Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1201 page)

Well on in the morning a message arrived from Captain Hegarty, No. 4 Company, that he and his men were on the St. Léger–Vraucourt road and held up like the rest. Captain Paget went over, in the usual way, by a series of bolts from shell-hole to shellhole, trying to clear up an only too-clear situation. On the way he found a lost platoon, sent it to dig in on the left of No. 2 Company, and also saw the C.O. 2nd Coldstream and explained his own dispositions. They were not made too soon, for in a short time there was an attack on No. 2 Company which came within sixty yards before it was broken up by our small-arm fire. The Germans were followed up as they returned across the Ecoust–Mory ridge by long-range shooting in which, for the sake of economy, captured enemy rifles and ammunition were used.

By this time the whole front was split up into small or large scattered posts in trenches or under cover, each held down by machine-guns which punished every movement. Two Companies (2 and 4) were near the St. Léger Trees, a clump of nine trees on the St. Léger–Ecoust road, mixed up with the Coldstream posts. The other two were dug in behind the Grenadiers on the right. Battalion Headquarters circulated spasmodically and by rushes, when it saw its chance, from one point to the other of the most unwholesome ground. Even at the time, some of its shellhole conferences struck the members as comic; but history does not record the things that were said by dripping officers between mouthfuls of dirt and gas.

Every battle has its special characteristic. St. Léger was one of heat, sunshine, sweat; the flavour of at least two gases tasted through respirators or in the raw; the wail of machine-gun bullets sweeping the crests of sunken roads; the sudden vision of wounded in still-smoking shell-holes or laid in the sides of a scarp; sharp whiffs of new-spilt blood, and here and there a face upon which the sun stared without making any change. So the hours wore on, under a sense of space, heat, and light; Death always just over the edge of that space and impudently busy in that light.

About what would have been tea-time in the real world, Captain Paget, a man of unhurried and careful speech and imperturbable soul, reported to the C.O., whom he found by the St. Léger Trees, that there were “Huns on his right — same trench as himself.” It was an awkward situation that needed mending before dusk, and it was made worse by the posts of the Coldstream and some Guards Machine-Guns’ posts, as well as those of our No. 4 Company, being mixed up within close range of No. 2. The C.O. decided that if a barrage could be brought to bear on the trench and its rather crowded neighbourhood, No. 2 might attack it. A young gunner, Fowler by name, cast up at that juncture and said it might be managed if the Battalion withdrew their posts round the area. He had a telephone, still uncut, to his guns and would observe their registration himself. The posts, including those of the Guards Machine-Guns, were withdrawn, and Fowler was as near as might be killed by one of his own registering shots. He got his 18-pounders to his liking at last, and ten minutes’ brisk barrage descended on the trench. When it stopped, and before our men could move, up went a white flag amid yells of “Kamerad,” and the Huns came out, hands aloft, to be met by our men, who, forgetting that exposed troops, friend and foe alike, would certainly be gunned by the nearest enemy-post, had to be shooed and shouted back to cover by their officers. The prisoners, ninety of them, were herded into a wood, where they cast their helmets on the ground, laughed, and shook hands with each other, to the immense amusement of our people. The capture had turned a very blank day into something of a success, and the Irish were grateful to the “bag.” This at least explains the politeness of the orderly who chaperoned rather than conducted the Hun officer to the rear, with many a “This way, sir. Mind out, now, sir, you don’t slip down the bank.” They put a platoon into the captured trench and lay down to a night of bursts of heavy shelling. But the enemy, whether because of direct pressure or because they had done their delaying work, asked for no more and drew back in the dark.

When morning of the 28th broke “few signs of enemy movement were observed.” Men say that there is no mistaking the “feel of the front” under this joyous aspect. The sense of constriction departs as swiftly as a headache, and with it, often, the taste that was in the mouth. One by one, as the lovely day went on, the patrols from the companies made their investigations and reports, till at last the whole line reformed and, in touch on either flank, felt forward under light shelling from withdrawing guns. An aeroplane dropped some bombs on the Battalion as it drew near to the St. Léger Trees, which wounded two men and two gunner officers, one of whom — not Fowler, the boy who arranged for the barrage — died in Father Browne’s arms. On the road at that point, where the wounded and dying of the fight had been laid, only dried pools of blood and some stained cotton-wads remained darkening in the sun. Such officers as the gas had affected in that way went about their routine-work vomiting disgustedly at intervals.

