Part 13

On the 17th March, for example, “we were never really in touch with the enemy’s rear-guard during the day except for one or two snipers.” On the 18th, “by daybreak we were out of touch with the enemy, and cavalry patrols of King Edward’s Horse and the 21st Lancers went through us.” Here is the comment of the time and the place on our advance: “The German retreat was conducted very skilfully. One cannot say that we caused them to leave one position an hour before they intended. They inflicted upon us a considerable number of casualties (twenty in this battalion, while on our left the 1st Battalion lost considerably more). On the other hand, we saw no evidence that in the actual retirement we had even damaged one German. They left little or nothing behind.”

And the professional judgment is equally fair. “But of course it must be remembered that the task of the (German) regimental officers was an easy one, however difficult it may have been for the Staff. Given time, there is no difficulty in withdrawing battalions from trenches by night, for a few snipers and machine-gunners, knowing the ground, and retreating from trench to trench, can hang up an advance indefinitely unless the troops advancing have strong reserves and are prepared for heavy losses.”

This last was not our situation. The Fourteenth Corps had no divisions in immediate reserve; the sector the Guards Division was working on had been greatly thinned out, and their artillery was relatively small. With tremendous losses in the past and the certainty of more to come, things had to be done as cheaply as possible. “Hence our mode of advance.” It led them into a stale hell which had once been soil of France but was now beyond grace, hope, or redemption. Most of the larger trees in St. Pierre Vaast were cut down, and the smaller ones split by shell or tooth-brushed by machine-gun fire. The ground was bog, studded with a few island-like formations of fire-trench, unrevetted, unboarded, with little dug-outs ten or twelve feet deep, all wet and filthy. There were no regular latrines. Numberless steel helmets and heaps of stick-bombs lay about under foot. The garrisons must have been deadly uncomfortable, and there was good evidence that the enemy had economised men beyond anything that we dared. The ground had been cut to bits by our fire, and in one place yawned what had been a battery position wiped out, unseeing and unseen, weeks ago, as the dead teams round it testified. Very few booby-traps were left behind. The Battalion lost only five men in all through this cause.

FATIGUES ON THE SOMME

And on March 19 they came away from the filth and the multitudes of scattered, distorted dead who grimaced at them over their victory, and were laid off at Montauban next day, to be railway navvies for a few weeks. Their camp had last been occupied by a “labour” battalion. “It would be quite impossible to exaggerate the state of filth in which we found this place. No tins had apparently been burned or buried for months, and rotting matter lay all over the ground.” Something like this has been observed before by other battalions about labour corps. However, they mucked it out into moderate decency, and went daily with the 3rd Grenadiers and the 4th Coldstream to make the broad-gauge line from Trônes Wood to Rocquigny and eventually into Ypres. Eventually, when the Sappers had taught them a little, they slapped it down at the rate of more than half a mile a day. It meant at the last four hours’ marching to reach railhead, and as many hours of strenuous work when they got there. But “the men were quite happy in spite of the long hours and the absolutely vile weather.” They could acquire all the fuel they needed, and had no drills or parades. To toil with your belts or braces disposed as you please; and to wear your cap at outrageous civilian angles; to explain to your desk-bred N.C.O. (with reminiscences, till he cuts you short) that you have had experience on this job in civil life, repairing Dublin trams; to delve in a clean dirt uncumbered by stringy bundles that have once been the likes of yourself; to return, singing, down the road to bountiful meals and a satisfactory “frowst” afterwards, are primitive pleasures far above pay or glory.

Their navvying at one camp or another along the rail lasted till almost the end of April. They were rather pleased with the country round them near Rocquigny, because there was grass on it, and they found passable football grounds. It was a queer, part rural,

## part mechanical, part military life, in which people grew fat and

jovial, and developed sides of their character that the strain of responsibility had hid. The Battalion made friendships, too, with troops in the railway trade—men whom they met day after day at the same place and job, just as though people on the Somme lived for ever. They were taught how to ballast permanent ways, or lever the eternally derailed troop- and construction-trains back on to the sprawling metals.

On the 27th April they were all called in from their scattered labours, reminded that they were guards once more, and promised a long programme of field-training. Inevitably, then, the evening after, came orders to strike their camp at Bois de Hem, pitch it on the Lesbœufs road and get back to road-work between Ginchy, Lesbœufs, and Le Transloy. The march was hot and dusty; which impressed them, for they had forgotten heat. Camp lay close to where the right of the 2nd Guards Brigade had reached, in the battle of September 15, 1916. Here is the picture. The site “had been under severe shell-fire all the winter, so little burying could be done. Before we could pitch the camp we had to get rid of several dead men, and all the country between Lesbœufs and Le Transloy, as well as towards Morval, was dotted with corpses. In one morning, No. 4 Company, incidental to its work on the roads, buried no less than seventy Germans, English, and French. On Ginchy crest we found the body of Lieutenant Montgomery. He had been killed commanding No. 2 Company on September 13 of last year” (that was when No. 2 was wiped out on the eve of the battle of the 15th), “but we had never been able to find him. He was buried on the crest.”

