Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1211 page)

It was pettifogging work for both sides, varied with detestable cleaning out “the height of the muck,” wrestling with sodden sand-bags and throwing up breastworks on exposed ground, so that men might smuggle themselves along clear of the flooded communication-trenches.

The first idea of raiding on a system was born out of that dull time; the size of the forces is noteworthy.

On the 20th November, a misty day when things were quiet, the C.O.’s of the two front-line Battalions (3rd Grenadiers and 2nd Irish Guards) together with the commandants of artillery brigades and batteries in the vicinity were assembled “to select passages to be cut by artillery fire at certain places, and for these to be kept constantly open, while raids one or two companies strong paid surprise visits to the German lines, killing or capturing and returning.” Three such places were thus chosen on the brigade front, one of which was in the line of the centre company of the 2nd Irish Guards. Having neatly laid out that much trouble for their successors, they were relieved by the 3rd Coldstream, marched to billets at La Gorgue and came into Divisional Reserve at 10.30 P.M. They expected, as they were entitled to, a long night in the Girls’ School which they occupied. But, for reasons which have long since passed with dead policies, it was important that the late Mr. John Redmond, M.P., should inspect them next morning. So their sleep was cut and they and their 1st Battalion marched a mile out of La Gorgue, and hung about for an hour on a muddy road in morning chill, till Mr. Redmond, blandly ignorant of his deep unpopularity at the moment, walked down the lines and shook hands after the manner of royalty with each officer. One of these chanced to be an ex-R.I.C. who, on the last occasion they had met, was engaged in protecting Mr. Redmond from the attentions of Mr. O’Brien’s followers in a faction-fight at Mallow. Mr. Redmond did not remember this, but the tale unholily delighted the Battalion, on their way to Divine Service afterwards.

Lieutenant T. Nugent left them on the 21st November to join the 1st Battalion with a view to appointment as Adjutant. This was a season, too, when a little leave might be counted on as within the possibilities. Nothing was breathed about it officially, but hopeful rumours arose that they were likely to be in billets well back of the firing-line for the next few weeks. The mere chance of five or six days’ return to real life acts as unexpectedly as drink or drugs on different temperaments. Some men it fills with strenuous zeal. Others it placates so that the hardiest “bad character” can take advantage of them; and there are yet those who, fretting and yearning beneath the mask of discipline, are hardly fit to approach on light matters till their date for home has been settled. Moreover, one’s first service-leave is of a quality by itself, and in those days was specially precious to parents and relatives, who made themselves cling to the piteous belief that the War might, somehow, end at any moment, even while their beloved was safe with them.

Bomb practice was taken up seriously while at La Gorgue, and the daily allowance of live bombs increased to sixty. Drums and fifes had been sent out from the Regimental Orderly Room, together with a few selected drummers from Warley. The Battalion promptly increased the number from its own ranks and formed a full corps of drums and fifes, which paraded for the first time on the 23rd November, when they exchanged billets with the 1st Coldstream at Merville. The first tune played was the Regimental March and the second “Brian Boru,” which goes notably to the drums. (In those days the Battalion was overwhelmingly Irish in composition.) Captain the Hon. H. R. Alexander, who had been in hospital with influenza for a week, rejoined on the 23rd as second in command. Merville was a mixed, but not too uncomfortable, experience. The Battalion with the rest of the Guards Division was placed temporarily at the disposal of the Forty-fifth Division as a reserve, a position which meant neither being actually in the trenches nor out of them. They were beyond reach of rifle-fire and in a corner not usually attended to by artillery. There was a roof to the officers’ mess, and some of the windows did not lack glass. They ate off tables with newspapers for cloth and enjoyed the luxury of chairs. The men lived more or less in trenches, but were allowed out, like well watched poultry, at night or on misty mornings. All this was interspersed with squad drill, instruction, baths, and a Battalion concert; while, in view of possibilities that might develop, Captain Alexander and the four company commanders “reconnoitred certain routes from Merville to Neuve Chapelle.” But every one knew at heart that there was nothing doing or to be done except to make oneself as comfortable as might be with all the blankets that one could steal, at night, and all the food one could compass by day. Leave was going on regularly. Captain and Adjutant J. S. N. FitzGerald left on the 26th for ten days and Lieutenant A. Pym took over his duties. When adjutants can afford to go on leave, life ought to be easy.

