion—an irregular method of
transfer which won him no small good-will and, incidentally, the
Military Medal for his share in the game.
Life began to return to the normal. The C.O. left, for a day or two,
to command the Brigade, as the Brigadier was down with gas-poisoning,
and on April the 25th a draft of fifty-nine men came in from home.
Captain A. F. L. Gordon arrived as Second in Command, and Captain
Law with him, from England on the 28th. On the 27th they were all
taken out of D’Aval Wood and billeted in farms round Hondeghem,
north of Hazebrouck on the Cassel road, to strengthen that side of
the Hazebrouck defence systems. Continuous lines of parapet had to
be raised across country, for all the soil here was water-logged. Of
evenings, they would return to Hondeghem and amuse the inhabitants
with their pipers and the massed bands of the Brigade. Except for
the last few days of their stay, they were under an hour’s notice
in Corps Reserve, while the final tremendous adjustments of masses
and boundaries, losses and recoveries, ere our last surge forward
began, troubled and kept awake all the fronts. They were inspected by
General Plumer on the 15th for a distribution of medal-ribbons, and,
having put in a thoroughly bad rehearsal the day before, achieved
on parade a faultless full-dress ceremonial-drill, turn-out and
appearance all excellent. (“The truth is, the way we were put through
it at Warley, we knew _that_ business blind, drunk, or asleep when it
come to the day. But them dam’ rehearsals, with the whole world an’
all the young officers panickin’, they’re no refreshment to drilled
men.”)
On the 20th May, when the line of the Lys battle had come to a
stand-still, and the enemy troops in the salient that they had won
and crowded into were enjoying the full effect of our long-range
artillery, there was a possibility that their restored armies in the
south might put further pressure on the Arras-Amiens front, and a
certain shifting of troops was undertaken on our side which brought
the 4th Guards Brigade down from Hondeghem by train to Mondicourt
on the Doullens-Arras line, where the drums of the 1st Grenadiers
played them out of the station, and, after a long, hot march, to
Barly between Bavincourt and Avesnes. Their orders were, if the enemy
broke through along that front, they would man the G.H.Q. line of
defence which ran to the east of Early Wood, and, for a wonder, was
already dug. There is an impenetrability about the Island temperament
in the face of the worst which defies criticism. Whether the enemy
broke through or not was in the hands of Providence and the valour
of their brethren; but the Battalion’s duty was plain. On the 22nd,
therefore, they were lectured “on the various forms of salutes” and
that afternoon selected, and ere evening had improved, “a suitable
site in the camp for a cricket-pitch.” Cricket, be it noted, is not
a national game of the Irish; but the Battalion was now largely
English. Next day company officers “reconnoitred” the G.H.Q. line.
After which they opened a new school of instruction, on the most
solid lines, for N.C.O.’s and men. Their numbers being so small,
none could later boast that he had escaped attention. At the end
of the month their 1st Battalion borrowed four lieutenants (Close,
Kent, Burke, and Dagger) for duty, which showed them, if they had not
guessed it before, that they were to be used as a feeding battalion,
and that the 4th Guards Brigade was, for further active use, extinct.
On the 9th June, after a week’s work on the G.H.Q. line and their
camp, Captain Nugent was transferred as Second in Command to the 1st
Battalion, and 2nd Lieutenant W. D. Faulkner took over the duties of
Acting Adjutant.
On the 11th they transferred to camp in the grounds of Bavincourt
Château, a known and well-bombed area, where they hid their tents
among the trees, and made little dug-outs and shelters inside them,
when they were not working on the back defences. But for the spread
of the “Spanish influenza” June was a delightful month, pleasantly
balanced between digging and divisional and brigade sports, for
they were all among their own people again, played cricket matches
in combination with their sister battalion, and wrote their names
high on the list of prize-winners. Their serious business was the
manufacture of new young N.C.O.’s for export to the 1st Battalion,
and even to Caterham, “where they tame lions.” Batches of these were
made and drilled under the cold eye of the Sergeant-Major, and were,
perhaps, the only men who did not thoroughly appreciate life on the
edge of the Somme in that inconceivable early summer of ’18.
The men, as men must be if they hope to live, were utterly
unconcerned with events beyond their view. They comprehended
generally that the German advance was stayed for the while, and
that it was a race between the enemy and ourselves to prepare fresh
armies and supplies; but they themselves had done what they were
required to do. If asked, they would do it again, but not being
afflicted with false heroisms, they were perfectly content that other
battalions should now pass through the fire. (“We knew there was
fighting all about an’ about. We knew the French had borrowed four
or five of our divisions and they was being hammered on the Aisne
all through May—that time we was learning to play cricket at Barly,
an’ _that_’ll show you how many of us was English in those days! We
heard about the old Fifth and Thirty-first Divisions retaking all our
Vieux-Berquin ground at the end o’ June (when we was having those
sports at Bavincourt) an’ we was dam’ glad of it—those of us who had
come through that fight. But no man can hold more than one thing at a
time, an’ a battalion’s own affairs are enough for one doings.... Now
there was a man in those days, called Timoney—a runner—an’ begad, at
the one mile and the half mile there was no one could see him when he
ran, etc. etc.”)
