“The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”
--OMAR KHAYYÁM.
The morrow of battle is worse than battle itself, worse even than the
eve. For, when the weary body has been rested, the dazed brain begins
to reassert itself, and the flood of realisation pains like the rush
of blood to a numbed limb. The empty messes, the missing faces, the
shrunken appearance of the battalion when the roll is called, the pile
of kits lying ownerless outside the Quartermaster’s store ... each of
these visible signs of the battalion having passed through the fire
the mind takes in, reluctantly and recoiling from each fresh shock. In
sleep it revives shudderingly every phase of the fight, and, liberated
from the shackles of the will, lying powerless in the ban of slumber,
suffers unresisting, a thousand times intensified, every torment of
fear and horror which the waking mind has suppressed. For dreams--so
the psychologists tell us--are but the expression of emotions
consciously or subconsciously held in restraint in the waking hours.
Tents, as far as the eye could see, pitched in a sea of mud, ruffled by
chill gusts of rain and wind sweeping across the slopes; a mammoth gun
belching forth green fire and yellow smoke a few hundred yards away,
the thunder of distant cannon, blending with the stir of the camp;
drums beating, pipes skirling from the lines of the Scots Guards, the
solemn harmony of men’s voices singing hymns (only the Welsh Guards
possessed a choir like that!) ... these were the sights and sounds to
which our Ensign awoke from his first troubled sleep after getting back
to camp.
He came to his senses with a start of terror that sent him flying to
the tent door. Hideous nightmare shapes were haunting the tents and
huts where officers and men of the Guards slept the sleep of utter
exhaustion, physical and mental, the terrifying spectres that drift
through the battle--dreams of men who have been in action. Until our
Ensign had gazed long upon the lines of tents swaying in the wind,
and had seen the familiar khaki figures, wrapped in their waterproof
capes, passing to and fro in the mud, his mind remained in the grip of
a nameless terror: he did not know who or where he was, whether he were
alive or dead, on earth or in space. Thus do men awake from their first
sleep after coming out of battle.
For a few instants he felt like one raised from the dead. Slowly and
painfully his mind picked up, one by one, the threads of his life
where it seemed to have left off on that sunny morning--surely it was
years ago?--when the whistles had sounded, the hurricane din had broken
loose, and the Guards had moved forward into battle.
But there across the tent lay Peter’s sleeping valise and things:
there, on the tent pole, hung the little mirror they shared in common.
The tent was dry and clean: the yellow light diffused through its
canvas sides was bright and comforting. And here was the faithful
Johnson, getting ready his bath and a complete change of clothing, and
collecting his torn and blood-stained uniform for the battalion tailor
to mend and scour.
Lazily our Ensign fished a box of cigarettes from his kit spread out
beside him, lit one, and lying back in his warm sleeping-bag, watched
the smoke curl upwards towards the peaked dome of the tent. He was
stiff all over, every bone in his body was aching, but he was conscious
of a deep sense of thanksgiving; he was overpoweringly glad to be back
in the world again.
They had to carry on. He had a pang when he found all those joyous
company Messes he had known shrunk to a group of officers small enough
to take their meals together at one short table. He would not let
himself think of the old double-company Mess, for only he and two
others survived--all the rest were casualties. “_Der Mann stirbt_,”
says the old German maxim, “_das Regiment bleibt_,” and the old
Battalion routine continued unbroken. The Battalion had to be remade,
companies re-shuffled, new non-commissioned officers appointed,
casualty lists made up, names sent in for decorations, and with it all
the old duties to be done--rifle inspections and rum issues and all the
rest. The very matter-of-factness of this resumption of the old life
hurt a little sometimes, but the work of the Army, like the Government
of the realm, brooks no interruption.
Drafts arrived to fill up the gaps in the ranks of the Battalion.
They saw the first batch of these parading one angry and lowering
autumn evening as they trooped back through the mud and rain from the
little cemetery in the centre of the camp, where they had laid to
rest a brother officer ... a plain rite with no other ceremonial than
that with which the simple majesty of the Burial Service invests the
humblest obsequies, with the rain blowing damp upon their bare heads,
and the guns of the Somme growling in the distance.
Truly the Regiment is a thing immortal.
* * * * *
But even in the midst of the work of reorganising the Battalion,
rumours began to circulate that the Guards, like other Divisions,
were going to have “a second helping” of the great offensive. There
was a plain hint of this intention in the very stirring message of
congratulation which the Brigadier sent to the Battalion for their
achievements on September 15: “You may be called upon in the near
future,” the passage ran, “to carry out similar work, and I know that
you will not fail.”
Of course they would not, but the news created something akin to dismay
amid the little band of survivors of the great advance--not from any
reluctance to play a man’s part again, but from apprehension as to how
the strong leaven of untried recruits in their ranks would withstand
the fury of a modern battle as their first taste of active service.
Events were to prove how utterly groundless these apprehensions were,
but there was a pretty general feeling at the time that it was hard
luck for the Battalion’s fine fighting reputation to be thus staked on
the untested quality of new drafts.
