Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1229 page)

They came out of the Wood on the evening of the 27th one hundred and seventeen strong; lay, nominally in reserve, but actually finished for the time being, along the La Justice–Graincourt road till one company of the 2/5th Leicesters took over. Their losses seemed to be enough to justify their resting a little, which they did at Ribecourt and, next day, the 29th November, moved on to a camp, at Bertincourt, of Nissen huts, crowded but comfortable, where they thought to relax and take full stock of their hurts, and fill their ranks again from the divisional reserve. [It is to be remembered that battalions went into action with only three officers per company and platoons reduced to practically half strength.] They had been warned by prisoners that the enemy had at least three battalions ready with which they intended to attack, but put the matter out of their collective minds as one to be attended to by their neighbours. All they desired were the decencies of a rest-billet far behind the infernal noise of the guns. But on the dawn of the 30th that irregular noise turned into the full-mouthed chorus which heralds a counterattack. The Third Army Corps was being hammered somewhere towards Gonnelieu a few miles to the southward, and the orders were for the whole of the Guards Division to get thither with every speed; for it looked as though the bottom were all out of the Cambrai fight. The 2nd Guards Brigade were away from Bertincourt ere noon, and, preceded by the 1st Scots Guards, moved in artillery formation straight across the country-side to the ridge in front of Gouzeaucourt Wood — there are two ridges between Metz and Gouzeaucourt village — where they were told to dig in and lie up as reserve. They noticed in their progress that the landscape was fairly full of retiring troops to whom they occasionally addressed remarks of an encouraging nature. (“After what we had took in bloody Bourlon ‘twas great comfort to see that there was others not making any picnic of it either.”) But they also observed with satisfaction that the 1st and 3rd Guards Brigades were ahead of them, making almost a parade movement of their advance against the machine-guns of the village. It was abominably cold, they were without greatcoats for the most part, and they had to dig in in frozen chalk, and whenever there was a block on the road, the enemy shelled it. Occasionally, the shells got in among their own prisoners, of whom small detachments were already being gathered, and sent back. The Battalion had been made up to four hundred rifles at that time, and when on the evening of the 1st December they moved to the western outskirts of Gouzeaucourt they relieved one company of the 2nd Coldstream and a company of the 1st Battalion Irish Guards in the support line beyond Gouzeaucourt railway station. Gouzeaucourt, and the situation, had been saved by the Guards Division. The 1st and 3rd Guards Brigade had attacked and, as we know, captured Gauche Wood to the east of Gouzeau court on the 1st, and the supporting brigade was not called upon to do more than sit in its trenches and take a not too heavy overflow of enemy’s shelling. Altogether the Battalion’s casualties were under half a dozen. An attack, which they were told would be sprung on them on the 2nd, did not arrive, and on the 4th December the 1st South African Infantry Regiment relieved the whole of the 2nd Brigade without a hitch, and the men moved off to bivouac in Gouzeaucourt Wood. Their bitter cold shelters lay among our vociferous batteries, which worked all night. At three in the morning 4.2’s began to fall among the officers’ tents so that the disgusted inmates had to move. One officer’s pillow was blown away almost immediately after he had quitted it, and it is reported that the C.O. and Adjutant “took refuge” behind a tent where they delivered their minds about the horrors of “sleeping with the guns.” The incoming brigade relieved them of their last responsibilities on the night of the 5th, and they would have rested at Fins, whose field railways they had helped to build in the pleasant summer days, but that a long-range gun was attending to the hutments there, and it was judged safer to push on several more weary miles to Etricourt which they reached at one in the morning.

Battles are like railway journeys in that the actual time of transit is as nothing compared to that wasted in getting from door to door. They were marched off to Etricourt Station at eight on the morning of their arrival, where they waited till eleven for a train that had run off the line, and it was late in the dark of the evening when, after passing Ginchy and the old battlefield of Transloy and Lesbœufs which they fought over on the 15th and the 26th of September the year before, and through Trônes Wood, of immortal and unhappy memories, they reached at last Beaumetz close to their billets at Simencourt where, with one day’s rest, the companies were “handed over to company commanders for reorganisation, inspection, etc.”

