Part 25

The 4th Guards Brigade, which had been in billets near Villers-Brulin, after its heavy work on the Arras side, was despatched on the 10th April to the flat country round Vierhoek, and there--as will be told--spent itself in the desperate fighting round La Couronne and Vieux-Berquin that gave time to bar the enemies’ way to Hazebrouck and--wiped out the 2nd Battalion.

The 1st Battalion, sufficiently occupied with its own front near Boiry, where the support-lines were targets by day and night, and the front-posts holes in the ground that seemed to shift at every relief, were told on the 12th April that a German attack was imminent, which report was repeated at intervals throughout the day. But their patrols found nothing moving in front of them, and their regular allowance of hostile mortar-bombs was not increased. The rumours from the Lys side were far more disturbing.

On the 13th April they were relieved by the 24th Lancashire Fusiliers, marched to Blairville where they embussed for Saulty at the head of the little river that runs in stone channels through quiet Doullens, and there, “very cold, wet, and muddy,” found the best billets taken by Corps and Labour troops whom they knew not. The sentiments of men who have been digging and fighting without a break for ten weeks when confronted with warmly billeted staffs and fat back-area working-parties need not be recorded.

At Saulty they rested from the 15th to the 23rd April under perpetual short notice: one hour from 8 A. M. till noon and three hours for the rest of the day and night. Thus “means of training were limited,” and the weather varied from wet to snow-showers.

On the 24th of April the enemy captured Villers-Bretonneux, staring directly into Amiens, which ground, had they been allowed to hold uninterruptedly even for a day, might have been made too strong to reduce with the forces at our disposal then, and thus would have become the very edge of the wedge for splitting the French and English armies asunder. But that night, and literally at almost an hour’s notice, a counter-attack by a Brigade of the Eighteenth Division, and the 13th and 15th Brigades of the Fourth and Fifth Australian Divisions, swept Villers-Bretonneux clear, and established ourselves beyond possibility of eviction. Thus, the one last chance that might have swung the whole war passed out of the enemy’s hands.

On that same day the 1st Irish Guards returned in lorries along the cramped and twisting roads by Bienvillers to Monchy, to relieve a battalion of the Royal Scots in the front line at Ayette, three miles south down the line from Boiry. Ayette village had been recaptured on the 3rd April by the Thirty-second Division, and had removed a thorn in the side of troops in that sector. Once again, their guides almost unanimously lost their way, and the multivious relief took half the night to accomplish.

It appeared as though the enemy had skinned his line here to feed his other enterprises in the north; for his outposts did nothing and, beyond shelling Monchy village from time to time, his guns were also idle.

So on the 29th April they arranged a battalion raid on a German post (supposed to be held by night only) to occupy it if possible. But the enemy were in occupation and very ready. The little party returned with their officer, 2nd Lieutenant G. C. MacLachlan, and a sergeant wounded. A few weeks later the Battalion worked out a most satisfactory little ten-minute return-raid without a single casualty, and so cleared their account.

April had been an inexpensive month for both men and officers. The Commanding Officer, the Assistant Adjutant, and the Medical Officer had, as we know, been slightly gassed at Headquarters, and 2nd Lieutenants C. L. Browne and MacLachlan wounded only. Three men had been killed and forty-one wounded. But no less than twenty-six were sent down sick--proof that the strain had told.

The enemy showed a certain amount of imagination unusual on that front. One of our forward posts, expecting the return of a patrol on the dawn on the 3rd May, saw a party of five approaching and challenged. “Irish Guards” was the reply, followed by a few bombs which did some damage. This peculiarly irritating trick had not been worked on the Battalion for some time, and they felt it--as their amused friends to left and right in the line took care that they should. Otherwise, the enemy devoted themselves to more and heavier gunnery, which, in a five-day tour, caused twenty casualties (wounded) and one killed. Brigade Reserve camps were outside Monchy-au-Bois, whence tired men were sent to the Details camp at Pommier (regularly bombed by aeroplane), and from Pommier were drawn occasional working-parties. One of these included the Battalion Drummers and Pipers, who enjoyed what might be called a “day out” in some old trenches.

On the 5th May, Lieutenant Keenan arrived from the 2nd Battalion to take over the Adjutancy in place of Captain Gordon, who had been transferred to the 2nd Battalion as Second in Command, after almost three years’ continuous service with the 1st Battalion.