The first little ripples of our own returning tide began to be
felt along the Arras-Amiens line when on the 4th of July the
Australians, under Lieutenant-General Monash, with four companies
of the Thirty-third American Division and many tanks, retook our
lost positions round Hamel and by Villers-Bretonneux. The Battalion
celebrated that same day by assisting the American troops with them
(and the Guards Division) at their national game. Here the Second in
Command narrowly escaped serious injury in the cause of international
good-will, for a baseball, says the Diary most ungallantly, “luckily
just missed him and struck a V.A.D. in the face.” The views of the
V.A.D. are not given.
The 14th July, the French celebration at Paris, fell just on the eve
of Marshal Foch’s historical first counter-attacks which, after the
Second Battle of the Marne, staggered the German front, when the same
trees that had hidden the 1st Battalion’s dead at Villers-Cotterêts,
close on four years ago, covered and launched one of the armies that
exacted repayment. And the 2nd Irish Guards, entirely appreciating
the comfort of their situation, despatched to Paris every member of
their bureaucracy who could by any means hatch up passable excuses
for helping to form the composite battalion which should grace the
festivities there. The C.O. (the Second in Command had gone on
already), the Adjutant, the Assistant Adjutant, the Sergeant-Major,
the M.O., the Sick Sergeant, the Orderly-Room Clerk, the Signalling
Sergeant, the Mess-Sergeant, and all the drums managed to get away.
So Captain Nutting chaperoned the remainder down to the pleasant
watering-place of Criel Plage, which is over against Dieppe. This
time they were set up in business as a young officers’ seminary for
the benefit of newly commissioned officers who were to be taken
in hand by the 4th Guards Brigade before passing on. Many of them
had had considerable service in the ranks, which again required a
special form of official education. They were distributed among the
battalions to the number of twenty-five or thirty each, and drilled
as companies. Whatever they learned, they were, beyond question,
worked up to fit physical trim with the others, and, at the Guards
Brigade Sports, the Battalion covered itself with glory. They
won every single event that counted for points, and the Brigade
championship by an overwhelming aggregate. Next day, being the
fourth anniversary of the War, they listened to a serious sermon on
the matter—as they had listened to others—not much crediting that
peace was in sight. Among the specialists who lectured them on their
many businesses was an officer from the G.H.Q. Physical and Bayonet
Training School, who spoke of “recreational training”—boxing for
choice—and had a pretty taste in irony. For he told them how well
some pugilists had done in the War; citing the case of an eminent
professional who had been offered large purses to appear in the ring,
but, feeling his country needed him, declined them all and, when the
War had been going on for rather more than two years, joined a select
body of cavalry, which, after another year, he discovered was not
going to the front. This so wrought on him that he forthwith gave his
services to the G.H.Q. Bayonet School, where he had flourished ever
since, heroically battling against stuffed gunny-bags. The Battalion
held its breath at the record of such bravery; and a few days later
professed loud horror at an indent which came in for a hundred and
fifty men and four officers—a draft for their 1st Battalion. The
Guards Division had been at work again since the 21st August on
the thrice fought-over Moyenneville-St. Léger-Mory ground, in our
northern attack which had followed Rawlinson’s blow round Amiens. The
whole of the 4th Guards Brigade was drawn upon to help make good the
wastage, and its draft of six hundred and seven men was one of the
finest that had ever been furnished—trained to the last ounce, and
taught to the limits of teaching. The young officers attached for
instruction left after a joyous dinner that lasted till late in the
dawn. And it may be that the draft had dined also; for, on the way
to the station, one of our men who had lost his cap and had paraded
in steel-helmet order was met by “a lady from out of a house,” who
solemnly presented him with the missing article. It was an omen of
victory and of the days when steel helmets should become curios.
They returned to their depleted camps until more young officers came
along for instruction, and in the last week of September their
comrades, the 4th Grenadiers and the 3rd Coldstream, were called
away to the moving front—“to fight”—as the horrified Diary puts it!
Actually, the two battalions merely followed the advance in the wake
of the cavalry corps as mobile infantry on lorries, till the 26th of
October. They then returned to their brigade till the 14th November,
when they joined the Guards Division for the march into Germany.
