CHAPTER XXI

MONTHS OF “WIND UP”

One night in Senlis was followed by a night in Hedauville, and then on the 9th of April, after a march to Acheux, the Battalion was conveyed by buses to the back area. The bus journey was pleasant enough at first, but on arriving at Beauval, where the troops were to have been billeted, it was found that all the accommodation had been allotted to other troops.

The bus column halted in the main road outside the village where a draft of 600 other ranks was waiting to join the Battalion. The draft had been waiting by the roadside since noon, and the men had had both dinner and tea in the same spot. But soon after dark the draft received orders to march to the next village, Gezaincourt, the Battalion continuing the journey by bus. The speed of the buses can best be judged by the fact that the draft arrived at Gezaincourt--about three and a half miles away--more than an hour in front of the Battalion.

The next day at Gezaincourt was spent in re-organising Companies and sorting out the huge draft, which was found to contain parties from practically every Battalion of the London Regiment except the Artists and the Scottish. The Civil Service Riflemen were now in a minority in their own Regiment.

The journey was continued on the 11th of April, when the Battalion marched to Domart en Ponthieu, a delightful village, where all ranks would have been happy to remain for the rest of the war. But it was not to be, for the troops were on the move again early next day, and after a fifteen miles’ march the training area was reached, and the Civil Service Rifles were billeted in the village of Canchy, close to the historic forest of Crecy. The village was also occupied by Divisional Headquarters, and the billets allotted to the Battalion were consequently poor, everything worth having being appropriated for the use of Divisional Headquarters.

The usual training programme was carried out and drafts continued to arrive until the Battalion grew to an unwieldy size, being over 1,300 strong. But although numerically it was stronger than it had ever been, the vast majority of the men were very raw--recruits who had been hurried out during the panic caused by the Retreat. It was soon found that the Civil Service Rifles had received more than their share of these men, and 250 of them were accordingly sent to the 142nd Brigade.

The only breaks in the routine of training were trips to Abbeville, football matches, and a half-hearted sort of Sports Meeting.

The Divisional Commander visited the Brigade at a Brigade parade at Forest l’Abbaye, on the 18th of April, when he complimented the Brigade on its work during recent operations, and hinted darkly at further “dirty work” in store in the near future.

The concluding sporting event at Canchy was a football match against the Divisional Train, the holders of the Divisional Company, who were well beaten by four goals to nil. While the match was in progress orders were received for the Transport to move early the next day, Sunday, the 28th of April, and for the Battalion to move by bus on Monday morning.

Although the programme of training had been arranged for another week, the sudden orders to move occasioned little surprise, for it was quite a common thing for a “training holiday” to be cut short, and the Transport Section accordingly moved to St. Quen without any fuss.

On the last afternoon at Canchy the _entente cordiale_ between the Civil Service Rifles and the villagers was strengthened by a tea-party which Colonel Segrave gave to the village children. To entertain them were engaged the Divisional Cinema, the String Trio and Private Saipe. The latter’s conjuring brought down the house, and was so popular that the conjurer, on taking his evening stroll later on, was mobbed by the villagers, who insisted on his giving them a “second house” in the open air.

The bus journey to Contay was uneventful, and on leaving the buses, the Battalion, just over 700 strong, marched to billets in Warloy. A battle surplus of eight officers and 240 other ranks had been left behind at a Divisional Reinforcement Camp at Estrées les Crecy.

The German advance had been held up in the neighbourhood of Albert, and for some weeks now no move had been made on either side, though farther north the allied lines in the Ypres and Armentieres districts had been pushed back considerably. It was not, therefore, surprising when the 21st Australian Battalion was relieved on the night of the 1st of May outside the Albert-Amiens Road that orders were issued to all units to make every possible preparation to meet an enemy attack, which, to use the official language, “is likely to develop on our front in the near future.”

During this tour of the trenches the patrols of “B,” “C,” and “D” Companies, who were the three front line Companies, all reported that at 2.0 a.m. on the morning of the 4th of May, a noise resembling that of steam tractors was heard coming from the vicinity of the railway south of the Albert Road. As a result, the R.A.F. carried out a special reconnaissance at dawn and found four enemy tanks hiding near the railway. These were bombed, two being totally destroyed and the others disabled. The Brigadier General specially commended the Civil Service Rifles on the good work done by the patrols.

The discovery of the tanks, however, only served to increase the warnings of a coming attack, and an otherwise uneventful spell in the mud and water was frequently disturbed by such orders from Division as “See that all men have a hot meal immediately: Attack probable this morning.”

On the night of the 6th of May a somewhat complicated relief, owing to a reshuffle of Brigades on the Corps front, brought to an end a surprisingly peaceful stay in the front line. It did not, however, bring much comfort to the troops.

The Battalion was to move back to support trenches in the neighbourhood of Millencourt and Henencourt, but the Companies had the greatest difficulty in identifying their positions, as they turned out to be mere scratches in the ground. The night was black and the rain poured in torrents throughout. The relief was accordingly exceptionally slow and day was breaking ere the support positions were reached.

The Officer Commanding “A” Company found in Millencourt some unoccupied cellars with plenty of straw, and decided to stow his men away there and risk the consequences. “B” and “C” Companies found ruined houses in Henencourt, and “D” moved into a barn in the yard of the château at Henencourt, which had been Third Corps Headquarters during the Somme battle of 1916. Battalion Headquarters was at the Grand Caporal estaminet--a “house” that had been a favourite resort of the men of the Civil Service Rifles during the rest after High Wood in 1916. But how the village had changed since those days! In 1916 Henencourt had been a tolerably clean inhabited village, but now all was desolation, every house was in ruins, and there was not a civilian to be found anywhere.