On the 7th May they went up from Monchy, by the ever-hateful, ever-shelled Cojeul valley, to the Ayette subsector, relieving the 2nd Coldstream. Next day the devil-directed luck of the front line, after a peaceful, fine night, caused the only trench-mortar sent over by the enemy that did not clean miss all our posts, to fall directly in No. 3 Post, right front Company (No. 4), instantly killing Captain Budd, M.C., commanding the Company, and with him 2nd Lieutenant E. C. G. Lord and seven men. Captain Budd’s energy and coolness, proved on many occasions, were a particular loss to his comrades. He was a large silent man, on whom every one could and did lean heavily at all times. He knew no fear and was of the self-contained, intensely alive type, always in danger, but never by his friends connected with any thought of death. Second Lieutenant Lord (“Rosy” Lord) was a keen and promising young officer. Those were the only casualties of the tour. They were buried in the little Military Cemetery near Ayette.

Our guns had been working steadily from behind, but till this trench-mortar outburst, most of the enemy replies had been directed on Ayette itself or our support-lines.

The shelling throughout the month grew more and more earnest and our replies, roaring overhead, worried the dead-tired soldiery. The work was all at night--wiring and improving posts, and unlimited digging of communication-ways between them; for whether a trench-line held till Christmas, went up bodily next minute, or was battered down every hour, in the making there was but one standard of work that beseemed the Battalion; and though divisional commanders might, and as on the dreary Scarpe posts did, draw gratified commanding officers aside and tell them that for quantity and quality their trench-craft excelled that of other battalions, the Battalion itself was never quite contented with what it had accomplished.

Their next turn--May 16 to 21--was fine and hot for a couple of mornings and regular barrages were put down on the support-line when they were standing-to. Four men were killed and thirteen, of whom two died later, were wounded.

They were heavily shelled in Brigade-Reserve camp on the night of the 24th. Four officers--Captain Bence-Jones, Lieutenants Riley and Buller, and 2nd Lieutenant Barry--wounded, one other rank killed, and five wounded.

When they went up to relieve the 2nd Coldstream on the 25th May, they were caught in platoon-order at the corner of Adinfer Wood, a place of no good name to marching troops, and Lieutenant Williams was slightly wounded. Three-quarters of an hour’s intense barrage was put down, on front and support lines, as soon as they were fairly in, causing several casualties.

The dawn of the 28th May began with another sharp barrage on the front line and the dinner-hour was a continuous barrage of 5.9’s and 4.2’s directed at Battalion Headquarters. They were missed, but a direct hit was made on an aid-post of the 2nd Grenadiers less than a hundred yards off on our left. As a distraction, orders came in from Brigade Headquarters the same morning that the Battalion would carry out a raid on one of the enemy’s posts in front of the Right Company. They were given their choice, it would seem, of two--one without artillery-help and by day; the other with an artillery-backing and by night. The Second in Command, Major R. Baggallay, elected for works of darkness--or as near as might be in spite of a disgustingly bright moon. Lieutenant C. S. O’Brien was detailed to command, with Sergeant Regan, a forceful man, as sergeant. Only twenty-nine hands were required, and therefore sixty volunteered, moved to this, not by particular thirst for glory, of which the trenches soon cure men, as by human desire to escape monotony punctuated with shells. Extra rum-rations, too, attach to extra duties. As a raid it was a small affair, but as a work of art, historically worth recording in some detail. F Battery R.H.A. and 400 Battery R.F.A. supplied the lifting barrages which duly cut the post off from succour, while standing-barrages of 18-pounders, a barrage of 4.5’s hows. and groups, firing concentrations at left and right enemy trenches, completed the boxed trap. In the few minutes the affair lasted, it is not extravagant to estimate that more stuff was expended than the whole of our front in 1914 was allowed to send over in two days.

The post had been reconnoitred earlier in the evening and was known not to be wired. All the raiders, with blackened faces and bayonets and stripped uniforms that betrayed nothing, were in position on the forming-up tape five minutes before zero. The moon forced them to crawl undignifiedly out in twos and threes, but they lined up with the precision of a football line, at one-yard intervals and, a minute before zero, wriggled to within seventy yards of their quarry. At zero the barrage came down bursting beautifully, just beyond the enemy post, and about two seconds ere it lifted the raiders charged in. No one had time to leave or even to make a show of resistance, and they were back with their five prisoners, all alive and quite identifiable, in ten minutes. The waiting stretcher-parties were not needed and--best of all--“retaliation was slight and entirely on Ayette.” (One is not told what Ayette thought of it.) The motive of the raid was “to secure identity alive or dead.” But when all was over without hurt, one single shell at morning “stand-to” (May 28) killed 2nd Lieutenant L. H. L. Carver in a front-line trench.

They held the raided post under close observation that day and the next (May 29), and discovered that it had been reoccupied by a machine-gun party. As they particularly did not wish it to put out wire or become offensive, they dosed it with constant bursts of their own machine-gun and were rewarded by hearing groans and cries, and our listening-patrol in No Man’s Land saw a man being carried away.