For the next six weeks or so, then, Criel Plage was all the
Battalion’s deserted own during the autumn days that saw the German
armies driven back, but it is interesting to observe that, on the
10th of October, a special order of the day, issued by the G.O.C.
Fourth Army, laid down that “all peace-talk must cease.” As usual,
they seemed to know more in the back-areas than at the front, where
the 1st Battalion certainly did not believe on the chances of any
immediate end.
On the 14th October, their small world was shaken out of all its talk
by the really serious news that their C.O. (Colonel the Hon. H. R.
Alexander) was to transfer to command the 10th Army School. He left
on the 18th, and the whole Battalion turned out to bid him good-bye
with an affection few commanding officers had ever awakened. He wrote
in orders (but he had spoken as well, straight from his heart): “I
wish to express my sincere grief in leaving the Battalion I am so
fond of. We have been through some hard times together, but the
remembrance of those battles in which the 2nd Battalion has taken
such a glorious part will always be a great pride to me. Remember
the great name that this wonderful Battalion has made for itself in
the War. Be proud of it and guard it jealously. I leave you with
complete confidence that its reputation is safe in your hands. I
thank you from the bottom of my heart for the loyalty that you have
always shown me during the whole time that I have had the honour of
commanding you. I wish you all and individually the best possible
luck and success, and a safe return to your homes when the War is
over.”
It is undeniable that Colonel Alexander had the gift of handling
the men on the lines to which they most readily responded; as the
many tales in this connection testify. At the worst crises he was
both inventive and cordial and, on such occasions as they all strove
together in the gates of Death, would somehow contrive to dress the
affair as high comedy. Moreover, when the blame for some incident
of battle or fatigue was his, he confessed and took it upon his own
shoulders in the presence of all. Consequently, his subordinates
loved him, even when he fell upon them blisteringly for their
shortcomings; and his men were all his own.
On the 26th October the 4th Grenadiers and the 3rd Coldstream
returned from their adventures at the front with the cavalry, full of
their impressions that everything was over now except the shouting.
Then there was more “peace-talk” than ever in the camp, and, three
days after the Armistice was declared, the Battalion with the
Brigade rolled statelily out of Criel for Cambrai by a “strategical”
train, which is slower than a sundial. They were clean, polished,
and splendid to behold, and they instantly fought with Brigade
Headquarters and their own trench-mortar battery, who had generous
ideas as to the amount of truckage which they themselves required.
They wandered half round northern France on that queer journey,
halting for hours in a battered world just realising that the weight
of the past four years had lifted. Whereby everybody attended to
everything except his proper job. At this distance one sees how all
men were walking in a mild delirium of reaction, but it annoyed
people at the time. Said one who had experienced it: “Ye would come
on a man an’ ask him for what ye wanted or where you was to go,
an’ the Frenchman, he’d say, ‘_Oui! Oui! Gare finne_,’ an’ smile
an’ rub his hands an’ push off. The Englishman—some dam’ back-area
sergeant-clerk or ticket-collector that had been playin’ ping-pong
at Boulogne since ’14—he’d smile the same way an’ ‘’Tis over, ’tis
over!’ he’d say, clean forgettin’ everything for you that he hadn’t
done wrong-end-up. But we was all like that together—silly, foolish,
an’ goin’ about grinnin’.” At one of their many resting-places,
they found the 4th Grenadiers who had started four hours before
them. The rail ahead was reported mined, and though the Battalion
politely suggested that their friends might hurry on and test the
truth of the rumour for themselves the Grenadiers declined. Men were
beginning to set a value on their lives again. At ruined Cambrai,
forty-eight hours after their start, they were warned to join the
Guards Division, who were going to Cologne, and to travel light,
as no further transport could be taken up. So they dumped surplus
kit, including boots, which was a mistake, at Cambrai, and waited
twenty-four hours till lorries should turn up, as guaranteed. When
these at last appeared no destination was laid down, but the Guards
Division was supposed to be somewhere near Maubeuge. They lost their
way from Cambrai at the outset and managed to mislay no small portion
of their lorries, all the Battalion, less Headquarters, and a good
deal of the 3rd Coldstream, ere they reached Maubeuge, which was
in the full swing of Armistice demonstrations. Their orders were
to march with the 2nd Guards Brigade next day to Vieux Reng, which
they did through a friendly and welcoming country-side, and on the
20th November to Charleroi through Marchienne where they were met
by a mad brass band (entirely composed of men in bowler hats!).