The desolation struck them with continuous horror. Most of the troops had been moved on into the comparatively unspoiled country to the eastward, but the Battalion was forced to sit down among the dead in “mile on mile of tumbled earth, collapsing trenches with their fringe of rotting sand-bags, tangles of rusted wire, and everywhere little crosses. For variety, an occasional wood, in which the trees were mere skeletons, shattered stumps with charred branches.” It is a perfect etching of the Somme. They were impressed, too, by the fiendish forethought and thoroughness with which all signs of civil life and work, and, as far as might be, all means of reviving them, had been wiped out, burned up, blasted off, cut down, or removed by the Hun. Details of destruction and defilement, such as would only occur to malignant apes, had been attended to as painstaking and lovingly in the most unlikely corner of some poor village, as in the fields and among the orchards and factories. They had to fill all shell-holes in camp to make even standing ground for themselves, and, of course, a football “field” came next. Every man returning from work brought back his load of timber or iron out of the pitiful old trenches, not to mention flowers from wrecked gardens, and “we built a regular village.” Their road-mending consisted in digging out the shell-holes till they reached firm ground, filling up with timber and brick (“easy to find).” By this time specialisation had run its course by rail. And thus they worked till the 9th May. But this was the last that was required of them in that form.

They were turned down to training camp at Curlu, almost on the banks of the Somme, in a clean and cleaned-up country where “dead men, even, were hard to find.” By this time specialization had run its course through our armies till the latest platoon-organisation acknowledged but one section that was known as a “rifle” section. The others, although behung with the ancient and honourable weapons of their trade, were bomb, Lewis-gun, and rifle (sniper) sections. But the Battle of Arras had proved what angry company commanders had been saying for months past—that infantry lived or died by their knowledge of the rifle. These Somme officers were accordingly told that most of their time should be given to platoon-training, fire direction, and musketry. (“We did what we were told, but we always found out when it came to a pinch—suppressing machine-guns in a pill-box and stuff of that kind—if you could rush your men into proper position, good shooting did the rest.”) And just as they were buckling down to the new orders, word came, on Sunday, May 13, that they had better prepare for an inspection by the King of the Belgians on Tuesday, May 15. The Brigade put up one long “agony” of rehearsal, and to its own surprise managed to achieve a creditable parade. Unlimited British generals attended the royal visitor, and for the first time in the Battalion’s history their pipers in their Celtic kilts were present. These had arrived about a fortnight before, when the Battalion solemnly invited Captain Hugh Ross of the Scots Guards to tea in his capacity of a “pipe expert” to pronounce on their merits. And civil war did not follow!

On the 17th May they set out _via_ Billon Farm camp to Méricourt l’Abbé, where for the first time in six months, barring a few days at Corbie in January, they were billeted in real houses such as human beings use. Méricourt in summer is quite different from the cramped, windy, damp Méricourt of winter. All the land smiled with the young crops that the old, indefatigable French women and men were cramming it with. Here, while the Guards Division was concentrating preparatory to their move into war again, the battalions were trained hard but _not_ as specialists.

General Ivor Maxse, commanding the Sixteenth Corps (none but corps generals can say certain things in public), lectured on some of the teachings of the Battle of Arras. He gave instances of what comes of divorcing the soldier from his rifle. On one occasion, said he, men were met sidling down a road with the simple statement that the Germans were advancing to counter-attack them, and that they were retiring “because their own supply of bombs had run out.” Patrols sent up to verify, found the counter-attack was being made by four Huns furiously trying to surrender to some one. Again, a company was heavily fired on from a wood about two hundred yards off. Not a man returned the fire. They simply shouted down the trench, “Pass the word for the snipers.” All of which proves what every company commander knows, that the human mind under stress of excitement holds but one idea at a time, or, as the drill books of forty years ago laid down, “men will instinctively act in war as they have been trained to act in peace.”

In spite of the growing crops and intense agriculture, the Battalion found rifle ranges and did “a great deal of much-needed musketry.”

They wound up their stay at Méricourt in great glory at the Brigade sports, sweeping off everything in sight—flat races, steeple-chase, tug-of-war, and the rest, and winning their brigadier’s trophy to the corps with the greatest number of firsts by a clear “possible” against the whole Guards Division. (“’Tis this way. A good battalion will do what is wanted; but a happy battalion, mark you, takes on from that. Did we work at the Sports? Remember, we was all in the pink, trained on that dam’ railway an’ fatted up for Boesinghe. What chance had the rest of the Division against us at all?”)