By night the Companies occupied their battle positions and tried to dig trenches there, and by day they kept under cover in their billets. A search was made for bath tubs, and a bath-house was started in the Château yard, and apart from occasional shelling of Millencourt and Henencourt, a fairly comfortable time was spent in these villages.

The next visit to the front line was to relieve the 17th London Regiment astride the Millencourt-Albert Road, a mile or so east of the village of Millencourt. The trenches here were new, and so exposed that no cooking could be done there. All food was cooked at the Quartermaster’s stores at Warloy and brought up at night, when the troops had their only hot meal of the day. The tea was sent up in petrol cans enclosed in packs stuffed with hay--a method which had been adopted by members of the Transport Section some months previously for keeping tea hot on a long march.

Digging new trenches and wiring were the nightly tasks of all Companies during five uneventful days in this sector, and on relief by the 6th London Regiment--now in the 58th Division--the Battalion moved back to billets in Warloy, and on the following day the Division moved into Corps Reserve.

The period in Corps Reserve had generally been spent in tolerably comfortable billets in inhabited villages some distance from the firing line, but on this occasion the Division was kept close up, owing to the possibility of an enemy attack, and it fell to the lot of the 140th Brigade to occupy small woods in the neighbourhood of Warloy and Bazieux. The accommodation was distinctly poor, the men having to sleep under bivouac sheets--or trench shelters as they were called officially.

Colonel Segrave accordingly indulged in a little billeting on his own account and fixed his battalion up in comfortable billets in Warloy, observing at the same time that as they were nearer to the front line they were tactically in a better position to meet an emergency. A wordy warfare with the Divisional Staff ensued, and for a few days the Civil Service Rifles hung on to their billets, although the Colonel had been withdrawn to command the 141st Brigade. But soon a move had to be made to the bivouacs in the Bois La Haut, north of Bazieux, where the days were spent by the troops in digging cable trenches near Henencourt Wood, and the nights were often spent in alarms and standing to.

Indeed, a more restless period in Corps Reserve had never been known. All officers were taken to reconnoitre positions of assembly for counter-attack, and to each battalion in the Brigade was allotted a definite objective. It was announced that the attack would be launched on the 20th, and the officers were taken through a kind of rehearsal of their counter-attack.

Nightly bombing raids by enemy aeroplanes added to the discomfort, and on the night of the 18th of May an intense bombardment was heard. Later, an alarm was sounded in an adjacent wood, and the Battalion stood to arms at 2.0 a.m. and remained so for about an hour. Thereafter the troops were made to stand to arms each morning at an hour before dawn as in the trenches, and the cooks had to “keep up steam” in readiness to serve a hot meal at once in the event of an enemy attack on the Corps front. Happily nothing so unpleasant as an attack developed, but the camp was shelled on the morning of the 22nd, with the result that the Transport Section lost an old and tried friend in Corporal Banks, who had been with them continuously since mobilisation. It was cruel luck that he should be killed while in Corps Reserve, after surviving such ordeals as the Somme, Ypres Salient, Bourlon Wood and the Retreat. Two horses were also killed and two others wounded.

The Division moved out of Corps Reserve on the 24th of May, and after a whole day spent in cable burying in the pouring rain, the Civil Service Rifles relieved the 7th East Surrey Regiment in quarries near the Franvillers-Albert road. Here the troops bivouacked amongst guns and howitzers of all calibres; in some cases the men slept, or rather spent the night, under the muzzles of the guns. The only good thing the Battalion got out of this relief was a draft of 10 N.C.O.’s, who had been wounded on the Somme in 1916, and on their return to France had been drafted to the East Surrey Regiment. By a strange coincidence they rejoined the Civil Service Rifles almost on the very ground where they had been trained for the Somme battle, for the Bois Robert, where many of the rehearsals for High Wood took place, was within a hundred yards or so of the bivouacs.

A short stay amid the guns was followed by a move to comfortable but shell-riddled billets in Baizieux--a village somewhat changed since the previous Christmas, when it was occupied by Divisional Headquarters.

The 4th Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers was relieved in the Lavieville defences on the 26th of May, and here the Battalion spent four days in support trenches, during the whole of which time all Companies were at work with the Royal Engineers on cable burying. At the end of May 1918, the Civil Service Rifles occupied a field surrounded by new and shallow trenches just north of the Franvillers-Berhencourt road, and about half a mile west of Franvillers itself. These trenches were the rear defences of the Lahoussoye system, but the men occupied tents and bivouacs outside the trenches.

There followed five uneventful days in the front line opposite the village of Dernancourt, and on relief by the 17th Battalion on the night of the 6th of June, support trenches astride the Albert-Amiens road were occupied for three days. The Battalion then relieved the 1st Surrey Rifles in the front line on the immediate left of the sector held previously. This particular area was held by the Brigade for nearly three weeks, the Battalion changing round every four or five days. Nothing worthy of note happened until, on the 19th of June, the Division was relieved by the 58th Division, the 6th London Regiment taking over from the Civil Service Rifles, who had a long march back to the village of Berhencourt, which was reached at about 5 a.m. After a few hours’ rest the march was continued to Molliens au Bois, where a tented camp in a sea of mud was taken over from the Queen Victoria Rifles. Here the Regimental Brass Band, which had been entertaining the Commander-in-Chief at General Headquarters for the past six weeks, rejoined, together with the battle surplus and a draft of reinforcements from the Divisional Reinforcement Camp.