The roads filled as they went on, with returning prisoners even
more compositely dressed than the natives—a general gaol-delivery
of hidden, escaped, released, and all the flotsam and jetsam of
violently arrested war. The customs of His Majesty’s armies were new
to the world, and Charleroi did not in the least understand “saluting
drill” with the drums in the background, and when, to this marvel,
was added the sight of a regiment of Grenadiers at physical drill,
hopping on one foot, they assembled and shouted like the men of
Ephesus.
The next move (November 24th) was to Presles on a frosty day, with
billets for the officers in the superbly comfortable Château, with
its pictures and wallpapers intact on the wall, handles to the doors,
and roofs of flawless integrity. To wake up among surroundings that
had altogether escaped the past four years was curious. (“Somehow or
other, it felt like being in a shop where everything was free, and
one could take down what one wanted. I remember looking at a ceiling
with flowers painted on it one morning and wondering how it hadn’t
been cracked.”) They were landed in the dull and cramped village of
Lesves by November the 25th and rained upon in their utter boredom.
Our national methods of conquest have nothing spectacular. They
were neither talked to, sung to, nor lectured on their victory, nor
encouraged to demonstrate their superiority over the rest of mankind.
They marched and mourned that they had not brought spare boots.
Company physical training and drills were kept up, and the sole thing
approaching war was a football match of the right half-battalion
against the left, which blossomed into an argument, which verged upon
a free fight and, almost, the slaughter of the umpire. At Petit Han,
in the remoter districts of the border where the people had accepted
the Hun from the first, and had profited by his rule, the attitude
of the civilians changed. Here they were prosperous pacifists who
objected to militarism; even cursing and swearing and shaking their
fists at the invaders. So one old lady had to be gently locked up in
her own room for two hours while billets were being arranged and the
officers patiently argued and entreated. Ouffey, another hamlet of
a few sad houses, was of the same unaccommodating temper, and their
transport turned up hours late after being delayed by traffic and bad
roads. A halt was necessary here to sort out the general confusion of
our brigades converging on Cologne. They were held, then, at Ouffey
till the 10th December, another day at Aisomont, an unknown village,
and at last on the 12th crossed into Germany from Stavelot at Pont
Rucken with the Brigade. The Battalion, whose staff never neglected
their interests, had contrived to secure waterproof capes at some
issue or other, which they wore under the approving eyes of the Corps
Commander, who watched the march past in the unending rain. Honsfeld
was their last journey afoot; there they got orders to go south to
Burg and entrain for Cologne, and at Ehrenfeld, on the outskirts of
that city, they dropped into the Pioneer Barracks, fitted with every
luxury from electric-light to drying-rooms and baths, and found the
inhabitants both friendly and intensely curious.
Here some of our men noticed, first, how keenly curious were the
natives to discover exactly what the strangers had in their minds,
and, that point established, exactly how far they might presume
upon their limitations. It was soon felt that our armies boasted no
tradition nor ritual of victory as the Germans understood it—that
the utmost they could devise was some form of polite police-work
and traffic regulation. So, as one observer put it—“There was Jerry
takin’ stock of us, under his hatbrim at the street-corners in the
wet; and there was those little steamers with some of our officers in
charge (an’ the Irish flag flyin’ at the bows of course) convoyin’
prisoners an’ refugees an’ details an’ all, up an’ down that Rhine
River, like pirates play-actin’! An’ there was the Jerry frowlines
so polite an’ anxious for to please, playin’ the ‘Marseillaise’ an’
‘God Save the King’ to the officers in the evenin’, an’ every Jerry
willin’ to sell us everything he thought we’d like to buy. An’ there
was us Micks mountin’ guard on the dumps, an’ patrollin’ the streets
an’ sittin’ on machine-guns acrost bridges in that wet an’ cold
an’—an’ ’twas all like play-actin’. Nothin’ real to it at all, except
the long waitin’ an’ we crazy to get home. Maybe the new hands an’
the cease fire drafts liked the victoriousness of it, but for us,
the old birds, that had come through great doin’s for so long, ’twas
not in nature, ye’ll understand. All false-like, except the dam’
ceremonials.”
The last was quite true. The “smartening-up” that overtook both
battalions in Cologne was of a thoroughness new even to the extended
experience of the “old birds.” Sergeants, sickened by long months of
gritty and dusty hutments that ruin the bloom and port of the ideal
“soldier,” with officers on the rebound from service requirements to
a desperate interest in the haberdashery and appurtenances of real,
and possible, life, fell upon them from either flank; while colonels
in the background and generals on far heights proclaimed the iniquity
of deviating by one hair’s breadth from the highest standards of
propriety in kit, conduct, and bearing while they were among the late
enemy. So they said, with justice, that Jerry managed to give them as
much trouble when they occupied him as when he was occupying them on
the Somme.