Battalion Headquarters, which had nominally spent the previous day in a waist-deep trench, set up office at the St. Léger Trees, and the advance of the Guards Division continued for a mile or so. Then, on a consolidated line, with machine-guns chattering to the eastward, it waited to be relieved. As prelude to their watch on the Rhine, the affair was not auspicious. The Grenadiers, on whom the brunt of the fight fell, were badly knocked out, and of their sixteen officers but four were on their feet. The Coldstream were so weakened that they borrowed our No. 4 Company to carry on with, and the Irish thought themselves lucky to have lost no more than two officers (Lieutenant J. N. Ward and Lieutenant H. R. Baldwin) dead, and six wounded or gassed, in addition to a hundred and seventy other ranks killed or wounded. The wounded officers were Captain W. Joyce; Lieutenants P. S. MacMahon and C. A. J. Vernon, who was incapacitated for a while by tear-gas in the middle of action and led away blinded and very wroth; also 2nd Lieutenants H. A. Connolly, G. T. Heaton, and A. E. Hutchinson.

The Division was relieved on the night of the 28th the Battalion itself, as far as regarded No. 1 Company, by the 1st Gordons, from the Third Division, Nos. 2 and 4 Companies by another battalion, and No. 3 Company under the orders of the 2nd Grenadiers. They marched back to their positions of the night before the battle “very glad that it was all behind us,” and their shelters of bits of wood and rough iron seemed like rest in a fair land.

On the 29th August, a hot day, they lay in old trenches over the Moyenneville spur in front of Adinfer Wood facing Douchy and Ayette, where “three weeks ago no man could have lived.” They talked together of the far-off times when they held that line daily expecting the enemy advance; and the officers lay out luxuriously in the wood in the evening after Mess, while the men made themselves “little homes in it.”

Next day they rested, for the men were very tired, and on the last of the month the whole Battalion was washed in the divisional baths that had established themselves at Adinfer. But the enemy had not forgotten them, and on the first of September their shelters and tents in the delightful wood were bombed. Six men were injured, five being buried in a trench, and of these two were suffocated before they could be dug out.

TOWARDS THE CANAL DU NORD

And that was all the rest allowed to the Battalion. On the 2nd September the Canadian Corps of the First Army broke that outlying spur of the Hindenburg System known as the Drocourt–Quéant Switch, with its wires, trenches, and posts; and the Fifty-seventh and Fifty-second Divisions, after hard work, equally smashed the triangle of fortifications north-west of Quéant where the Switch joined the System. The gain shook the whole of the Hindenburg Line south of Quéant and, after five days’ clean-up behind the line, the Guards Division were ordered to go in again at the very breast of Hindernburg’s works. No one knew what the enemy’s idea might be, but there was strong presumption that, if he did not hold his defence at that point, he might crack. (“But, ye’ll understand, for all that, we did
not
believe Jerry would crack past mendin’.” )

The Battalion spent the night of the 2nd September, then, in shelters in Hamel Switch Trench on their way back from Adinfer Wood to the battle. The front had now shifted to very much the one as we held in April, 1917, ere the days of Cambrai and Bourlon Wood. The 1st Guards Brigade were in Divisional Reserve at Lagnicourt, three miles south-west of Ecoust-St.Mein, where the Battalion had to cross their still fresh battle-field of less than a week back, as an appetizer to their hot dinners. They occupied a waist-deep old trench, a little west of Lagnicourt, and noticed that there was no shelling, though the roads were full of our traffic, “a good deal of it in full view of Bourlon Wood.” Going over “used” ground for the third time and noting one’s many dead comrades does not make for high spirit even though one’s own Divisional General has written one’s own Brigadier, “All battalions of the 1st Guards Brigade discharged their duty splendidly at St. Léger.”

Lagnicourt was shelled a little by a high-velocity gun between the 4th and the 6th of September, and seventeen bombs were dropped on the Battalion, wounding two men.

