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Other documents randomly have
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our corporals and wounded a couple of the Coldstream. A hint of the
various companies’ works shows what they had to contend with
nightly. No. 2, which held the right front line “where enough of the
trench had been already reclaimed to accommodate the whole
company” (it was not superior accommodation), borrowed two
platoons from No. 1 and worked till dawn at finishing a traffic-trench
behind the blown-in front and at making parapets till “by morning it
was possible to get all along this trench, even with a good deal of
crawling.” No. 4 were out wiring a post against flank and rear attack.
It stood out in a wilderness of utterly smashed trenches, which
fatigue-parties from the reserve battalions dealt with, by the help and
advice of the Sappers, and constructed a new trench (Wieltje
Trench) running out on the left flank of the weak and unsupported
Wieltje salient. Here was another desert of broken trenches, linked
by shallow or wet sketches of new ones. No. 3 Company worked at
its own trench, and at the repair of Cardoen Street which “had
recently been blown in in several places.” An improved trench could
be walked along, without too much stooping. Unimproved dittoes
demanded that men should get out and run in the open, steeple-
chasing across wreckage of tinware and timber, the bramble-like
embraces of stray wire-ends, and that brittle and insecure foothold
afforded by a stale corpse, while low flights of machine-gun bullets
hastened their progress, or shrapnel overhead hunted the party as
hawks hunt small birds in and out of hedges. The labour was as
monotonous and barren to perform as it seems to record; but it made
the background of their lives and experiences. Some say that,
whatever future war may bring forth, never again can men be
brought to endure what armed mankind faced in the trenches in
those years. Certain it is that men, nowadays, thinking upon that
past, marvel to themselves that they could by any means have
overcome it at the time, or, later, have put it behind them. But the
wonder above all wonders is that, while they lived that life, it seemed
to them sane and normal, and they met it with even temper and cool
heads.
On the 3rd May, Major Chichester, who had been suffering for
some time from the effects of a wound by a H.E. that burst within a
few feet of him, had to go sick, and Captain E. B. Greer was left
temporarily in command. Their own Commanding Officer, the Hon. L.
J. P. Butler, who had come out with them at the first and taken all
that the Gods had sent since, was on the 5th May translated to the
command of a Kitchener Brigade. Here is a tribute of that time, from
within the Battalion, where they were not at all pleased by the calls of
the New Army for seasoned brigadiers. “Butler, more than any other
man, has made this Battalion what it is. Also we all love him.
However, I am glad he has got a less dangerous job. He is too brave
a man ever to be safe.”
On that same day they were relieved and went into one of the
scattered wooden camps near Brandhoek for a whole week, which
was spoiled by cold weather and classes in wiring under an R.E.
corporal attached to them for that purpose. (“We were not clever with
our hands at first go-off, but when it came to back-chat and remarks
on things, and no officers near, begad there was times when I could
have pitied a Sapper!”)
By the 12th May the Battalion was in reserve, their Brigade in the
line, Major P. L. Reid had assumed command and Lieutenant F. Pym
and 2nd Lieutenants A. Pym and Close had joined. Then they began
again to consider raids of a new pattern under much more difficult
conditions than their Laventie affairs. The 2nd Grenadiers and the
1st Coldstream were to do the reconnoitring for them, and “live
Germans were badly needed for purposes of intelligence.” The
authorities recommended, once more, two simultaneous raids
symmetrically one from each flank. Their C.O. replied, as at
Laventie, that live Germans meant stalking, and wished to know how
it was possible to stalk to a time-table, even had the ground been
well reconnoitred, and if several nights instead of one, and that a
relief-night, had been allowed for preparations. Neither of the raids
actually came off, but the projected one on the left flank ended in a
most typical and instructive game of blind-man’s buff. The idea was
to rush a German listening-post known to be held just north of the
railway line on the left of Railway Wood, and the point of departure
for the Coldstream reconnoitring patrol had been from a listening-
post of our own, also on the railway. The patrol’s report was perfectly
coherent. They had left our listening-post, gone up the railway line,
turned half right, crawled fifty yards, found German wire, worked
along it, discovered a listening-post “empty but obviously in recent
use,” had hurried back, recrossed the railway about a hundred yards
above our own listening-post, and fifty yards to the north of their
crossing had noted the outline of another German listening-post
where men were talking. (It is interesting to remember that the entire
stage of these tense dramas could almost be reconstructed in a fair-
sized garden.) This latter, then, was the post which the Battalion was
to attack. Accordingly, they rehearsed the play very carefully with ten
men under Lieutenant F. Pym, who had strict orders when they
should rush the post, to club the Germans, “trying not to kill them (or
one another).” They were to “collar a prisoner and hurry him back if
well enough to walk,” and, incidentally, as illustrating the fashion of
the moment, they were all to wear “brown veils.”