Moreover, this time it was the turn of our Ensign’s Battalion to lead
the attack. Everybody was going in: and our Ensign found himself back
with his company, as second in command to Peter and the only other
officer in the company. Nos. 1 and 2 companies were to furnish the
first “waves” of the assault.
One afternoon the Corps Commander rode over to the camp, and from his
horse told the officers of our Ensign’s Battalion, assembled in a
semicircle, what was expected of the Battalion, and why. In a few very
brief but very lucid words he explained the higher strategy of the
Somme offensive, which the general public was to learn three months’
later from Sir Douglas Haig’s memorable despatch, and assured them that
what the great British artillery superiority on the Somme could do
to lighten their task would be done in a measure that should surpass
anything the Germans had yet experienced in the way of bombardments.
Then, wishing them all good luck, he rode away, and in simple language,
such as soldiers understand, addressed the non-commissioned officers
to the same effect. And that simple, straightforward talk was like
a searchlight that picked out and held in its bright beam the word
“Duty,” which is engraved in every soldier’s mind.
* * * * *
So, on a wet, dark evening, the Battalion marched back again to that
little copse where in the dug-out “The Last Supper of the Girondins”
had taken place. The roads had suffered terribly from the combined
effects of the rain and the heavy traffic of the recent advance. They
had been churned into deep quagmires of glutinous mud, where guns and
limbers and G.S. waggons kept on getting bogged, where the men sank in
above the middle of their puttees at every step.
What with the darkness and the mud and the frequent blocks owing to
vehicles sticking fast in the slime, the traffic was in a state of
chaos. The rain pelted down unmercifully, and it was so dark that a
man could not distinguish the features of his neighbour in the ranks.
Reliefs and fatigue parties, passing to and from the front line, got
inextricably mixed up. Men lost touch, and amid the curses of the
drivers as they urged their exhausted horses or mules through the deep
bog of the road, echoed cries such as: “Fatigue party this way!” “All
Welsh Guards to move forward”; “Make way there! Stretcher-bearers!”
while the rain splashed sorrowfully down and the air trembled to the
thundering crash of the guns all around.
The Battalion took about four hours to march the few miles separating
their last camp from the copse, and when they finally got in they were
all drenched and liberally besmeared with mud. A rum issue warmed them
a little, and then once more the men set about scraping themselves
dry spots in the crumbling shell-holes and building shelters out of
the litter of branches and shell-baskets and corrugated iron sheeting
scattered about the copse.
Their labours proved to be in vain, for at luncheon the next day a
baby-faced infantry subaltern walked up to the officers’ mess and very
diffidently suggested that the Battalion was occupying his battalion’s
billet. The Brigade was consulted and gave the verdict in favour of the
Line, so that afternoon the Battalion moved to another portion of the
wood, where, in a number of German dug-outs, all more or less battered,
and in shell-holes, they managed to make themselves fairly comfortable.
With the aid of the mess-servants, the officers managed to put a fairly
large dug-out into a state of repair, thatching the holes in the roof
with sandbags filled with earth, laid across iron girders, and building
up the gaps in the back of the shelter with sheets of corrugated iron
which one of the orderlies found lying in the wood. The floor was
carpeted with clean sandbags, a table was knocked together and a line
of seats constructed out of filled sandbags. A brazier of glowing coals
was placed in the doorway, for the nights were very cold, and thus
they managed to install themselves with some measure of comfort.
The men displayed extraordinary ingenuity in the little bivouacs and
earths they constructed out of their waterproof sheets and all kinds of
odd material. Fortunately the weather improved, and the sun came out
hot in the daytime, though the air got very cold after nightfall.
Early each morning the companies were taken out by an officer and
given half an hour’s physical drill in the bright sunshine--either a
little doubling (which was a matter of some difficulty, as the slopes
on which they exercised were pitted with shell-holes) or leap-frog or
follow-my-leader. In the afternoons there were fatigues to be done,
mostly salvage fatigues, to clear that littered brown slope over which
the Guards had advanced.
Until he had superintended one of these salvage parties, our Ensign
had had no idea of the extraordinary quantity and variety of articles
with which a battlefield is strewn. The men of the party--generally 100
strong--were spread out over the area designated by the Brigade to be
cleared, and ordered to bring in every single article they found, no
matter what it was, and deposit their burdens at a salvage-dump which
had been formed by the roadside. At the dump lay in huge piles rusty
rifles, both British and German, bayonets and equipment and greatcoats
the same, khaki caps and German helmets, boxes of ammunition and bombs,
thousands of rounds of ammunition, parts of machine- and Lewis guns
and trench mortars, field-dressings in their neat brown cases, and all
kinds of unused rations. All the dead that had strewn the slope had, by
this time, been covered in, and the articles which the salvage parties
brought by the hundred to the dump were merely the superficial litter
of the battlefield.
Altogether the Battalion spent four days in the wood. For the greater
part of the time they were shelled--an utterly haphazard, sporadic
bombardment, with large black 5·9 shells. In comparison with their
noise and number, the projectiles did very little damage, but they gave
the survivors of the 15th of September an insight into the quality
of the new drafts. One of these shells exploded in the middle of the
night, with a crash that shook the wood, within a score of yards of
a leafy shelter beneath which three of the recruits were sleeping.
