Chapter VIII: Part 8

By five in the morning, after a most wearing night, the Battalion was in position, the 2/5th West Riding of the 1st Brigade on its left and the 1st Coldstream on its right; and the Wood in front alive with concealed machine-guns and spattered with shells. They led off at 6.20 behind their own barrage, in two waves; No. 1 Company on the right and No. 2 Company on the left, supported by No. 3 Company and No. 4. Everything was ready for them, and machine-guns opened on well-chosen and converging ranges. Almost at the outset they met a line of enemy posts held in strength, where many of the occupants had chosen to shelter themselves at the bottom of the trenches under oil-sheets, a protection hampering them equally in their efforts to fight or to surrender. Here there was some quick killing and a despatch of prisoners to the rear; but the Wood offered many chances of escape, and as our guards were necessarily few, for every rifle was needed, a number broke away and returned. Meantime, the Battalion took half a dozen machine-guns and lost more men at each blind step. In some respects Bourlon was like Villers-Cotterêts on a large scale, with the added handicap of severe and well-placed shelling. A man once down in the coppice, or bogged in a wood-pool, was as good as lost, and the in-and-out work through the trees and stumpage broke up the formations. Nor, when the affair was well launched, was there much help from “the officer with the compass” who was supposed to direct the outer flank of each company. The ground on the right of the Battalion’s attack, which the Coldstream were handling, was thick with undestroyed houses and buildings of all sorts that gave perfect shelter to the machine-guns; but it is questionable whether Bourlon Wood itself, in its lack of points to concentrate upon, and in the confusion of forest rides all exactly like each other, was not, after all, the worst. Early in the advance, No. 2 Company lost touch on the left, while the rest of the Battalion, which was still somehow keeping together, managed to get forward through the Wood as far as its north-east corner, where they made touch with the 1st Coldstream. Not long after this, they tried to dig in among the wet tree-roots, just beyond the Wood’s north edge. It seemed to them that the enemy had fallen back to the railway line which skirted it, as well as to the north of La Fontaine village. Officially, the objective was reached, but our attacking strength had been used up, and there were no reserves. A barrage of big stuff, supplemented by field-guns, was steadily threshing out the centre and north of the Wood, and, somewhere to the rear of the Battalion a nest of machine-guns broke out viciously and unexpectedly. Then the whole fabric of the fight appeared to crumble, as, through one or other of the many gaps between the Battalions, the enemy thrust in, and the 2nd Irish guards, hanging on to their thin front line, realized him suddenly at their backs. What remained of them split up into little fighting groups; sometimes taking prisoners, sometimes themselves being taken, and again breaking away from their captors, dodging, turning, and ducking in dripping coppices and over the slippery soil, while the shells impartially smote both parties. Such as had kept their sense of direction headed back by twos and threes to their original starting-point; but at noon Battalion Headquarters had lost all touch of the Battalion, and the patrols that got forward to investigate reported there was no sign of it. It looked like complete and unqualified disaster. But men say that the very blindness of the ground hid this fact to a certain extent both from us and the enemy, and the multiplied clamours in the Wood supplied an additional blindage. As one man said: “If Jerry had only shut off his dam’ guns and _listened_ he’d ha’ heard we was knocked out; but he kept on hammer—hammering an’ rushin’ his parties back and forth the Wood, and so, ye see, them that could of us, slipped back quiet in the height of the noise.” Another observer compared it to the chopping of many foxes in cover—not pleasant, but diversified by some hideously comic incidents. All agreed that it was defeat for the Guards—the first complete one they had sustained; but the admitted fact was that they had been turned on at a few hours’ notice to achieve the impossible, did not spoil their tempers. The records say that the 2nd Guards Brigade with the rest of the Division “fell back to its original line.” Unofficially: “We did—but I don’t know how we did it. There wasn’t any Battalion worth mentioning when the Welsh Guards relieved us in the dark, but stray men kept on casting up all night long.” The losses were in proportion to the failure. Of officers, two were killed—Cary-Elwes, just as they reached their objective, by a bullet through the head, and A. F. Synge shot down at the beginning of the attack, both of them men without fear and with knowledge. Three were missing, which is to say, dead—2nd Lieutenants N. D. Bayly of No. 2 Company, W. G. Rea of No. 3, and N. F. Durant of No. 4 who was also believed to have been wounded. Four were wounded—Captain the Hon. H. A. V. Harmsworth, No. 1; Captain Reford, No. 3, bullet through the shoulder; and Lieutenant S. S. Wordley, of the same company, in the head. Also 2nd Lieut. F. C. Lynch-Blosse of No. 2 blown up, but able to get back. The C.O. (Colonel the Hon. H. R. Alexander), the Second in Command (Captain the Hon. W. S. Alexander), Captain Nugent, Adjutant, 2nd Lieutenant W. D. Faulkner, Assistant Adjutant Captain Sassoon and Lieutenant O’Connor, these last two being company officers in reserve who were kept with Battalion Headquarters, were unhurt. Twenty-five men were known to be dead on comrades’ evidence; one hundred and forty-six were missing, of whom a number would naturally be dead; and one hundred and forty-two were wounded and brought back. Total, three hundred and twenty-two.

They came out of the Wood on the evening of the 27th one hundred and 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

On the 9th of April was a brigade rehearsal of “ceremonial” parade 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.