Part 23

They do not seem to have been called upon to do more than sit, suffer and be shelled till evening, when they were relieved by a company of the 1st Coldstream and went back in the hard black frost to their bivouac in Gouzeaucourt Wood. Gauche Wood was won and held, but Gonnelieu, its houses and cellarages crammed with machine-guns, was a hopeless proposition from the first, to troops lacking tanks or adequate artillery aid. The sole excuse for attempting it was that the enemy’s pressure was heavy and increasing on all three sides of the Cambrai Salient (Bourlon Wood in the north was the point of most actual danger) and had to be met by whatever offered at the times and near the places. The 3rd Brigade was held up by the inevitable machine-gun in trenches in front of Gonnelieu and round the cemetery on its eastern outskirts; and there it stayed, under circumstances of extreme misery, till the 3rd December, when the 1st Brigade came back from Gouzeaucourt Wood to relieve. The 1st Irish Guards, numbering, then, four hundred and fifty battle-strength, who took over the 2nd Scots Guards’ and half the 1st Grenadiers’ line, were allotted what might be termed “mixed samples” of trench. No. 1 Company, for instance, held six hundred yards of superior wired line, evidently an old British reserve line, with the enemy dug in sixty yards away. No. 3 Company on its right had a section mostly battered to bits and, further weakened by an old communication-trench running up to the enemy, which had to be blocked as soon as possible. No. 2 Company was even less happily placed; for the enemy inhabited the actual continuation of their trench, so that they worked with their right flank grossly exposed. Two platoons of No. 4 Company lay close behind No. 2 to cover a gap; while the other two platoons in Flag Ravine, four or five hundred yards back, by the railway-line, were all the reserve the Battalion possessed east of Gouzeaucourt Wood. By some unexplained mercy of Providence that night, the next day and the next day’s night were “quiet” in the sense that there was no actual attack. The men sat in the trenches and froze; for the frost held day and night, and the enemy shelled the line at their will, with trench-mortars from near at hand and heavier stuff from the ridges beyond. Just before dawn, on the 5th December, they put down a very heavy mixed barrage behind the front line and a trench-mortar one on the line itself, and then attacked the two weak spots--No. 2 and No. 3 Companys’ position--with armoured bombers. The barricade to the communication-trench of No. 3 Company was blown in by a direct mortar-hit and a rush followed. No. 2 Company’s trench was also rushed end-on from the right, and three or four bays of it were taken. At this point, the Irish left the trenches all filling with the enemy, got out into the open, where for the moment there was no mortar-fire, and dealt with the invaders from outside, bombing and shooting downwards into the heavily-moving queues. The Germans wore their packs, “from which it may be inferred,” says the Diary delicately, “that they meant to occupy our trenches.” This, and their scientific armour, proved their undoing, and when--presumably to make doubly sure--an infantry attack swarmed out in two lines from Gonnelieu, it was broken up by our rifle and machine-gun fire, till it turned round and fled. Hereupon, says the Diary, “they were heavily bombed by their own side,” presumably as an example to His Majesty’s Guards of Prussian discipline. The casualties in the Battalion were one officer, 2nd Lieutenant Carey, and four other ranks killed; and about thirty wounded, mainly by bombs and mortars. But the affair was waste-work on both sides; for Gonnelieu was never taken by our arms. Our line here, in the next day or so, fell back on Gauche Wood; and of all the salient won at the Battle of Cambrai between the 20th and the 23rd of November, all that remained by the 7th of December was a stretch of country perhaps four thousand yards deep running from the Gouzeaucourt-Cambrai road to north of Demicourt. On the other hand, a cantle had been taken out of our old front line from opposite Vendhuille to Gonnelieu. But in the area that we held lay a sample of the great Hindenburg Line with its support-systems, its ten-foot-deep concreted and camouflaged trenches, covered gun-ways, machine-gun wells and shafts, and the whole detail of its immensely advertised impregnability. Men saw it with their own eyes, explored its recesses wonderingly, followed down the terrible lanes that the tanks had cut in its hundred-yard-deep beltings of wire, and settled themselves thankfully in its secure dug-outs, not foreseeing the days next spring when they would be swept out of it all like withered leaves. Cambrai was no success, but it would be unjust to hold it, as some wearied and over-wrought souls did, an unrelieved failure. The enemy had not achieved their purpose, which was to cut off all our troops in the salient, and were quite willing to break away and wait till the transfer of fresh divisions from the collapsed Russian front should be methodically completed. We, on our part, were equally ready to cut our losses, for we had no men to spare. The Guards Division was moved out of the battle-area on the 6th December, being relieved by troops of the Ninth Division. On the evening of their own private battle the Battalion handed over their none too pleasant trenches to the 5th Cameron Highlanders, and went back to bivouac in Gouzeaucourt Wood after a “very good relief,” which drew from the Diary the tribute that the Camerons were a “fine Battalion.” Had they been an hour late, in that cutting wind across the slopes, a cohort of angels with fiery swords would have been put down as hopeless!