With these stage-directions clear in their mind, they went into the
line on the 16th May, after a quiet relief, and took over from the
Coldstream the sector from Railway Wood, the barricades across the
railway, the big dug-out which had been an old mine, under Railway
Wood, and disposed their reserves near Hell Fire Corner and the
Menin road. It was ground they knew and hated, but since they had
last eaten dirt there, our own listening-post, which had been the point
of departure for the Coldstream patrol, on whose reports the raid
would be based, had been withdrawn one hundred and fifty yards
down the railway line. Apparently no one had realised this, and the
captain (Platt) of the Coldstream Company, who had this sector
when the 2nd Irish Guards relieved, had been killed while out wiring
a couple of nights before. Consequently, that patrol had reconnoitred
inside our own front; had mistaken our own wire for the German, had
followed it to one of our own disused posts, and had seen and heard
a listening-post of the 2nd Grenadiers which they, quite logically,
assumed to be German and reported as such. Everything fitted in
like a jigsaw puzzle, but all was based on a line which had been
shifted—as the Battalion perceived the moment they took over the
sector. So there was no attack with clubs and brown veils by the 2nd
Irish Guards on the 2nd Grenadiers’ listening-post then, or
afterwards, and the moral of the story was “verify your data.” (“No
living man could tell from one day to the next—let alone nights—
which was our line and which was Jerry’s. ’Twas broke an’ gapped
and turned round every way, and each battalion had its own fancy-
trenches dug for to make it worse for the next that took over. The
miracle was—an’ how often have I seen it!—the miracle was that we
did not club each other in the dark every night instead of—instead of
when we did.”)
The Battalion went on, sadly, with its lawful enterprises of running
wire and trench from the high ground under Railway Wood toward
the shifted barricade on the railway itself; and digging saps to
unstable mine-craters that had, some way or other, to be worked into
their ever-shifting schemes of defence. All this under machine-gun
fire on bright nights, when, as the cruel moon worked behind them,
each head showing above ground-level was etched in black for the
snipers’ benefit. On their right flank, between their own division and
the Canadians, lay a gap of a quarter of a mile or so, which up till
then had been imperfectly looked after by alternate hourly patrols.
(“And in the intervals, any Germans who knew the way might have
walked into Ypres in quest of souvenirs.”) It had to be wired and
posted, and, at the same time, a huge, but for the moment dry, mine-
crater directly in front of the right company’s shattered trench,
needed linking up and connecting with another crater on the left.
Many dead men lay in the line of that sap, where, at intervals, enemy
rifle-grenades would lob in among the sickened workers. The
moonlight made the Germans active as rats every night, and, since it
was impossible to wire the far sides of the craters in peace, our
people hit upon the idea of pushing “knife-rests”—ready wired
trestles—out in the desired direction with poles, after dark. Be it
noted, “This is a way, too much neglected, of wiring dangerous
places. Every description of ‘puzzy-wuzzy’ can be made by day by
the eight company wirers, and pushed out. Then on the first dark
night, a few metal pegs and a strand or two of wire passed through
the whole thing, makes an entanglement that would entangle a
train.” (The language and emotions of the fatigue-parties who
sweated up the unhandy “knife-rests” are not told.) Half the Battalion
were used to supply the wants of the other half; for rations and water
could only creep to within a couple of hundred yards of Hell Fire
Corner, where the parties had to meet them and pack them the rest
of the way by hand. The work of staggering and crawling, loaded
with sharp-angled petrol-tins of water along imperfect duck-boards,
is perhaps a memory which will outlast all others for the present
generation. “The fatigues kill—the fatigues kill us”—as the living and
the dead knew well.
On the 18th May they were drenched with a five hours’
bombardment of 4.2’s and “woolly bears.” It blew in one of their
trenches (West Lane) and killed two men and wounded an officer of
the Trench Mortar Battery there. But the height of the storm fell, as
usual, round Hell Fire Corner, never a frequented thoroughfare by
daylight, and into an abandoned trench. “They could hardly have put
down so much shell anywhere else in our line and have got so small
a bag. Only one man in the company was wounded.” The race is not
always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but a battalion that
works strenuously on its parapets and traffic-trenches gets its
reward, even in the Salient in ’16. Battalion Headquarters, always
fair target for a jest, is derided as taking “a severe fright from a shell
that pitched twenty yards away, but it was an obvious error in
bowling, and was not repeated.” Our guns fired throughout the next
day, presumably in retaliation, but, like all troops in trenches, the
Battalion had no interest in demonstrations that did not directly affect
their food and precious water-tins. They were relieved on the 21st of
May by the 6th Oxford and Bucks of the Twentieth Division, and went
off to camp near Proven for ten days’ Corps Reserve, when “almost
the entire Battalion was on fatigue, either building military railways or
cleaning up reserve-lines of trenches.”

After Hooge
On the 1st June they moved out of that front altogether, to billets at
the back of Wormhoudt fourteen miles away, and thence on the next
day, June 2, to Bollezeele westward, while the enemy were making
their successful attack on the Canadians at Hooge. (“Have ye
noticed there is always trouble as soon as you come out of the line;
or, maybe, being idle you pay the more attention to it. Annyway, the
minute we was out of it, of course Jerry begins to play up and so
Hooge happened, and that meant more fatigue for the Micks.”)