THIRD YPRES AND BOESINGHE

They entrained on the 30th May as part of the vast concentration that was crystallising itself for the Third Battle of Ypres, and, after twelve hours, breakfasted at Arques, near St. Omer, and marched all day to their crowded billets, which, like the rest of the landscape, were loaded up with crops and difficult to train in. They knew nothing of what was expected of them till 11th June, when C.O.’s were told at Brigade Headquarters that they were to practise assaults from trench to trench instead of “open warfare.” A battle, including earthquakes, had taken place at Messines which had unkeyed the situation to a certain extent, and the Guards Division would be needed to develop it.

The screw would be applied next in the Salient, and they would go up to Elverdinghe, on a sector that had long been notoriously quiet. But they were assured that as soon as “Jerry” had word of their arrival they would not feel neglected. All this on the top of their open-warfare exercise was disappointing. They knew more than they wanted to about the Ypres areas, and had hoped that something was going to crack on the high and windy Somme and let them triumphantly into Cambrai. “Fatted troops” are ever optimistic.

Their march towards their new ground was a hot and villainously dusty one, with packs and steel helmets, of eleven miles and the wind at their backs, so they moved in a sweating pillar of cloud. Not a man of theirs fell out, and the Brigade knew it, for the C.O. of the 3rd Grenadiers, who were bringing up the rear, sent along written congratulations with word that he had not seen one single Irish guardsman panting by the wayside. To have won that little record had meant the hardest sort of work for officers and N.C.O.’s.

On the 15th June they lay at Cardoen Farm, in shelters and huts round the place on which the enemy had no direct observation, though it was not four miles behind the line. Brigade Headquarters was more or less underground at Elverdinghe Château, and the enemy attended to it the instant the Guards Division relieved the Thirty-eighth Division. The front lines, as usual hereabouts, were too close together for unrestricted artillery work; but supports, communications, railways, and battery positions were open to him, and he dosed them by day and night. The divisional sector had a frontage of about twelve hundred yards, which ran from the point where our line bending back from the Ypres salient, turned across the Yser Canal some five thousand yards north-north-west of Ypres itself, and thence straight along the canal bank to where the Belgians took on. The Battalion relieved the 1st Coldstream on the 18th June, and found their front, which was on top of the canal embankment and within fifty yards of the enemy’s, fairly good. Owing to water showing at two feet, trenches were protected by breast-works and well revetted, but liable, from their make, to be badly blown by direct hits when, since it crowned the breast-works, their own wire would hamper the occupants. The canal bed, empty and overgrown with high grass and weeds, was all dead ground. The most that could be said for the position was that it gave fair protection against shell, but might be awkward to hold, as support and back-lines were much too much under direct observation. Battalion Headquarters were regularly shelled, and in Boesinghe village itself, the most dangerous area of all, there was no cover, and one had to skirmish about in the open, with both eyes and ears on what might be coming next. The front, as usual, under these conditions was the safest. They were so close to the enemy that they were not shelled at all. What little stuff fell near them was the enemy’s own shorts, upon receipt of which the German front line would loose protesting rockets. Support and reserve companies were regularly shelled, with the ration and water parties pushing supplies up the railway in trucks from Elverdinghe to B.H.Q. The Battalion’s normal work was repairing blown head-cover and breast-work, and reporting, with oaths, that it was impossible to dig on account of subsoil water. They indulged the enemy every early morning with five minutes’ “rapid” of Lewis-guns or rifles, and their Stokes mortars were busy day and night. Machine-guns (nothing can keep a machine-gunner quiet long) sprayed enemy dumps intermittently all night long. It was an intimate, uneasy dog’s life of dodging and ducking; yet with reliefs and all it only cost them twenty-four casualties, mostly slight, in the four days’ turn. Their rest at Cardoen Farm afterwards meant fatigues of carrying sand-bags and six casualties to show for it; a brisk shelling of the camp; and a brawl between their Lewis-gun battery and one of the wandering Hun planes with which the camps were so infested that they were hardly noticed in reports or letters.

Their next tour, June 27 to 29, was in support behind the canal, in dug-outs round Bleuet Farm; Battalion Headquarters in the remnants of the farm itself. Our own artillery seemed, from the infantry point of view, to be devoting its attention to building up dumps and bringing in more guns; so the enemy had it rather their own way in shelling working-parties and communications. The relief was a bad one, and that tour worked out at nineteen casualties, of whom six were dead.