They moved from the Wood next day to Etricourt down the long road through Fins, and at Etricourt entrained for Beaumetz-les-Loges on the Arras-Doullens road which they reached late at night, cold and empty, and were not billeted at Berneville, two or three kilometres to the north-east, till midnight. They had lost, in November and December, two officers killed; Lieutenant N. F. Durant on the 30th November, who had joined on the 1st of that month, and 2nd Lieutenant T. A. Carey, killed on the 5th December, joined on the 24th October. (The average expectation of an officer’s life in those days on the Somme was still about six weeks, though some were so lucky they survived for months.) Four officers had been wounded in the same period: Lieutenants G. K. Thompson, Lieutenant (Acting Captain) Joyce; G. E. F. Van der Noot, and 2nd Lieutenant P. M. Riley, all on the 30th November. The following officers joined in November and December: Lieutenants Zigomala, B. F. Crewdson, D. J. B. FitzGerald and J. N. Ward; and 2nd Lieutenants H. A. A. Collett, A. W. G. Jamrack and C. A. J. Nicholson.

At Beaumetz-les-Loges they lay till the end of the year, cleaning up, refitting, drilling, and not forgetting their football--the 2nd Scots Guards beat them in the third round of the Divisional Football Competition at Arras--or their company Christmas dinners. These were the fourth that the Battalion had eaten within sound of the weary guns, but if any one had told them that their next would be celebrated in stately steam-heated barracks at Cologne, hospital would have been his portion. They could not have been called happy or hopeful at that time; for they knew, as all our armies did, that the year’s gain had been small, and the work ahead of them, now that the German divisions, released from Russia were pouring westward, would be heavy. But for the moment they were free of the Somme and its interminable duckboards that led men to death or hard work; its shell-holes floored with icy snow-water, the grave-like chill of its chalk trenches, and the life-sapping damps of the uplands on which they had lain out from nights till mornings.

Here is a memory of those days presented by the teller as a jest. “Aye! Gouzeaucourt and Gonnelieu! _I_’m not like to forget ’em. I was back from leave, ye’ll understand; no more anxious to die than the rest of us. An’ there was some new men, too--new young lads just come over. My kit was all new, too, me bein’ back from leave. Our C.S.M. dhrew me attention to it one of those merry nights we was poachin’ about in No Man’s Land. ‘’Tis a pity,’ says he, ‘ye did not bring the band from Caterham _also_,’ says he. ‘’Twould have amused Jerry.’ My new kit was shqueakin’ an’ clicking the way they could have heard it a mile. Aye, Gouzeaucourt an’ the trenches outside Gonnelieu! Jerry was usin’ trench-mortars at his pleasure on us those nights. They was crackin’ on our heads, ye’ll understand. An’ I was in a bay with two men. Wan was a new young man, an’ the trench-mortars was new to him. Cowld? It was all of that! An’ Jerry crackin’ this dam’ trench mortar-stuff of his on our heads at will. It put the wind up _me_! Did I tell you the other man in the bay was dead! He was. That finished me new young man. He kep’ trying to make himself smaller an’ smaller against the trench-mortars. In the end of it, he laced his arrums round his ankles--he did--an’ rocked to an’ fro, whishperin’ to the Saints. Shell-shock? Oh, yes, ’twas all that. Presintly I heard Mr. ---- comin’ the rounds, walking outside the trench. Ye see more where ye’re outside a trench, but ’tis no place I’m fond of without orders. ‘An’ are ye all cozy down there, Sergeant?’ says he. Yes, ‘cosy’ was his word! Knowin’ him well, ‘Why wud we not be cosy, Sorr?’ says I, an’ at that he dhrops into the bay to have a look. We was cosy enough, all three of us--the dead man dead an’ stiffenin’ in the frost, an’ this fine new young lad of ours embracin’ his own ankles an’ rockin’ back an’ forth, an’ me _so_ sorry my leave was up. Oh! we was the cosiest party in the whole dam’ front line that night; and for to make it all the cosier, my new young man, as soon as he set eyes on Mr. ----, he flung his arrums around his neck, an’ he let out a yell, an’ he hugged him like a gurrl. I had to separate ’em! I’ve laughed at it since, an’ so did Mr. ---- an’, begad, I remember laughin’ at it at the time. Ay, ‘cosy,’ Mr. ---- said. That _was_ the word! So I laughed. Otherwise there was not much laughin’, ye’ll understand, at Gouzeaucourt an’ them ‘cosy’ trenches before Gonnelieu.”

1918

ARRAS TO THE ARMISTICE

The lull lasted till the 2nd of January when they marched _via_ Warlus to Arras and were billeted in the prison there. Battalion Headquarters were in a luxurious house in the Rue d’Amiens, with a whole roof and all windows repaired with canvas. It was hard frosty weather, binding everything tight--of the kind that must be paid for when thaw comes.

At that moment our line, on the Somme side, ran from Lens just behind Oppy, through Rœux, five miles east of Arras, south to Bullecourt, south-easterly towards Boursies, round the Flesquières-Ribecourt Salient that Cambrai fight had won for us, curved back between Gonnelieu and Gouzeaucourt, and thence dropped, skirting St. Quentin and the valley of the Oise, to the junction with the French at Barisis, south of that river. This length, of close on seventy miles, was held, from Barisis to Gouzeaucourt, by Byng’s Third Army, and from Gouzeaucourt to Gavrelle, by Gough’s Fifth Army. North of this, the First Army took on. The working and reserve strength of the Third and Fifth Armies at the opening of 1918 was twenty-nine infantry and three cavalry divisions. So far as our arms were concerned, everything on the French and Belgian fronts was at a standstill. The Somme had cost very heavily throughout the year, and there was, or was said to be, a scarcity of men. The situation appears to have been met by reducing the number of battalions in the brigades from four to three apiece. This released the odd battalions to make what, on paper, and in the journals, looked like additional brigades, but threw extra work, which nowhere appeared as news, on the whole of the army administration in the field. Sir Douglas Haig’s despatches refer guardedly to the reorganization, which he hints “to some extent affected” the fighting efficiency of the units concerned. The sentiments of commanders more directly concerned were, perhaps, less publishable; for it rarely improves an old army in the field to lace it at the last moment, before a general attack, with new brigades composed of battalions suddenly disassociated from the units with whom they have been working. But thus was created the Fourth Guards Brigade, by lopping off the 4th Grenadiers, the 2nd Irish Guards, and the 3rd Coldstream from their respective brigades, and attaching them to the Thirty-first Division. Further, it was necessary for the British armies to take over another stretch of nearly thirty miles from the French on the right--approximately from Barisis to Vendhuille on the Oise--and this brought the British front up to one hundred and twenty-five miles total length.

Our enemy lay less under such burdens. His released divisions, aeroplanes, and guns were decently entraining from the Russian front, and arriving on the Somme in good order, a fact of which our Staff, and in a very short time all our armies, were perfectly aware. (“We could _feel_ Jerry pilin’ up and pilin’ up against us in those days, ye’ll understand.”) So, as may have been pointed out, every one stood by to prepare for the worst. The Guards Division, now of nine battalions, instead of twelve, was assigned to the defences before Arras, the hinge on which the coming trouble might be expected to turn. Their trench and post system ran north and south across the Scarpe with its lagoon and marshes, by Rœux--all old and much used ground, but which had the advantage of being served both by canal and a light rail from Arras.