Meantime, they were in “G.H.Q. Reserve” for a fortnight, busy on a
rehearsal-line of English and German trenches which the R.E. had
laid down for them to develop. Our G.H.Q. were thinking of the
approaching campaign on the Somme. The enemy were intent on
disarranging our plans just as our guns were moving southward.
Hooge was their spoke in our wheel. It came not far short of
success; for it pinned a quantity of shellable troops to weak ground,
directly cost the lives of several thousands of them and added a
fresh sore to the Salient’s many weaknesses in that it opened a
fortnight’s fierce fighting, with consequent waste, as well as
diversion, of supplies. While that battle, barren as the ground it won
and lost, surged back and forth, the Battalion at Bollezeele gained a
glory it really appreciated by beating the 3rd Grenadiers in the ring,
six fights out of nine, at all weights. Specially they defeated Ian
Hague (late heavy-weight champion of England) whom Corporal
Smith of the Battalion settled “on points.” There would be time and,
perhaps, warning to attend to Death when He called. Till then, young
and active life was uppermost, and had to be catered for. Indeed,
their brigadier remarked of the social side of that boxing
entertainment that “it reminded him of Ascot.”
But at the back of everything, and pouring in hourly by official or
unofficial word, was the news of the changing fortunes of Hooge.
Would that postpone or advance the date of the “spring meeting,” not
in the least like Ascot, that they had discussed so long? Whichever
way war might go, the Guards would not be left idle.
On the evening of the 13th June the order came “telling us that we
would move up next day to Hooge and take over a section of the line
from a Canadian brigade.” They went off in motor lorries, and by the
evening of the 15th the Battalion was once more in the packed
Infantry Barracks of Ypres where the Canadian officers made
Battalion Headquarters their guests till things could be sorted out.
Our counter-attack of the 13th June had more or less come to rest,
leaving the wrecked plinths of the houses of Hooge, and but very
little more, in the enemy’s hands, and both sides were living on the
last edge of their nerves. Proof of this came on the night of the 16th,
when the Battalion in barracks was waiting its turn. An SOS. went up
in the dark from somewhere north of the Menin road, that stony-
hearted step-mother of calamity; some guns responded and, all in
one instant, both sides’ artillery fell to it full-tongued, while “to make
everything complete a gas-signal was given by one of our battalions.
A terrific bombardment ensued. Later in the night, the performance
was repeated, less the gas-alarm.”
The explanation was as simple as human nature. Both sides had
taken bad knocks in the past fortnight. Both artilleries, largely
increased, were standing by ready for trouble, and what else could
one expect—save a detonation? But local rumour ran that the whole
Gehenna had been started by one stray ration-party which, all
communication-trenches being blown in, was toiling to the front line
in the open and showed against the sky-line—quite enough, at that
tension, to convince the enemy that it was the head of a fresh
infantry attack. The rest came of itself: but the gas-alarm was the
invention of the Devil himself. It upset the dignity of all the staffs
concerned, for the Brigadier himself, the H.Q. Staff of the
Coldstream as well as the C.O. and company officers of the 2nd Irish
Guards who were visiting preparatory to taking over the sector, found
themselves in one tiny room beneath a brick-kiln, all putting on their
helmets at once, and, thereafter, all trying to explain their views of
the crisis through them. Some have since compared that symposium
to a mass-meeting of unemployed divers; others to a troupe of
performing seals.
They relieved the 1st Coldstream, very quietly, on the night of the
18th June in an all but obliterated section of what had been the
Canadians’ second line and was now our first, running from the
Culvert, on the Menin road, west of Hooge, through Zouave Wood,
and into the north end of Sanctuary Wood. Four to eight hundred
yards lay between them and the enemy, who were settling down in
the old Canadian front line across the little swampy valley. The left of
the Irish Guards’ sector was, even after the Coldstream had worked
on it for three days, without dug-outs, and blown in in places, but it
offered a little cover. Their right line, for nearly half a mile, was
absolutely unrecognizable save in a few isolated spots. The
shredded ground was full of buried iron and timber which made
digging very difficult, and, in spite of a lot of cleaning up by their
predecessors, dead Canadians lay in every corner. It ran through
what had once been a wood, and was now a dreary collection of
charred and splintered stakes, “to the tops of which, blown there by
shells, hung tatters of khaki uniform and equipment.” There was no
trace of any communication-trenches, so companies had to stay
where they were as long as the light lasted. Battalion H.Q. lived in
the brick-kiln aforementioned, just west of the Zillebeke road, and
company commanders walked about in the dark from one inhabited
stretch to the next, trusting in Providence. So, too, did the enemy,
whom Captain Alexander found, to the number of six, ambling
promiscuously in the direction of Ypres. They challenged, he fired,
and they blundered off—probably a lost wiring-party. In truth, neither
front line knew exactly where the other lay in that chaos; and, both
being intent upon digging themselves in ere the guns should begin
again, were glad enough to keep still. Our observation-parties
watched the Germans as they crept over the ridge at dusk and
dropped into the old Canadian line, where their policies could be
guessed at from the nature of the noises they made at work; but no
one worried them.