On the 31st May the enemy set to, in earnest, to shell all reserve-lines and back-area for six hours; as well as the first-line transport in Adinfer Wood after dark, when wounded horses are not easy to handle. Their relief by the 2nd Grenadiers was badly delayed by heavy shelling all the way from the front line to Monchy, but instead of any number of casualties, which might reasonably have been expected, the Battalion got through unscathed.

The month’s list was heavy enough as it stood. Five officers had been wounded and three killed in action; seventeen other ranks killed, and forty-eight wounded, and all this in the regular wear-and-tear front-line routine with nothing more to see than a stray German cap here and there. Twenty-two men were sent down sick, and the Diary begins to hint at the prevalence of the “Spanish fever,” which was in a few months to sweep France and all the world.

June was a month of peace. It opened in reserve-trenches at the south-west end of Monchy-au-Bois, and when they next went up into line, a new route had been surveyed round the dreaded corner of Adinfer Wood which saved some shelling of reliefs.

On the 4th June the C.O., Lieutenant-Colonel Pollok, left the Battalion to take over command of Sixth Corps Army School, and Major R. R. C. Baggallay assumed command. Likewise three stray Germans were captured opposite one of our posts.

On the 5th Major Gordon arrived from the 2nd Battalion for duty as Second in Command.

They were relieved by the 1st King’s Regiment on the 6th June--a somewhat hectic performance, as the front-line track-ways were intricate, needing guides at almost every turn of them, and, for the run-up, one guide per platoon. After which, about one in the morning, it was discovered that the King’s had come in without their Lewis-guns. Some divisions were in the habit of leaving and taking over the Lewis-guns _in situ_; but the Guards Division always went in and out of the line with their very own weapons. One cannot delay a clear June dawn and, as the relieved Battalion had to get off in tightly packed and horribly conspicuous lorries, and as the last platoon could not reach those lorries till 3 A. M., it was touch-and-go whether daylight would not reveal them “like a Sunday School treat” to the German guns. But luck held. The last lorry was safe in Bavincourt Wood five miles behind Monchy before day had stripped the landscape, and the 1st King’s were left to meditate on the wealth and variety of the Irish tongue, as delivered on empty stomachs in whispers down packed trenches.

The Battalion billeted at Bavincourt when the 2nd H.L.I. had got out of their quarters, and since, like the other camps, Bavincourt was regularly bombed, made earth walls round their Nissen huts, and slits near them to be used against ’planes or too extravagant shell-fire. Here they stayed till the end of the month, cleaning, refitting, and training (in open warfare principally; and, this time, they were not to be disappointed) at Lewis gunnery, bombing, and general physical smartening-up. When the Brigade Sports took place at Saulty they won every event but three, and when the Corps Commander, the following week, inspected the different ways in the divisional methods of carrying the eight Lewis-guns of each company all on one limber, “the method employed by the Battalion was considered the best, and all units were ordered to copy.” They had rigged a sort of false top on a rear-limber which accommodated all eight guns together.

A Divisional Horse-show was held on the 22nd, but there the Battalion did not get a single prize. They hammered on at their trainings and Brigade field-days--all with an eye to the coming open warfare, while the “Spanish fever,” which was influenza of the post-war type, grew steadily worse among men and officers alike. When H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught visited Divisional Headquarters at Bavincourt Château on the 30th June, and the Battalion had to find not only the Guard of Honour but 160 men to line the avenue to the Château, there were seventy officers and men down with the pest, out of less than 900. Thirty-one men had been sent down sick, two had been killed in action presumably by overhead bombing, for the Diary does not mention any trench casualties, and twenty-three wounded.

The following officers joined during the month of June: Lieutenant C. A. J. Vernon, and 2nd Lieutenants E. B. Spafford, A. E. Hutchinson, H. R. Baldwin, G. F. Mathieson, J. A. M. Faraday, E. M. Harvey, M.C., and A. E. O’Connor, all on the 2nd June; Captain A. W. L. Paget on the 4th, and 2nd Lieutenant A. H. O’Farrell on the 10th June. Second Lieutenant C. S. O’Brien, who was in command of the model raid already mentioned, was awarded the Military Cross on the 9th of June.

After a sporting interlude on the 3rd July, when they met the 1st Munster Fusiliers at athletics and won everything except the hundred yards, they relieved the 15th H.L.I. in the intermediate line near Hendecourt. As a matter of fact, they were a sick people just then. All Battalion Headquarters except the Commanding Officer, and all the officers of No. 2 Company, besides officers of other companies, were down with “Spanish fever” on going into the line. A third of the men were also sick at one time, and apparently the enemy too, for they hardly troubled to shell by day and let the night-reliefs go without attention. The only drawbacks were furious summer thunderstorms which, from time to time, flooded the trenches and woke up more fever. The front line held here by the Guards was badly knocked about and battered, and instructions ran that, in event of serious attack, it would not be contested.