But, as the Company Sergeant-Major informed our Ensign in accents of
admiration afterwards, the three recruits merely turned over on their
sides and went to sleep again.
It was 9 o’clock in the evening of September 24 when the Battalion
started out for the trenches from which the attack was to be delivered
the next day, at 12.35 P.M. instead of the more customary early
hour. Our Ensign’s company led off, and as both officers had been
over the route they found their way safely to the rendezvous, a
Tank stranded on the plain, where the guides sent by the battalion
they were relieving met them. The night was as dark as pitch and
the German guns most unpleasantly active; in fact, as soon as they
had topped the ridge--a long winding caterpillar of silent marching
figures--high-explosive shrapnel began to burst about them with
unpleasant force and in dangerous proximity.
Our Ensign marked down their experiences of that night in his diary as
“the most beastly night I ever remember.” Men marching at night are
always inclined to hurry the pace when they come under shell fire, and
as the going was very bad over the loose and crumbling shell-holes, the
rear of the company, where our Ensign was, had considerable difficulty
in keeping touch with the head. Night after night parties of Germans
walked into the British lines, for in the devastated country where most
trenches were merely lines of shell-holes connected up, there were no
landmarks to guide one. Once touch were lost with the head of the
column and the guide, our Ensign knew that he and his men stood a very
good chance of landing themselves in the German lines.
There was a communication trench, but it was full of water, so the
companies went up over the open. Several times they had to cross the
trench in its windings, and each time our Ensign had to help his
heavily-laden men to leap the yawning gulf, and then urge them forward
at the double to catch up with the rest of the party disappearing into
the gloom.
At length they reached their destination--a very narrow, shallow
trench dug in the soft brown earth on the grassy downward slope of a
low ridge, the German star-shells spouting from the flat ground below
them. The trench was so narrow that the reliefs had to stand on the
edge until the battalion occupying it had scrambled out. There were no
dug-outs or shelters of any kind--save that, here and there, men had
scraped long shelves in the back wall. The only fire-step was a series
of rough embrasures scooped at intervals in the forward wall; parapet
there was none, for the edge of the trench was practically flush with
the ground.
The relief was accomplished with remarkable alacrity, as reliefs in
such circumstances generally are, and the outgoing battalion hurried
helter-skelter away into the darkness amid a rain of shells. The only
means of communication between one end of that crowded trench and the
other was by walking along the top. Luckily, as the night advanced, the
Hun became quieter, so Peter and our Ensign made their way to the end
of their section of the trench and verified their connection with the
other Guards battalion which was to attack the next day on their right,
and got back unscathed to the officers’ corner of the trench.
There they found El Capitan and his ensign who were to take No. 1
Company “over the top” in the morning. The only accommodation was
a long shelf cut in the wall of the trench which would shelter two
sitting or one lying, and a niche, scooped out of the back wall about
level with their waists, which they used as a table.
Throughout the long cold hours until daylight the officers took it turn
and turn about to watch, whilst the remaining three sought slumber in
the sand-hole or on the floor of the trench. But sleep was out of the
question, for once below the level of the ground, by some trick of
acoustics, the air trembled so violently with the crash of the guns
that the ear-drums positively ached. All night the Germans shelled them
in desultory fashion, the shells ploughing up and down the trench but
never in it, and the only casualties they sustained were in a luckless
water fatigue party. All night the British artillery pounded away at
the German lines, cleaving a passage by which the Guards would advance
in the noonday hours.
Morning broke--the morning of September 25--pearly and fresh and
delightful, and from the shallow trench the officers surveyed the
objectives of the coming attack set in a landscape whose perfect
serenity was marred only by the gleaming shell-bursts that dotted it
everywhere. They saw the long gash in the brown shell-ploughed soil
which marked the trench, their first objective; beyond it the village,
embowered in foliage, swathed in coral-pink and saffron smoke ... a
yellow, jagged fragment of church tower, a glimpse of long skeleton
roofs and of gaping white walls ... with the capture of which their
day’s work would be done.
By some miracle of organisation servants turned up with breakfast,
and the four officers munched cold bacon and bread-and-butter and
hard-boiled eggs, and drank scalding-hot tea whilst they studied the
scene before them. Aeroplanes--British, of course: the Hun variety was
a rarity on the Somme in those days--soared out into the cloudless sky,
and fussed about over the German lines amid woolly-white shell-bursts,
whilst the German trenches broke their silence with the vicious stutter
of machine-guns.
All the time the British shells screamed overhead and burst with vast
brown earth-spouts and creamy belches of smoke about the trench and
the village. Up and down that first objective they went, now flinging
high into the air great beams of wood and other dark objects that might
have been human limbs, now sending up merely a low billow of dust and
smoke, showing that the projectile had fallen plumb into the trench.
In the village the shells crashed and thundered and sent great masses
of masonry and woodwork flying, and once, after a burst of pink smoke
had cleared away, our Ensign saw that the jagged finger of church tower
had vanished.