On the 20th June an unlucky shell pitched into No. 1 Company,
killing three, wounding two, and shocking five men; otherwise there
was quiet, and their brigadier came round the support-trenches that
day and complimented all hands on their honesty as craftsmen. As
he said, it would have been easy for them to have slacked off on
their last night in a position to which they were not returning,
whereas they had worked like beavers, and so the battalion which
relieved them (the Royal Canadian Regiment resting at Steenvoorde
since Hooge where it had lost three hundred men) found good cover
and fair wire all along the sector. The Canadians were late, for their
motor-buses went adrift somewhere down the road, and the
Battalion only “just caught the last train” out of Ypres and reached
camp near Vlamertinghe at dawn on the 21st June.
It had been a strange interlude of ash-pits and charnel-houses,
sandwiched between open-air preparations, for that always
postponed “spring meeting.” No troops are the better for lying out,
unrelieved by active reprisals, among shrivelled dead; and even the
men, who love not parades, were pleased at a few days of steady
barrack-square drill, when a human being walks and comports
himself as though he were a man, and not a worm in the mire or a
slave bound to bitter burdens and obscene tasks. At Vlamertinghe
they found, and were glad to see him, Captain FitzGerald, recovered
after three weeks’ sickness in England, and joyfully back before his
time; and Lieutenant R. McNeill, who had acted as Adjutant, returned
to the command of No. 2 Company in the absence of Captain Bird,
gone sick. They were busied at Battalion H.Q. with the preparation of
another raid to be carried out on the night of the 2nd July “as part of
the demonstration intended to occupy the attention of the Germans
in this locality while more important events were happening
elsewhere.” Lieutenant F. Pym, a bold, daring, and collected officer,
was chosen to command the little action, and each company sent up
eight volunteers and one sergeant, from whom thirty men and one
sergeant were finally picked and set to rehearsing every detail.
On the 28th June they moved up to within four miles of the front
and lay at Elverdinghe—two companies and Battalion H.Q. in the
château itself, where they were singularly comfortable, and two in
the canal bank, in brick and sand-bag dug-outs. It was true that all
furniture and pictures had gone from the château with the window-
glass, and that swallows nested in the cornices of the high, stale-
smelling rooms, but the building itself, probably because some trees
around blocked direct observation, was little changed, and still
counted as one of the best places in the line for Brigade reserves.
Their trenches, however, across the battered canal presented less
charm. The front line was “dry on the whole,” but shallow; the
support quite good, but the communication-trenches (it was the
Battalion’s first experience of Skipton Road) were variously wet,
blown in, swamped, or frankly flooded with three feet of water.
Broken trenches mean broken companies and more work for
company commanders, but some of the platoons had to be scattered
about in “grouse butts” and little trenches of their own, a disposition
which tempts men to lie snug, and not to hear orders at the first call.
 T h e R a i d o f t h e 2 n d J u ly
All through the 1st of July our guns bombarded their chosen front
with the object of cutting, not too ostentatiously, the wire where our
raid was going to take place, and of preparing the way on the right
for an attack by the 3rd Guards Brigade on a small German salient
that had to be reduced. The enemy answered with a new type of
trench-mortar shell, nine inches in diameter, fired from a rifled mortar
of high trajectory at a thousand yards’ range. The shock and smash
of it were worse than a 5.9, and did much damage to Nile Trench,
but caused no casualties. The 2nd July was the day for the raid
itself, and just as Battalion Headquarters were discussing the very
last details, an urgent message from Brigade Headquarters came in
to them—“Please hasten your report on pork and bean rations.”
The notion was that our 18-pounders and 4.5 hows. with a couple
of trench-mortars, would open heavily at twenty minutes to ten. Ten
minutes later, the Stokes mortars were to join in. At ten the guns
would lift and make a barrage while the Stokes mortars attended to
the flanks of the attack. It was a clear evening, so light, indeed, that
at the last minute the men were told to keep their jackets on lest their
shirts should betray them. (It was then, men said later, that the raid
should have been postponed.) Everything was quite quiet, and
hardly a shot was being fired anywhere, when the party lined up
under Lieutenant F. Pym. Our bombardment opened punctually, but
drew no answer from the enemy for ten minutes. Then they put down
a barrage behind our front line, which was the origin of all the trouble
to come. At the last minute, one single unrelated private, appearing
from nowhere in particular, was seen to push his way down the
trench, climbing over the raiders where they crouched waiting for the
life-or-death word. Said an officer, who assumed that at the least he
must bear vital messages: “Who are you?” “R.F.A. trench-mortar
man, sir,” was the reply. Then, “Where the devil are you
going?”—“Going to get my tea, sir.” He passed on, mess-tin in hand,
noticing nothing that was outside of his own immediate show; for of
such, mercifully, were the armies of England.