The Battalion, which had trained and bombed in the town till the 8th January, relieved the 3rd Grenadiers in the reserve trenches of the right sub-sector of this defence, on the 9th January, in heavy snow. Lancer Avenue, which commanded a fine view of our own lines and the enemy’s, and posts K, L, and M just off it (all south of the river), took half the strength. The remainder garrisoned Crump and Cordite Reserve trenches on the north, and supplied an isolated and unpleasant post (F) between the river and the lagoon which could only be reached with comfort after dark, when an officer, twenty men, a Lewis-gun, and a couple of signallers watched there in case an enterprising enemy should be minded to raid along the tow-path.

Next day it thawed and the old horrors of Ypres Salient were their portion. The snow vanished, leaving terrible mud. The day passed quietly. Nos. 1 and 3 Companies had to find “a carrying-party for front companies in the evening.” The story behind the entry tells itself. The enemy did not add himself to their burdens. A patrol, under 2nd Lieutenant H. A. Collett, went out the next night (January 11) five hundred yards into No Man’s Land--from F post--saw and heard nothing. F post was always a ghostly sort of place, where bullets whistled by without explanation between the furred tree-trunks along the tow-path; and the marshy ground behind it was filled with shell-holes, rusty wire and the black dead of forgotten fights. The ruins of Rœux across the river, suddenly leaping to shape in the flare of Véry lights, looked down on it like the skeleton of a fortress on a stage, and single unexpected shells spattered mud across the cold waters.

On the 13th January they relieved the 2nd Grenadiers at the front in a fresh assortment of decayed posts--Scabbard Alley, Scabbard Support, Welford Reserve and the like, whose names even to this day make men who served there shiver. As thaw and rain worked on them, the trenches “all fell in great lumps.”

“Why troops who had held them all the summer had done nothing to revet them and prepare for the winter, I cannot think,” one indignant sufferer wrote. “But that is always the fault of the British army. It _will_ not look ahead.” He prophesied better than he knew. Then he went to visit his posts, where the men were already half buried in mud. The enemy assisted our repairing parties with trench-mortars at intervals, till orders went forth that, though our mortars were nowise to stir up trouble, when once it began they would retaliate for just five minutes longer than the enemy. By the misfortune of a faulty shell, one of our Stokes guns burst on the 14th, killing or wounding eight men. However, it was noted that the enemy transferred his attentions for the next few days to a battalion of East Lancashires on our right.

On the 15th all wiring and defence-work ceased--“employed solely on trying to keep trenches passable.” In spite of which the mud gained. Men’s boots were pulled off their feet, and it is on joyous record that when Captain Gordon, the adjutant, tried to get up Johnson Avenue, their only communication-trench, he stuck up to his waist in mud and water and, lest he should be engulfed, had to wriggle out of his gum-boots, which came up to his thighs, and continue in his socks. The gum-boots, empty, sank out of sight like a wreck on the Goodwins. They reconnoitred new tracks for the reliefs, across duckboards running in full view of the enemy, who, luckily, had their own conditions to fight, and let a couple of our patrols invade No Man’s Land unmolested, prowl round two machine-gun posts and even enter a German front line, “being too busy talking and hammering to notice us.” The sodden sand-bags of the revetments bulged outwards and met across the trenches. The men worked day and night, and blessed every battalion’s remotest ancestry that had ever used, and neglected, that accursed line.

On the 17th January they were relieved by the 2nd Grenadiers, which merely meant their reverting to Crump Trench, Cordite Reserve, Ceylon Avenue, etc., where, all being equally impassable, every movement had to be effected in the open.

Our artillery chose the 18th to be very active from their positions round Battalion Headquarters near the railway cutting behind, whereby there was some enemy retaliation that the mired front line could have spared. (“Every one is looking like the worst form of tramp--standing, walking, sleeping and eating mud.”)

On the 19th they got it worse, and when No. 1 Company paraded in the dawn dark (they were in dug-outs below the rail embankment) to go to work, a shell which dropped at the entrance killed one (but he was the cook), wounded two of their number, and destroyed the whole cooking-outfit. Captain A. F. L. Gordon, M.C., was also slightly wounded on that date, but not enough to send him to hospital. He was riding into Arras with Captain Woodhouse, the M.O.--also a man of charmed lives--and just behind the railway embankment came in for a complete barrage of heavy stuff, intended for Battalion Headquarters. Neither he, nor any one else, ever understood why they were not blown to pieces. The doctor’s horse wounded was the only other casualty.