By all reason there should have been a bitter fight on that ground, and full preparation for it was made. But the enemy, after St. Léger, saw fit to withdraw himself suddenly and unexpectedly out of all that area. For one bewildering dawn and day “the bottom fell out of the front,” as far as the Guards Division was concerned. It is a curious story, even though it does not directly concern the Battalion. Here is one detail of it:

On the 3rd September the 2nd Brigade toiled in from Monchy, in full war-kit, and, tired with the long day’s heat, formed up west of Lagnicourt before dawn, detailed to win, if they could, a thousand yards or so of chewed-up ground. They “went over the top” under a creeping barrage, one gun of which persistently fired short, and — found nothing whatever in front of them save a prodigious number of dead horses, some few corpses, and an intolerable buzzing of flies! As they topped the ridge above Lagnicourt, they saw against the first light of the sun, dump after German dump blazing palely towards the east. That was all. They wandered, wondering, into a vast, grassy, habitationless plain that stretched away towards the Bapaume–Cambrai road. Not a machine-gun broke the stupefying stillness from any fold of it. Yet it was the very place for such surprises. Aeroplanes swooped low, looked them well over, and skimmed off. No distant guns opened. The advance became a route-march, a Sunday walk-out, edged with tense suspicion. They saw a German cooker wrecked on the grass, and, beside it, the bodies of two clean, good-looking boys, pathetically laid out as for burial. The thing was a booby-trap arranged to move our people’s pity. Some pitied, and were blown to bits by the concealed mine. No one made any comment. They were tired with carrying their kit in the sun among the maddening flies. The thousand yards stretched into miles. Twice or thrice they halted and began to dig in for fear of attack. But nothing overtook them and they installed themselves, about dusk, in some old British trenches outside Boursies, four miles and more, as the crow flies, from Lagnicourt! At midnight, up came their rations, and the punctual home-letters, across that enchanted desert which had spared them. They were told that their Brigade Artillery was in place behind the next rise, ready to deliver barrages on demand, and in due course the whole of our line on that sector flowed forward.

The Battalion relieved the 1st Scots Guards in the front line near Mœuvres on the 7th — a quiet relief followed by severe gassing. Here they passed two days in the delicate and difficult business of feeling all about them among the mass of old trenches, to locate enemy’s posts and to watch what points of vantage might offer. The wreckage of the houses round Mœuvres, into which the trenches ran, lent itself excellently to enemy activity; and men played blind-man’s buff round bits of broken walls wherever they explored. Their left was in the air; their right under the care of Providence; and their supports were far off. No. 3 Company (Captain G. L. Bambridge, M.C.), while trying to close a gap between the two front companies (3 and 1) by peaceful penetration with a bombing-party, found enemy in the trench, drove him up it as far as they could, built a barricade, and were then heavily counter-raided by a couple of officers and twenty men whom they ejected after, as the Company justly owned, “a good attempt.” The enemy “attempted” again about midnight on the 8th, when he was bombed off, and again on the afternoon of the 9th in an outlying trench, mixed up with smashed cellars and broken floors, where he captured two unarmed stretcher-bearers and three men who had not been in the line before. Though it does new hands no harm to realize that front-line trenches are not Warley Barracks (and stretcher-bearers, like orderlies, are prey to all the world), still the matter could not be passed over. Our trench-mortars attended vigorously to the enemy posts whence the raid had been launched, and in the afternoon sent a strong patrol to make the outraged trench secure. Later on, a platoon of No. 1 Company got into touch with the battalion (8th King’s) on their left, and took part in a small “bicker,” as it was described, but with no casualties.

They were relieved the same night, though they did not expect it, by the 1/5th Battalion Loyal North Lanes who had not made sure of their route beforehand, and so, in wet darkness, lost their way, failed to meet the guides at the rendezvous, and were heavily shelled. The relief dragged on till well towards dawn, when the battalions straggled off into some drenching trenches without any sort of accommodation. (“The whole thing the most appalling mess and agony I have ever experienced.”) The worst was when a stray light went up and showed the relieved Battalion under pouring rain playing “follow my leader” in a complete circle like caterpillars, in the hopeful belief that they were moving to their destination. They next took the place of the 3rd Guards Brigade in reserve-trenches near Edinburgh Support, where they stayed till the 14th September and were not even once shelled. Salvage and cleaning up was their fatigue — a dreadful job at any time, for the ground was filled with ancient offal as well as new — lost French of ‘14 mingled grotesquely with the raw produce of yesterday’s bombing-raid. Yet men’s feelings blunt so by use that they will scavenge yard by yard over the very clay of the pit into which they themselves may at any instant be stamped, nor turn a hair at shapes made last year in their likeness. The Battalion was complimented by its Major-General on the extent and neatness of its dump. No mere campaigning interferes with the Army’s passion for elaborate economies. A little before this, the entire British Expeditionary Force was exhorted to collect and turn in all solder from bully-beef tins and the like. Naturally, the thing became a game with betting on results between corps; but when a dark, elderly, brooding private of the Irish spent three hours stalking a Coldstream cooker with intent to convey and melt it down, every one felt it had gone far enough.