 Meantime the enemy barrage increased on Nile Trench, and the
front trenches began to gap badly. There was still light enough to
give a good view of the German parapets when our raiders went
over the top, and several machine-guns opened on them from the
enemy second line. This was a bad kick-off, for, with our leading
raiders out in the open, it would have been murder to have held the
rest back. They all went on into the barrage and the machine-gun
fire, and from that point the account of what actually, or supposedly,
happened must, as usual, be collected from survivors. The whole
attack seems to have reached the German wire which was “well cut
in places.” Here our men were checked by machine-gun fire (they
probably ran up to the muzzles of them) and some bombing. They
stopped and began to bomb back. Pym rushed forward through the
leading men, jumped into the trench, landed in an empty German
bay, shouting to them to follow, turned left with a few men, reached
the door of a machine-gun dug-out with its gun in full blast, broke in,
found two men at work, knocked one of them off the gun and, with
the help of Private Walshe, made him prisoner. Our bombers,
meantime, had spread left and right, as laid down, to hold each end
of the captured section, but had further to block a communication-
trench which entered it about the middle, where the enemy was
trying to force his way in. It is difficult to say whether there was not
an attack on both flanks as well. At any rate, a general bomb-scuffle
followed, in which our men held up the enemy and tried to collect
prisoners. The captured section of trench only contained one dead
and five living. One of these “proved unmanageable and had to be
killed.” Four were hurried back under escort for samples, but two of
these were killed by their own shell-fire on the road. The R.E. officer
looked round, as his duty was, to find things to demolish, but the
trench was clean and empty. He was hit twice, but managed to get
back. Three gas-experts had also been attached to the expedition.
Two of them were wounded on the outward run. The third searched
the trench but found no trace of gas engines. Some papers and
documents were snatched up from the dug-outs, but he who took
charge of them did not live to hand over. The barrage grew heavier;
the machine-gun fire from the enemy second line never ceased; and
the raiders could see the home-parapet going up in lumps. It was an
exquisitely balanced choice of evils when, at about ten past ten,
Lieutenant Pym blew his horn for the withdrawal. A minute or two
later, men began to trickle over our parapet through the barrage, and
here the bulk of the casualties occurred. Our guns ceased fire at
twenty past ten, but the enemy battered savagely at our front line
with heavies and trench-mortars till eleven. The result was that “the
front line, never very good, became chaotic, and the wounded had to
be collected in undamaged bays.” It was hopeless to attempt to call
the roll there, so what raiders could stand, with the two surviving
prisoners, were sent up to Brigade Headquarters while the wounded
were got across the open to Lancashire Farm and the trolley-line
there. Pym was nowhere to be found, and though some men said,
and honestly believed, that they had seen him re-enter our lines, he
was not of the breed which would have done this till he had seen the
last of his command out of the German trenches. He may have got
as far as the German wire on his way back and there, or in that
neighbourhood, have been killed; but he was never in our trench
again after he left it. Others, too, of that luckless party bore
themselves not without credit. For example, a signaller, name not
recorded, who laid his telephone wire up to the trench across No
Man’s Land and had it cut by a shell while he was seeking for
Lieutenant Pym. On his return he came across a man shot in the
legs, and bore him, under heavy shell and machine-gun fire, to our
wire which was not constructed for helpless wounded to get through.
The signaller dropped into the trench, calling on Sergeant O’Hagan,
a busy man that night, for stretcher-bearers, but these had all been
hit. The Sergeant suggested that he should telephone to Battalion
Headquarters and draw some from there. The telephonist—perhaps
because a doctor rarely uses his own drugs—preferred to put the
case directly to a couple of men in No. 2 Company, at the same time
indicating the position of the wounded man, and those three handed
him down into the very moderate safety that our front line then
offered. And again, when Sergeant Austen, the sergeant of the raid,
was hit and fell in German wire, one of the raiders stayed with him
awhile, and finally dragged him to our line, with the usual demand for
bearers. This time they were all busy, but he found Lieutenant F.
Greer and that officer’s servant, whom he had led forth, and “in spite
of heavy machine-gun fire,” they brought in the Sergeant. Unluckily,
just at the end of the German bombardment, Lieutenant Synge was
very badly hit while in the front line. The raid had been a fair, flat, but
heroic failure, due, as most men said, to its being loosed in broad
daylight at a fully prepared enemy. Outside the two prisoners,
nothing, not even a scrap of paper, was gained except the
knowledge that the Battalion could handle such affairs as these in
their day’s work, put it all equably behind them, and draw fresh
lessons for fresh to-morrows. (“We lost one dam’ good officer, and
more good men than was worth a thousand Jerries, but, mark you,
we might have lost just that same number any morning in the front
line, as we have lost them again and again, under the expenditure of
half a dozen, maybe one, shell the devil happened to be riding that
time. And them that it took would never have had even the exercise,
let alone the glory, of all them great doings of ours. So, ye see,
everything in war is good luck or bad.”)
Their brigadier had a little talk with the raiding-party next day on
the Canal Bank, when he made much of them, and told them that he
was very pleased with “their gallant behaviour under adverse
circumstances.” It was gratifying, because they had done all that
they could. But after every raid, as indeed after every action, there
follows interminable discussion from every point of view of every
rank, as to the “might-have-beens”—what would have happened had
you been there, or they been here, and whether the bay where the
raid wrecked itself against the barricade none suspected might have
been turned by a dash across the top, in the pauses of the shifting
and returning overhead machine-gun fire. The messes discuss it, the
estaminets where the men talk pick up those verdicts from the mess-
waiters and go over them again and again; the front line scratches
diagrams on the flank of sand-bags with bits of burned stick, and the
more they explain, argue, and asseverate, the deeper grows the
confusion out of which the historian in due time weaves the accepted
version—at which all who were concerned scoff.
The 4th July was a quiet day after a bombardment the night before
that had further enlarged the gap of untenable trench which the
furious reprisals for the raid had created. They spent their hours
repairing damage as much as possible till they were relieved by the
1st Coldstream, and a half of them got into billets at Elverdinghe
Château, and the rest in Canal Bank. By this time the enemy had
begun to turn their attention to the château, in spite of its screening
trees, and were in the habit of giving it a daily ration of whizz-bangs,
which disturb drill-formations. Troops of the Division being fairly thick
on the ground, one morning’s work (July 7) managed to wound two
machine-gunners of the 1st Coldstream and another of the 1st Irish
Guards.
On the 5th July Major C. A. Rocke arrived and took over the duties
of Second in Command. On the 7th Captain R. McNeill left the
Battalion sick, and Lieutenant R. Nutting took over command of No.
2 Company.
On the 8th they moved up to their old position, relieving the 1st
Coldstream across the canal without casualties, three companies in
the front line that had been a little repaired since their raid, and the
fourth (No. 2) in support in Nile Trench. Three quiet days and nights
followed, when they could work undisturbed. On the 11th July a
happy party was chosen to attend the 14th July celebrations at Paris.
The adjutant, Captain J. S. N. FitzGerald, commanded them, all six,
and their names were: Drill-Sergeant Harradine, Sergeants Reid,
Glennon, and Halpin, and Privates Towland and Dunne. Rumour,
which respects naught, said that they were chosen with an eye to the
credit of the Battalion at any inter-allied banquets that might be
obligatory, and that they did not fail. On the 12th, after a quiet night,
forty large-size shells were sent into Canal Bank, as retaliation, they
presumed, for some attentions on the part of our 9.2’s, the afternoon
before. The Battalion was unhurt, but the 1st Scots Guards had
several casualties. Their tour ended next day without trouble, and
they were back by Elverdinghe Château for two days’ light and
mostly ineffective shelling preparatory to their move on the 15th July
to Camp P. some three miles north of Poperinghe. During this time,
2nd Lieutenant Mylne arrived and was posted to No. 4 Company,
and 2nd Lieutenants C. Hyne and Denson to No. 2 Company.
Second Lieutenant Hordern also rejoined and was posted to No. 1.
Every one understood, without too much being said, that that sector
would see them no more till after the great “spring meeting,” now set
for the autumn, which many believed would settle the war. It was a
small interlude of “fattening up” before the Somme, which included
Battalion sports and company-drill competitions. There was, too, a
dinner on the anniversary of the raising of the Battalion, 16th of July,
when General Ponsonby dined with the Battalion. (In those ancient
days men expected everything in the world except its disbandment
as soon as war should be over.)
On the 18th July Captain J. S. N. FitzGerald and his detachment
returned from Paris after one joyous week, and took over the
adjutancy again from the second in command; and Captain Greer,
who had sprained his ankle badly during the raid, was sent down to
the base for cure.
It is noted that on the 21st Captain Lord Castlerosse, wounded in
the far-off days at Villers-Cotterêts with the 1st Battalion, joined the
Battalion from G.S. Ninth Corps. The wild geese were being called in
preparatory to their flight for the Somme.

The Somme
It began in the usual way, by definite orders to relieve a battalion in
the front line. These were countermanded next day and, the day
after, changed to orders to move to Bollezeele, where on the 25th
they “received a great welcome from the inhabitants,” doubtless for
old sakes’ sake. Then came the joining up of the last subalterns, and
three days’ steady route-marching to toughen tender feet. Lieutenant
Montgomery rejoined, and was posted to No. 2 Company, and, with
him, 2nd Lieutenant Budd; Lieutenant Brew, not without experience
in raiding, also arrived and was posted to No. 4 Company. This
finished the tale, and on the 29th, the last Sunday of the month, they
cleared personal accounts at mass and Church of England services;
and on the 30th marched out to Esquelbecq, where they entrained
all together, with their first-line transport, and were shifted, via
Hazebrouck, Berguette, and St. Pol, to Petit Houvain five miles south
of the latter town, or, broadly speaking, from the left to the right of the
British line. That small trip lasted till evening, after which they
marched fourteen miles to Lucheux on the Grouches River above
Doullens, into a new world of camps and hutments, at midnight. The
Diary says—on such points diaries are always particular, because it
touches the honour of company officers—“the Battalion marched
splendidly, only six men having to be carried for the last few miles.
These were mostly old or previously wounded men.” And the month
of July ends with the words, “There is nothing to record.”
There was, perhaps, not so very much after all.
The battle of the Somme had been in full blaze now from Maricourt
to Hébuterne and Gomiecourt, for one month; and after the
expenditure of no one had time to count how many men, our front
from Ovillers-la-Boisselle to Fricourt and below Montauban had been
advanced in places to the depth of three miles on a front of ten. It
was magnificent, for the whole of the Press said so; and it was also
extensively advertised as war.
From Ovillers-la-Boisselle to the north the German line, thanks to
its clouds of machine-guns, had not been shifted by our attack, and
the Battalion came, for the time being, under the orders of the
Twenty-fifth Division (7th Brigade) which lay against the southern
shoulder of the Gomiecourt salient just where the sweeping bare
uplands break back to the valley of the Authies. They were turned in
to dig trenches on the sector, four or five miles from their bivouac in
the little wood to the south of Mailly-Maillet. They left the crowded
Lucheux camp in lorries at three on the afternoon of the 1st August
(“In those days we knew we were for it, but we did not know what the
Somme was going to be”), reached bivouac at eight, marched to
their trenches and came back at daybreak with one N.C.O. and four
men wounded. It was a most gentle introduction to the scenes of
their labours. The enemy were using shrapnel mostly part of the 3rd
August; 2nd Lieutenant Hordern was dangerously and eight men
were slightly wounded by one shell while at work. Second Lieutenant
Vaughan joined on this date and was posted to No. 2 Company.
Whether, as some said, the authorities did not know what to do with
them for a few days, or whether they were part of a definite scheme
of attack, no one cared. The machine had taken possession of their
lives and fates, and as they went from trench to bivouac and back
again they could both see and hear how extremely little a battalion,
or for that matter a brigade, mattered in the present inferno. The
fortnight’s battle that had opened on the 14th of July had finished
itself among erased villages and woods that were already all but
stumpage, while the big guns were pounding the camps and
bivouacs that held our reserves, and one stumbled on old and fresh
dead in the most unlikely and absurd places.
On the 6th August their turn ended, and they came back, for a
couple of days, to the 2nd Guards Brigade in the Bois du Warnimont
hutments—none too good—outside Authie. Here His Majesty the
King visited them on the 9th August, and, after three “quiet” days
spent in reconnoitring the trenches in front of Mailly-Maillet and
Auchonvillers, the Battalion on the 13th relieved the 1st Coldstream
in the front line.
It was a featureless turn of duty, barring some minenwerfer work
by the enemy once or twice in the dawns, which affected nothing.
They were relieved by a battalion of the K.O.Y.L.I. on the 15th, and
hutted in the wood near Mailly-Maillet. Here began their more
specialised training for the work that lay ahead of them. It included
everything that modern warfare of that date could imagine, from
following up drum-barrages at twenty-five yards’ distance, to the
unlovely business of unloading ammunition at railheads.
Domestically, there were not many incidents. Captain E. B. Greer
rejoined from the base on the 15th August. The Second in Command
and the Adjutant went sick on the 18th and 19th respectively. (These
ranks are not in the habit of noticing their personal complaints when
regimental life is crowded. They were back in ten days.) Second
Lieutenants Lysaght and Tomkins arrived from the base on the 30th,
and 2nd Lieutenant Zigomala on the 31st August.
One little horror of a life where men had not far to look for such
things stands out in the record of preparations that went on through
the clangour and fury of the Somme around them. On a windy
Sunday evening at Couin, in the valley north of Bus-les-Artois, they
saw an observation-balloon, tethered near their bivouacs, break
loose while being hauled down. It drifted towards the enemy line.
First they watched maps and books being heaved overboard, then a
man in a parachute jumping for his life, who landed safely. “Soon
after, something black, which had been hanging below the basket,
detached itself and fell some three thousand feet. We heard later
that it was Captain Radford (Basil Hallam). His parachute apparently
caught in the rigging and in some way he slipped out of the belt
which attached him to it. He fell near Brigade Headquarters.” Of
those who watched, there was not one that had not seen him at the
“Halls” in the immensely remote days of “Gilbert the Filbert, the
Colonel of the Nuts.”
Before the end of the month, they had shifted from their congested
camp near Bus-les-Artois to Méricourt under Albert, which they
reached circuitously by train, and there lay in Corps Reserve. The
weather was against drills. It rained almost every day, and they
slipped and swore through their rehearsals, wave-attacks, and
barrage-huntings across the deepening mud.