On review the last tour (everything between rests was a “tour” in those days) had not been very glorious, but there was no denying it was very much up to Somme pattern. One came out of line and was fatted up; one was “messed about,” thrown in, used up and thrown out again, to be refatted for the next occasion with apparently small results, except, always, the saving of the situation at Gouzeaucourt. (“If that thing had happened one day later an’ the Division in rest miles back instead of being on top of it, Saints know the whole line might have gone.”) Otherwise the Somme seemed as large, as sticky, and as well-populated with aggressive enemies as ever before. The bodies and the uniforms of the dead of past years had withered down somewhat on the clawed and raked fields; but to the mere soldier’s eye, uninfluenced by statements of the Press, there was no reason under the grey heavens why their past performances should not be repeated, as part of the natural order of things for ever and ever. Cambrai may have given hope and encouragement in England, but those who had been through it remained Sadducees.

There were those who said that that hour was the psychological one to have gone on and taken advantage of the moral effect of breaking the Hindenburg Line, but this theory was put forward after the event; and a total of eleven thousand prisoners and a hundred and forty-five German guns for three weeks’ fighting seems small foundation for such large hopes. Every one on the field seems to have been agreed as to the futility of trying to work with, and making arrangements for the keep of, masses of cavalry on the chance that these might break through and overrun the enemy in the background.

That autumn Russia deliquesced and began to pass out of civilisation, and the armed strength of Germany on that front was freed to return and rearrange itself on the western border, ready for the fourth spring of the War. We are told with emphasis that that return-wave was foreseen, and to some extent provided for, by increasing the line for which our armies were responsible, and by reorganising those armies so that divisions stood on a ten-battalion as against a thirteen-battalion basis.
²
We may once more quote Sir Douglas Haig’s despatches on this head. “An unfamiliar grouping of units was introduced thereby, necessitating new methods of tactical handling of the troops and the discarding of old methods to which subordinate commanders had been accustomed.” But the change was well supported in the home Press.

Meantime, as far as possible, the war stood still on both sides. The Battalion was encouraged to put on fat and to practise cleanliness, kit inspections, and interregimental and company football matches till the end of the year. During the month of December, at Simencourt, Captain the Hon. H. B. O’Brien arrived and took over No. 1 Company; Lieutenant B. Levy, M.C., joined from the 4th Army School, and 2nd Lieutenants J. C. Maher and T. Mathew also joined. The Christmas dinners were good and solid affairs of pork, plum-pudding, plum-dough (a filling and concrete-like dish), three bottles of Bass per throat and a litre of beer, plus cigars and tobacco. The C.O. had gone into Amiens to make sure of it and of the Headquarters’ Christmas trees which, next day, were relighted and redecorated with small gifts and sweets for the benefit of the village children.

A moral victory over Eton crowned the year. The officers of the 2nd Battalion played the officers of the 1st Coldstream at Eton football at Wanquetin. They lost by a goal to two goals and a rouge, but their consolation was that their C.O., an Harrovian, scored their goal and that half the Coldstream’s goals were got by Harrow. It was a small thing but it made them very happy in their little idleness after “Bloody Bourlon.”

Arras to the End

ASSUMING
that the information of our Intelligence Department was correct, the weight of the coming German attack would be delivered to the south of Arras; and that town would be the hinge on which it would turn. Elsewhere along the Somme front, ground might be given if required, but between Arras and Amiens the line, at all costs, must stand; and we are told that, months before the spring of the year, attention was given to strengthening the systems of defence in the rear. It is difficult to discover how many of the precautions taken were made with serious expectation of trouble, and how many were, so to say, fitted into statements published after the events. Men who were on that front speak of most of the back-trenches and reserve lines as inadequate. The truth may be that no one believed the British collapse would be so swift or so catastrophic as it was.