On the 22nd January the relieved 2nd Grenadiers, having handed over news of the discovery of a German listening-post which seemed to be used only by night, a scheme was arranged to occupy it while it was empty, and astonish the enemy on their return. But the enemy never came, though 2nd Lieutenant Stacpoole and a party of seven, with blackened faces and smoked bayonets, lay out for them all night. It was the same with a German working-party, fifty strong, located by our patrols on the 22nd, sought on the 23rd, and found missing. The enemy were anxious not to give any chances just then, for identifications; and, though they raided generously in other directions, left the Guards’ sector by the Scarpe unvisited. They delivered mortar bombardments when reliefs were due, and were attended to by our artillery at dusk with a desultory but at the same time steady shelling, just enough to keep the five principal offenders’ crews in their dug-outs. It worked admirably, and the enemy mortars, as registered on the maps, were quiet for a whole evening. After one such treatment (the night of the 25th January) they drenched the Decauville railway, just when the Battalion had railed back to Arras on relief by the 1st Grenadiers, with an hour’s intense barrage of gas-shells, and a sprinkling of 5.9’s and 4.2’s. Battalion Headquarters were waiting to follow: and all the men had been sent down the line because rail-head was no healthy place to linger at. A company of the 2nd Grenadiers, newly relieved, came up and also waited for the little train in the still moonlight night, and drank hot tea while a spare engine was being coupled up. Every one thought (inevitable prelude to calamity!) that, after sixteen days in the trenches, his troubles were over. Then a gas-shell skimmed over the line which at this point had a cutting on one side and an embankment on the other. All hands fled to the embankment side and hugged it for precisely one hour while the air screamed to the curious whiplash-like noise of the gas-shells splintering, and filled with the fumes of them. The engine bolted down the line before it should be blown up, and when, on the stroke of ten, shelling ceased, Battalion Headquarters, Father Browne and the Doctor, Captain Woodhouse, and the Grenadiers’ Company stumbled as best they could along the sleepers towards Arras. Every one missed every one else in the confusion, while the Irish orderlies raged through the crowd like angry nurses, in search of their officers. But at last all hands were accounted for, blind, coughing, and, thanks to the nose-clips of the masks, mostly with sore noses. They got into Arras at midnight, and a good many of the Grenadiers had to be sent down for gas injuries.

The month closed with the Battalion nominally at Arras, and actually finding more than two thirds of its strength for working-parties in the filthy front line--a favour which it had not received itself while there. Its casualty list for January was extraordinarily low, being only two men killed and twenty-six wounded, one officer, Captain Gordon, wounded and one, 2nd Lieutenant D. A. B. Moodie in hospital. During the month, 2nd Lieutenants A. S. Stokes and L. H. L. Carver joined, and 2nd Lieutenant A. W. G. Jamrack rejoined from the Reinforcement Battalion.

On the 1st February orders came that the line was to be held by all three brigades of the Guards Division instead of two; for it must be remembered that each brigade was short one battalion. The rearrangement drew more heavily on the working-parties in the forward area where a new, foul trench--Hyderabad Support--was under way. They supplied from two to four hundred men as need was, and lived in Arras prison in luxury--wire beds, and palliasses for every man!--till the 6th February, when they relieved the 2nd Coldstream in the front line. The support-trenches here were the best they had found, being deep, duck-boarded, well revetted and with plenty of dug-outs and an enviable system of cook-houses delivering hot meals in the actual trenches. They sent working-parties to the insatiable engineers and the brigade at large; for fresh trenches were being sketched out, if not built, against the impending German attack.

The front line from the 10th to the 13th February was remarkably quiet but not easy. Their patrols found no enemy, nor any sign of them in No Man’s Land; a little wiring of nights was possible; and there were no casualties. But the trench-strength of the Battalion was weak--16 officers and 398 ranks, and every one had to work double-tides to keep the ways open.

They were relieved on St. Valentine’s Day, two days after the 4th Guards Brigade, which took with them the 2nd Irish Guards, had been formed under Lord Ardee, and added to the Thirty-first Division.