Then they shifted to Laventie in a full blizzard, relieving the 2nd Scots Guards in Brigade Reserve. Their own Brigade, the 2nd, was taking over from the 3rd Guards Brigade, and Captain Alexander, who not unnaturally caught a fresh attack of influenza later, spent the afternoon reconnoitring the trenches which he would have to occupy on the 28th. The No Man’s Land to be held in front of them was marsh and ditch, impassable save when frozen. It carried no marks in the shape of hedges or stumps to guide men out or back on patrol, and its great depth-three hundred yards in places from wire to wire-made thorough ferreting most difficult. In this war, men with small-arms that carried twenty-eight hundred yards, hardly felt safe unless they were within half bow-shot of their enemy.

The Battalion’s entry into their forlorn heritage was preceded by a small house-warming in the shape of an artillery bombardment on our side. This, they knew, by doleful experience, would provoke retaliation, and the relief was accordingly delayed till dark, which avoided all casualties. Their general orders were to look out for likely spots whence to launch “small enterprises” against the enemy. It meant patrols wandering out in rain and a thaw that had followed the stiff frost, and doing their best to keep direction by unassisted intellect and a compass. (“Ye’ll understand that, in those days, once you was out on your belly in that muck, ye knew no more than a babe in a blanket. Dark, wet and windy it was, with big, steep, deep ditches waiting on ye every yard. All we took of it was a stiff neck, and all
we
heard was Jerry gruntin’ in his pigstye!” ) A patrol of No. 4 Company under Lieutenant Brew managed to get up within ear-shot of the German wire on the night of the 29th, crossing a drain by a providential plank. While they lay close, listening to the Huns hammering stakes in their trenches, they saw a German patrol slip home by the very bridge which they themselves had used. Hope ran high of catching the same party next night in the same place, but it rained torrentially, and they found it impossible to move a man out across the bog. They spent their time baling their own trenches as these filled, and were happy to wade only ankle-deep. But their professional lives were peaceful. Though the enemy shelled mechanically at intervals not a soul was even wounded when on the 30th November they came back for the short rest in billets in Laventie.

On their return to the “Red House” where they relieved the 1st Coldstream on the 2nd December, their night patrols discovered, apparently for the first time, that the enemy held their front line very thinly and their support in strength. As a matter of later observation, it was established that, on that sector, the front line mostly withdrew after dark and slept at the back till our unsympathetic guns stirred them up. Our custom seemed always to crowd the front line both with men and responsibility.

The main of the Battalion’s work was simple aquatics; draining off of waters that persisted in running uphill, and trying to find the bottom of fluid and unstable ditches where things once lost disappeared for ever. They had not yet seen a man choking in mud, and found it rather hard to believe that such things could happen. But the Somme was to convince them.

The organization of the Front evolved itself behind them as time passed, and batteries and battalions came to understand each other. Too much enemy shelling on a trench led to a telephone-call, and after a decent interval of from two to six minutes (the record was one minute fifty-five seconds) our batteries would signify their displeasure by a flight of perhaps thirty shells at one drench, or several separate salvoes. As a rule that was enough, and this, perhaps, led to the legend that the enemy artillery was weakening. And, with organisation, came the inevitable floods of paper-work that Authority insists on. There was a conference of the four C.O.’s of the Brigade on the subject on the 6th December, where suggestions were invited for “reducing correspondence” and “for saving company officers as much as possible,” which seemed, like many other conferences, to have ended in more paper-work and resolutions on “the importance of keeping a logbook in the trenches by each company officer.” The logbook handed over by every company commander to his relief is essential to the continuity of trench-war life, though nine tenths of the returns demanded seemed pure waste.