On New Year’s Day, Colonel Alexander, commanding, went on leave, and was succeeded by Major R. H. Ferguson. The Battalion, reconstituted and replenished, marched to Arras Gaol, which was always regarded as a superior billet in cold weather, as the only shelling that mattered took the south-east end of the town. Their work for the next few weeks was to occupy and prevent the enemy from raiding into the system of trenches and posts on the Scarpe to the east of Arras at and round Fampoux and Rœux. Their experiences there were precisely the same as those of the 1st Battalion. It was, as we know, a variegated, swampy, and in places overlooked, stretch of works which had been used as a front line a almost since the beginning of the War, and was paved with odds and ends of ancient horrors as well as thoroughly soaked with remains of tear and other gas in the support-lines. Their first turn began on the 2nd January when they relieved a battalion of Gordon Highlanders in bitter cold weather, and settled down to the business of wiring and cleaning-up. A small excitement was the shelling of the left company by trench-mortars, to which our guns replied but in their zeal cut our own wire. The frost so far kept the trenches standing up, but, as none of them were revetted, it was obvious that the next thaw would bring them all down. Then the duckboards froze and turned to ice, and the C.O., slipping on them, fell and strained himself so badly that he had to go to hospital. Food apart, there was little comfort or decency in that work of shovelling and firming dirt, and shivering day and night in their dry or sodden clothing. Their rests at Arras were complicated by the necessity of looking out for enemy aeroplanes, which forbade them drilling more than one company at a time; and men grow vastly wearied of standing about and fiddling with small duties in a constricted town. The Battalion was so reduced in strength, too, that two companies together made little more than an ordinary platoon. However, in spite of knowing each other to the limits of boredom, they found a certain amount of amusement in respirator drill for all cooks, Headquarters details and the like (one cannot afford to have cooks and storemen gassed) under the company gas N.C.O. At the end of it, the Sergeant-Major, without mask, drilled them where they stood, when their boomings and bellowings as they numbered off delighted every one. Gas was always a nuisance. Broadly speaking, a good scenting day would be good for gas, both old and new; but, without direct orders, the men loathed casing themselves in their masks, and company officers, sniffing the faint familiar flavour of ether or rotting leaves in Northumberland or Shaftesbury Avenue, had to chase them into the apparatus.

Then came a time when, on most of the sectors, the wet trenches went out of commission altogether, and both sides, if they wished to move about, had to climb out in full view of each other. At last, they practically abandoned the front line and fell back on the support. It made little difference, since the enemy was quiet except for occasional salvoes of trench-mortar gas-bombs. Even when a dummy raid on their left caused him to put down a hot barrage for an hour, there were no casualties. The main trouble was the gas-shells in which the enemy, with an eye to the near future, specialised and experimented freely.

So passed January ‘18, and on the 10th February began the transfer of the newly formed 4th Guards Brigade, of three lean battalions (2nd Irish Guards, 3rd Coldstream, and 4th Grenadiers), to their new division and companions.

The officers of the Brigade were conducted to Vimy Ridge that they might well look over the rear-line defences, in case it should be necessary to fall back there. It took them into the territory of the First Corps and a world where they were divorced from all their tired associates and had to learn the other ways that suited the other people among whom their lot would be cast. All Battalion Headquarters dined together at the Hôtel de l’Univers next day, after Brigadier-General Sergison-Brooke, commanding their old brigade, had said good-bye and thanked them all for all they had done while they had been with him. They were played out of barracks at Arras by the regimental band and the drums of the Welch Guards. “The Battalion marched past our late Brigadier at the Rond Point in column of route. Thus we left the Guards Division.” No one was overelated at the change; and none could foresee that they were within a few weeks of their death as a battalion.

Their first destination was at Bray beneath the little hill above the Scarpe south of the long pavé to Villers-au-Bois, and their first duty was rehearsal for ceremonial parade on St. Valentine’s Day before their new corps commander. He complimented them on their looks and expressed his sense of the honour of having a Guards Brigade with him. After which came immediate conference on taking over the new ground assigned them, from troops of the Line. It was a sector of the line between Lens and Arras that had never shifted since the War was young — the Bailleul–Willerval stretch, about five miles north of their old sector at Fampoux, that ran up to Arleux-en-Gohelle and looked directly towards inaccessible Douai. It was worked on a different system from the old pattern — the brigade front of 2000 yards being lightly held by widely spaced fortified posts; with a strong support-trench known as the Arleux Loop a thousand yards in the rear. Their brigade went up in the night of the 17th, the 2nd Irish Guards in support. The enemy, quite aware there were new troops up, began to fish for samples. The 4th grenadiers held the front line on the 19th February. The C.O. of the 2nd Irish Guards had been up that afternoon to look at the lie of the land as the Battalion were going to take it over in a couple of days. Everything was quiet — too quiet to be healthy, indeed, till late in the evening when a heavy bombardment preluded a scientifically thought-out German raid for identification purposes. It failed, for the Grenadiers dealt rudely with the raids; but it lasted for a couple of hours from the time that the first SOS was sent up, and served the battalion, who stood to, but were not needed, as an excellent rehearsal for emergencies. Likewise, the enemy barrage knocked the frontline trenches about, and in the confusion of things an SOS went up from too far on the left of the assaulted line, so that our protective barrage came down where there was no enemy and had to be shifted.