There is no clear evidence of the state of the Battalion’s collective mind at this time, but from home letters it might be gathered that the strain of the Bush and its bewilderment had given place to the idea that great things were preparing. Battalions are very often told tales to this effect, but they suit themselves as to the amount that they swallow. No power on earth, for instance, could have persuaded the veterans of the Somme, after Cambrai, that there was “anything doing”; but as the summer of 1918 grew warmer in the wooded and orchard country behind the Amiens-Albert line, and our lines there held and were strengthened, and those who had been home or on the seas reported what they had heard and seen, hope, of a kind not raised before, grew in the talks of the men and the officers. (“Understand, I do _not_ say there was anny of the old chat regardin’ that the war would finish next Chuseday, the way we talked in ’16. But, whatever they said acrost the water, _we_ did not hould ’twould endure those two more extra years all them civilians was dishin’ out to us. _What_ did we think? That ’19 would see the finish? ’Twud be hard to tell what we thought. Leave it this way--we was no more than waitin’ on mercies to happen an’--’twas mericles that transpired!”)

They relieved their own brigade battalions with the punctilio proper to their common ritual, and for the benefit of over a hundred recruits. It was their ancient comrades under all sorts of terrors, the 2nd Coldstream, whose guides from Boiry-St. Martin one night lost their way in the maze of tracks and turns to the front line. But, as meekly set forth in the Diary, when it came the Battalion’s turn to be relieved by the 2nd Grenadiers, “all tracks had been carefully picketed by _this_ Battalion to assist grenadier companies coming in and ours going out.” The occasions when the guides of the 1st Irish Guards lost their way must be looked for in the reports of others.

“Little shelling and no casualties” were the order of the fine days till, on the 29th July, taking over from the 2nd Coldstream, they found six platoons of the 3rd Battalion, 320th Regiment, U.S.A., which had come into line the night before and were attached for instruction. These were young, keen, desperately anxious to learn, and not at all disposed to keep their heads down.

Next day the enemy opened on them, and “were rather offensive in their shelling.” The front platoon of the Americans, attached to the Battalion’s front company, caught it worst, but no casualties were reported. Then things quieted down, and a patrol of Special Battalion Scouts, a new organization of old, trusty No Man’s Landers, under Lieutenant Vernon as Intelligence Officer, went out on reconnaissance, across the Cojeul valley, and wandered generally among ancient trench-lines in bright moonlight. They found a German party working on fresh earth, but no signs of enemy patrols on the move in the valley. This was as well. No one wished to see that dead ground occupied, except by our own people at the proper time.

July’s bill of casualties was the lowest of all. No officer and but one man had been killed, and two wounded. This last was when the enemy shelled Boiry to celebrate the arrival of the American platoons. Seventeen men were sent down sick. Fifty other ranks were transferred to the 1st from the 2nd Battalion, now acting as a feeder to its elder brother.

On the 1st of August the Battalion was still in the peaceful front line watching the six American platoons being relieved by other six platoons from the 2nd Battalion of the 320th Regiment. It was observed, not without some envy--“They did not know enough to save ’emselves throuble, an’ they would not ha’ done it if they had. They was too full of this same dam’ new ould war.” Even at this immense distance of time, one can almost hear the veterans commenting on the zeal and excitement that filled the stale lines where, to those young eyes from across the water, everything was as shining-new as death.

On the 3rd August the Battalion made a reconnaissance of a post with the idea of raiding it, which was a complete though bloodless failure. Some of our back guns chose the exact moment when the raiders were setting out (on the sure information of a scouting-party, who had just come in) to wipe up the unconscious little garrison and their machine-gun, and woke the night with heavy shell dropped _in_ our own wire and in front of our objective. Naturally nothing could be done, and the affair was called off till the next evening (4th August), when a “crawling-party,” under Lieutenant Vernon, of a corporal and six men went out along the same route that the scouts had taken the night before. They were expected and welcomed with enthusiasm. A sentry gave the alarm, a little party ran out to cut them off, the machine-gun (a heavy one), which had not betrayed itself before, promptly opened fire, but wide of our prone men, and a German, as promptly, hove bombs in the wrong direction. All this, says the report, happened as soon as some one inside the post gave “short, decisive orders.” Then Véry lights flared without stint, and, being some way from home, with much unlocated wire between, the raiders got away swiftly and safely. The tracks of the scouts through the long grass the night before had put the enemy on the alert. But if our guns had only held their tongues on that occasion, our coup might have been brought off. Instead of which, the enemy woke up and shelled a front company for a quarter of an hour with 60-pounders before he could be induced to go to bed.

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE END