Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1179 page)

The Salient To The Somme

BRIGADIER-GENERAL
G. FEILDING, D.S.O., as we know, succeeded Lord Cavan in the command of the Guards Division, and the enemy woke up to a little more regular shelling and sniping for a few days till (January 4) the 1st Guards Brigade was unexpectedly relieved by a fresh brigade (the 114th), and the Battalion moved to billets in St. Floris which, as usual, were “in a very filthy condition.” There they stayed, under strong training at bombing and Lewis gunnery, till the 12th. Thence to Merville till the 23rd, when Lieutenant Hon. H. B. O’Brien, a specialist in these matters, as may have been noticed before, was appointed Brigade Bombing Officer. The bomb was to be the dominant factor of the day’s work for the next year or so, and the number of students made the country round billets unwholesome and varied. There is a true tale of a bombing school on a foggy morning who, hurling with zeal over a bank into the mist, found themselves presently being cursed from a safe distance by a repairing party who had been sent out to discover why one whole system of big-gun telephone-wires was dumb. They complained that the school had “cut it into vermicelli.”

The instruction bore fruit; for, so soon as they were back in the trenches at Ebenezer farm, which they had quitted on the 4th, bombing seems to have been forced wherever practicable. A weak, or it might be more accurate to say, a sore point had developed on the front in a crater thrown up by one of our own mines, which it was necessary to sap out to and protect by intermittent bombing. This brought retaliation and a few casualties nightly. A trench-mortar battery was imported to deal with the nuisance and, as might be expected, drew the enemy’s artillery.

On the 28th January a single stray bullet in the dark found and killed Captain V. C. J. Blake, No. 2 Company, while he was laying out some work in wire for his company, and a bombing attack round the mine-crater ended in three other ranks killed and one wounded.

On February 1 our mine-shaft in the same locality flooded without warning and drowned a couple of men in a listening-post. Our pumps could make no impression on the water; it was difficult to put up any head-cover for the men in the forward sap, and the enemy’s wire was being strengthened nightly and needed clearing away. This was routine-work undertaken by our artillery who blew gaps in it in three places, which the Battalion covered with machine-gun fire. It kept the enemy reasonably quiet, and H.R.H. Prince Albert, who was out on a tour from England, breakfasted with Battalion Headquarters the same morning (February 5). Once again the enemy’s information must have been inaccurate or delayed since there is no mention of any shelling or aeroplane work on Headquarters.

They came out of the line on the 7th and billeted near Merville. Reckoned by their standards it had been an uneventful stretch of duty, and those officers who could be spared had gone on short leave; for there was a rumour that leave would be stopped after the 20th of the month. The French and their English allies knew well that the great German attack on Verdun was ripening (it opened in the third week of February) and the world had no doubt of the issues that depended upon that gate to the heart of France holding fast. The whole long line stiffened to take the weight of any sudden side-issue or main catastrophe that the chance of war might bring about. But a battalion among hundreds of battalions knows as little what its own movements mean as a single truck in a goods yard knows of the import and export trade of Great Britain. The young officers snatched their few hours’ leave at home, loyally told their people that all was going well, returned — ”to a most interesting lecture on the Battle of Neuve Chapelle,” delivered at La Gorgue by a Divisional Staff Officer, and to an inspection of the 1st Guards Brigade by Lord Kitchener on a vile wet day when they were all soaked to the skin (February 10), and “to the usual routine in very poor weather.”

Lord Desmond FitzGerald, being now second in command by seniority, resigned his adjutancy and was succeeded by Lieutenant T. E. G. Nugent; No. 2, Captain Blake’s, Company was commanded by Major the Hon. A. C. S. Chichester, fresh from home, and Father S. Knapp, their priest, who had been transferred to the 1st London Irish, was followed by Father J. LaneFox from the same Battalion. Of the six Fathers who served the two battalions, two — Fathers Gwynne and S. Knapp, D.S.O., M.C. — were killed, one — Father F. M. Browne, M.C. — wounded twice, and one — Father F. S. Browne, M.C. — wounded once.

On the face of it nothing could have been quieter and more domestic than their daily life round Merville, and after a week of it they were moved (February 16) north towards Steenvoorde, in a hurricane of wind and rain, to the neighbourhood of Poperinghe, on the Ypres–Poperinghe–Dunkirk road, and a camp of tents, mostly blown down, and huts connected, for which small ease they were grateful, by duck-boards. This brought them into the Second Army area and into the Fourteenth Corps under Lord Cavan, precisely as that officer had hoped. He explained to them there was “a small German offensive” on the left of the line here, and that “if it came to anything” the Brigade might be wanted.

The “small offensive” had opened on the 13th with a furious bombardment of the extreme southern end of the Ypres Salient between the Ypres–Comines Canal and Ypres–Comines railway, a little to the south of Hill 60, followed by the springing of five mines under the British front line and an infantry attack, which ended in the capture by the enemy of four or five hundred yards of trench and the low ridge called “The Bluff,” over which they ran. The affair bulked big in the newspaper-press of the day; for a battalion, the 10th Lancashire Fusiliers, was literally buried by one of the mine explosions. The German gain was well held, but prevented from extending by a concentration of our artillery, and later on (March 2) the whole position was recaptured after desperate fighting and the line there came to rest.

For the first time the Battalion seems impressed by the hostile aircraft with which the Salient was filled. Poperinghe and Hazebrouck were bombed almost as soon as they came in, and their camp was visited by four aeroplanes at high noon, after a snow-fall, which showed up everything below. They had been attending a demonstration to prove the harmlessness of a Flammenwerfer if only one lay flat on the ground and let the roaring blast hiss over. Ribald men have explained, since, that these demonstrations were more demoralising than the actual machine in action, especially when, as occasionally happened, the nozzle of the flameshooter carried away and, in the attempts to recontrol the thing, the class, bombed from above and chased by fire below, broke and fled.

But the whole Salient was a death-trap throughout. The great shells crossed each other’s path at every angle, back and forth, single or in flights. For no certain cause that our side could guess, fire would concentrate itself on some half-obliterated feature of the landscape — a bank, the poor stumpage of a wood, a remnant of a village or the angle of a road, that went out in smoke, dust, and flying clods, as though devils were flinging it up with invisible spades. The concentrated clamours would die down and cease; the single shells would resume their aimless falling over a line of fields, with the monotony of drips from a tap, till, again, it seemed as though one of them had found something worthy of attention and shouted back the news to its fellows who, crowding altogether in one spot, roared, overturned, and set alight for five or ten wild minutes or through a methodical half-hour. If the storm fell on bare ground, that was churned and torn afresh into smoking clods; if upon men in trenches, on relief, or with the transport, no eye could judge what harm had been done; for often where it had seemed as though nothing could live, dispersed units picked themselves up and reformed, almost untouched, after inconceivable escapes. Elsewhere, a few spurts of stinking smoke in a corner might cover all that remained of a platoon or have ripped the heart out of a silent, waiting company. By night, fantastic traceries of crossing firelines ran along the shoulder of a ridge; shrapnel, bursting high, jetted a trail of swift sparks, as it might be steel striking flint; dropping flares outlined some tortured farm-house among its willow-stumps, or the intolerable glare of a big shell framed itself behind a naked doorway; and coloured lights dyed the bellies of the low clouds till all sense of distance and direction was lost, and the bewildered troops stumbled and crawled from pavé to pot-hole, treading upon the old dead.