Yet there is another point of view. (“Looking back on it, one sees that that everlasting having to pull yourself together to fill in tosh about raspberry jam, or how men ought to salute, steadies one a good deal. We cursed it at the time, though!”)

On the 7th December, patrols reported the enemy with full trenches working on their front-line wire, upon which our artillery cut it up, and the enemy turned out in the evening to repair damages. The local Battery B, 76th Brigade R.F.A., was asked “to fire again.” They fired two salvoes at 10.15 P.M., and two more one hour later. One Lewis-gun of No. 1 Company “also fired at this point.” So simple and homoeopathic was war in that age!

On the 8th their sister battalion took over from them at Red House, in a relief completed in ninety minutes, and the drums of the 1st Battalion played the companies through Laventie, while the drums of the 2nd played them into billets at La Gorgue. For the first time since they had been in France all the officers of both battalions messed together, in one room, for all the time that they were there; and, as supplies from friends at home were ample and varied, the tales of some of the meals at La Gorgue endure to this day.

The system of the Guards’ company training always allowed large latitude to company officers as long as required results were obtained; and they fell back on it when bombers and Lewis-gun teams were permanently added to the organization. With the reservation that bombing-practice with live bombs was only to take place under the battalion bombing officer, company commanders were made entirely responsible for the training both of their bombers and Lewis-gunners. It made an almost immediate difference in the handiness and suppleness of the teams, and woke up intercompany competition. The teams, it may have been pointed out, were surprisingly keen and intelligent. One officer, finding a nucleus of ex-taxi drivers among his drafts, treated the Lewis-gun as a simple internalcombustion engine, which simile they caught on to at once and conveyed it in their own words and gestures to their slower comrades.

On the 12th December, the Battalion was paraded while the C.O. presented the ribbon of the D.C.M. to Lance-Corporal Quinn for gallantry in Chalk-Pit Wood at the battle of Loos, that now seemed to all of them a century distant.

On the 14th they moved to a more southerly sector to take over from the Welsh Guards, and to pick up a company of the 13th R.W. Fusiliers; one platoon being attached to each company for instruction, and the Fusiliers B.H.Q. messing with their own. There is no record what the Welshmen thought of their instructors or they of them, except the fragment of a tale of trench-fatigues during which, to the deep disgust of the Irish, who are not loudly vocal by temperament, “the little fellas sang like canary-birds.”

Their new lines, reached across mud, from Pont du Hem, were the old, well-known, and not so badly looked-after stretch from North Moated Grange Street to Erith Street at the lower end of the endless Tilleloy Road which faced south-easterly towards the Aubers Ridge, then held by the enemy. The relief was finished without demonstrations beyond a few shrapnel launched at one of the posts, Fort Erith.

On the 15th 2nd Lieutenant Brew went out with a patrol to investigate some mine-craters in front of the German firing-line and found them empty, but woke up an enemy machine-gun in the background. Other patrols reported like slackness, but when they tried to take advantage of it, they met the same gun awake, and came home upon their bellies. The ground being so flat, however, the German machines could not get well down to their work of shaving the landscape, and fifteen inches will clear a prostrate man if he lies close. A snipers’ team had been organised, and the deep peace of that age may be seen from the fact that, at the end of a quiet day, the only claim put in was for “one victim who was passing a gap between two mine-craters.”

They were relieved by the 1st Coldstream on the 16th December and went into billets, not more than two miles back, at Pont du Hem and La Flinque Farm, with scattered platoons and single officers holding posts in the neighbourhood of the Rue du Bacquerot. A draft of forty-seven men, which should have been fifty, turned up that same day. The odd three had contrived to mislay themselves as only men on draft can, but were gathered in later with marvellous explanations at the tips of their ready tongues. Officers sent out from Warley also got lost
en route
, to the wrath of company commanders clamouring for them. One writer home complains: “it seems that they are waylaid by some unknown person at the base and sent off for quite long periods to take charge of mysterious parties which dig trenches somewhere unknown.” This was the origin, though they knew it not at the Front, of the divisional entrenching battalion — a hated and unpopular necessity.