On the 9th September, at Happy Valley, they had their first sight of
the tanks, some thirty of which were parked, trumpeting and
clanking, near their camp. At that date the creatures were known as
“creepy-crawlies” or “hush-hush birds” and were not as useful as
they learned to become later. Then came the Battalion’s last
dispositions as to the reserve of officers, who were to be held till
needed with the first-line transport. The C.O., Lieut.-Colonel Reid,
was down in hospital with pukka trench-fever and a temperature to
match, and Lieutenant Nutting, sick with dysentery, had to be sent to
England. Lieutenant Dollar, who had rejoined a few days before on
recovery of the same disease, Captain Greer, and Lieutenant Brew
represented the Reserve, and even so (for the Somme was
merciless throughout) Captain Witts, who had fallen ill at Carnoy,
had to change places with Lieutenant Brew. Captain Alexander had
rejoined the Battalion after two days’ (jealously noted as “three
nights”) Paris leave.
The field-wastage began at once. They relieved the 4th
Grenadiers on the evening of the 12th September in the new, poor,
and shallow trenches dug a few days before, as our troops had
worked their way into the German system, in the salient east of
Ginchy; but ere that relief was completed, 2nd Lieutenant Zigomala
and ten men had been wounded. Next day saw forty casualties from
shrapnel and snipers, and 2nd Lieutenant Vaughan and several men
in No. 1 Company were killed by a single shell. The enemy, well
aware of what was intended, did all that they could to cripple, delay,
and confuse, and waste the men and material on our side. Their
chief reliance was their “pocketed” machine-guns with which the
whole ground was peppered; and their gunners’ instructions, most
gallantly obeyed, were, on the withdrawal of any force, to remain and
continue killing till they themselves were killed. Consequently it was
necessary at frequent intervals to hunt up these pests by hand rather
as one digs out wasps’ nests after dark.
On the night of the 13th September, it fell to the lot of the Battalion
to send out No. 2 Company upon a business of this nature—
machine-guns in a strong trench on their right. After a bombardment
supposed to have cut the wire, the company had to file across a
stretch of the open Ginchy-Morval road, and there were enfiladed by
machine-gun fire which killed 2nd Lieutenant Tomkins, who had
joined less than a fortnight before, and wounded a good many of the
men. This was while merely getting into position among the cramped
trenches. Next, it was discovered that our bombardment had by no
means cut enough wire, and when the attack was launched, in
waves of two platoons each, undisturbed machine-guns in a few
dreadful minutes accounted for more than three quarters of the little
host. Almost at the outset, Lieutenant Montgomery was killed close
to our own parapet, and those who were left, under 2nd Lieutenant
Hely-Hutchinson, lay down till they might crawl back after dark. That
wiped out No. 2 Company, and next day, its thirty survivors were sent
back to the first-line transport—a bleak prelude to the battle ahead.
But it passed almost unnoticed in the failure of an attack launched at
the same time by the 71st and 16th Infantry Brigades in the direction
of Leuze Wood. Names of villages and salient points existed
beautifully on such maps as were issued to the officers, and there is
no doubt that the distances on these maps were entirely correct. The
drawback was that the whole landscape happened to be one pitted,
clodded, brown and white wilderness of aching uniformity, on which
to pick up any given detail was like identifying one plover’s nest in a
hundred-acre bog.

Ginchy
But the idea of the battle of the 15th September was, as usual,
immensely definite. Rawlinson’s Fourth Army was to attack between
Combles and Martinpuich and seize Morval, Lesbœufs,
Gueudecourt, and Flers; the French attacking at the same time on
the right, and the Reserve Army on the left. Immediately after our
objective had been won the cavalry would advance and, apparently,
seize the high ground all round the Department, culminating at
Bapaume. The work of the Guards Division, whose views of cavalry
at that particular moment are not worth reproducing, was to support
the cavalry “on the above lines.” The 2nd Guards Brigade would take
the right of the attack on Lesbœufs; the 1st the left, with the 3rd
Brigade in Reserve, and the 71st Infantry Brigade on the right of the
2nd Guards Brigade. The 3rd Grenadiers and 1st Coldstream were
respectively right and left leading battalions, with the 1st Scots
Guards and the 2nd Irish Guards as right and left supporting
battalions; each advancing in four waves of single rank; two
machine-guns accompanying each leading battalion and four each
the supporting ones. Three other machine-guns were to bring up the
rear flanked, on either side, by two Stokes mortar-guns. The
Brigade’s allotted front was five hundred yards to the north-east of
Ginchy, and since the normal enemy barrage between Guillemont
and Ginchy was a thing to be avoided if possible, they were
assembled east of the latter village and not behind it. Their
objectives were duly laid down for them in green, brown, blue, and
red lines on the maps, or as one young gentleman observed, “just
like a game of snooker except that every one played with the nearest
ball as soon as the game began.” But every one understood
perfectly the outlines of the game. Their predecessors had been
playing it by hundreds of thousands since the 1st of July. They knew
they would all go on till they were dropped, or blown off the face of
the earth.