They ended June in wet bivouacs at a camp near International Corner, which had an unsavoury reputation for being shelled, and under the shadow of a specially heavy fatigue of burying a cable in a forward area. But—army fashion—nothing happened. No shells arrived; it was too wet even for parades, and some other lucky battalion had that cable-picnic all to itself.

On the 2nd July they were marched off twelve miles to Herzeele, where as no billets were ready they dined in a field, and shook down afterwards among a crowd of gunners. Many tales have been told of happy Herzeele, for it boasted at that time no less than three town majors, every one of them a colonel! Hence some small muddle as to billets.

The immense preparations for what was to be the Third Battle of the Ypres included, for the Guards Division, ten days’ special training over trenches such as they would have to deal with when their turn came. These were duly dug by fatigue-parties in an open stretch of country near the town, and “the whole model was on the same scale as the actual German front-line system.” Although the existing features of the ground were puzzling at first, the model proved to be extremely useful as teaching all ranks the lie of the land.

The only features not included were the hidden concrete “pill-boxes” supporting each other behind his line, on which the enemy was basing his new and unpleasant system of elastic defence. But, allowing for inevitable unrealities, there is no doubt that training “on the model” supplies and brings a battalion to hand better than any other device. The men grow keen as they realise by eye what is to be expected; talk it over afterwards (there are certain analogies between trench-to-trench attack and “soccer”); the N.C.O.’s discuss with the officers, and the battalion commander can check some preventable errors before the real thing is loosed.

His Majesty the King came on the 6th July to watch a brigade attack in the new formation. It was a perfect success, but the next week saw them sweated through it again and again in every detail, till “as far as the Battalion was concerned the drill of the attack was reduced almost to perfection.” In their rare leisure came conferences, map- and aeroplane-study, and, most vital of all, “explaining things to the N.C.O.’s and men.” They wound up with a model of a foot to a hundred yards, giving all the features in the Battalion’s battle-area. The men naturally understood this better than a map, but it was too small. (“’Twas like a doll’s-house garden, and it looked you would be across and over it all in five minutes. But we was not! We was not!”)

On the 14th, in hot weather, the move towards the cockpit began. They bivouacked in certain selected woods that gave cover against searching planes, who knew as much about it as the enemy staff did, and bombed all movements on principle.

On the 17th they went into line “for a tour which proved to be one of the most unpleasant and most expensive” since the Battalion came to France. They held the whole of the 2nd Guards Brigade frontage, with a battalion of the 3rd Guards Brigade on their left, so the companies were necessarily broken up, as their platoons were detached to the separate trenches. All No. 4 Company and two platoons of No. 3 were in the front line, and a platoon of No. 3 and Company H.Q. in the support-line near Hunter Street. In Walkrantz Trench was another platoon of No. 3; No. 1 Company was in an unwholesome support-trench; and working with it, one platoon of No. 2. In Bleuet Farm were the remaining three platoons of No. 2 Company; and Battalion Headquarters were in Chasseur Farm, about a hundred and fifty yards behind No. 1 Company. Altogether, it might fairly be called a “hurrah’s nest” to relieve, hold, or get away from. The enemy, even without being stirred up by our first series of preliminary bombardments, which had opened on the 15th, were thoroughly abreast of things. They began by catching No. 2 Company coming up to Bleuet Farm in a barrage of gas-shells, which meant putting on box-respirators in the dark and going ahead blind. Only one man was knocked out, however. The transport was gassed late at night on the Elverdinghe road, and held up for two hours under fumes of lachrymatory and phosgene. But transport is expected to get in, whatever happens, and the fact that Lieutenant R. Nutting, its officer, was badly gassed, too, was an incident. From the official point of view he should have put on his respirator at the first, which is notoriously easy when rounding up hooded men and panicky horses. So he suffered. But as he was the only person who knew where Bleuet Farm might be in that poisonous blackness, he lay on the mess-cart, and between upheavals, guided the convoy thither. Next morn, after spending the night in a dug-out, he had to be carried back to the dressing-station. That same night 2nd Lieutenant Lofting, while on patrol along the canal bank, was slightly wounded in the leg.

The next three days were one nightmare of stores of all kinds for the battle-dumps pouring into the front line while the platoons there stacked and sorted them out, under continuous fire. Our hourly increasing force of heavies (the field-guns were not yet called upon) took as much of the burden off our men as they could, but the enemy were well set and knew just what they had to bowl at. The front-line companies’ work was to repair a very great deal of trench damage; make assembly-trenches for the coming attack; pile up the dumps, praying that the next salvo would not send them all sky-high, and keep the crawling communication-lines clear of corpses, wreckage, wounded and traffic blocks.