Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  The following day a change occurred. 118th Battery had been sent further east towards Langemarck in pursuit of the Germans. On the way through the town one of its subalterns was struck in the elbow by shrapnel and a reshuffle of the dwindling junior officers was required. Regie had just finished shaving when the major arrived and told him he was required to replace him. ‘Great bore this’ was all he had to say. He had come to like 116th. ‘I say goodbye and reluctantly pack up.’ The personnel in his new battery were nice enough though. His new major was apt to be rather too serious for Regie’s liking; every time he saw Regie in his non-regulation Leander scarf his face would contort accordingly. Regie was thrilled though to find that the other subaltern was a Cambridge oar. ‘He was a Jesus … man and a member of Leander … I doubt if there is another Battery in the army that would hold on to Fawley in a pair!’2

  His men were raw. Every single one was a replacement for gunners that had been lost in the retreat. ‘New sergeants, new men, new guns, new horses.’ The first thing he did was sit down and give them some instruction. Half of them didn’t know the guns and even fewer knew how to operate the dial sight. This rudimentary lesson had to suffice. At lunchtime they came into action and began blazing away. The Germans came within 1,000 yards of the guns and shells began dropping all around; rifle bullets were pinging off the guns and their carriages. ‘The brutes began sniping us … Suddenly one beautiful shot came and burst above my head and the [shrapnel] went crashing into the trees behind.’ The order came to retire and 118th Battery limbered up under heavy rifle fire. Regie’s men were having a cruel introduction to the realities of war and he was forced to do much of the preparatory work himself. ‘My new section did not like it at all … I had to do the final adjustments myself.’

  They retreated carrying wounded men they found nearby on their carriages and Regie sympathised with his frightened, inexperienced men. Rifle bullets chased them in the driving rain. Dusk fell early. Men fell asleep in their dinner plates and Regie, who had subsisted on nothing but lumps of chocolate lovingly sent by his mother since 5.30 that morning, couldn’t find the energy to eat a thing. Frantically they attempted to dig in and camouflage their guns. Finding themselves in a cornfield Regie prayed to God that German pilots knew nothing about harvesting and in late October began disguising them as giant corn stooks. ‘My only hope is that the entire field does not catch fire when we blaze off.’ That day he watched lines of German prisoners being led past the field. ‘I have never seen such poor wretches. Some boys of only sixteen, some crumplety old men … all the most miserable looking scallywags.’ He found it oddly cheering. Surely if that was all the Kaiser had to offer by way of men then victory had to be just around the corner.

  The frenzied firing was not to last. The following day 118th Battery fired nothing before lunchtime, although they could hear ‘a devil of a battle’ going on towards Ypres in the south. Regie even had time to sit down and give his section a lecture on ‘The Art of War as Practiced by 2nd Lieutenant R.W. Fletcher, RFA’. The battle hadn’t stopped, and neither had the German gunners, but the fact was that the British artillery were running out of shells. On 24 October a limit was placed on expenditure. Regie’s battery was equipped with eighteen pounders and from now on they would be restricted to 120 shells per day for the four guns in his care. The day before the restriction was imposed he claimed to have fired 700 in about twelve hours. If he fired this new lower amount over the same period he would be firing each gun once every twenty minutes, whereas in the heat of battle on 23 October, he had been timing his battery’s fire at forty-five-second intervals. It was a dramatic reduction.

  The shortage was not a surprise. It was apparent on the Aisne that demand was outstripping supply. The British Army was not guilty of outright negligence. It had two-and-a-half times the amount of shells available in 1899. The fact was that neither Britain, France, nor Germany, all of whom would begin to run out of shells, had anticipated just how much modern industrialised warfare would be dominated by artillery. Along with their dwindling supply of shells, the theories, tactical doctrine and assumptions of all of the war’s major combatants were being tossed to the wind.

  Regie and his brigade left their corn field on 24 October. Rather than listening to the furore of the battle to the south they were being fed into it. The logistics were absolute chaos. Every time they attempted to limber up the Germans pummelled them with another barrage. They finally got away in the early hours of the morning and trudged off into the fog. Men lay sleeping in ditches, every country road was choked with a cacophony of guns, wounded men, straggling, exhausted troops, wagons and refugees fleeing for their lives. Panic reigned. One general was in such a hurry that he charged an entire brigade of infantry through the middle of 118th Battery, cutting off Regie, supplies, horses and a gun. Tempers frayed. Precious guns were not supposed to travel in the rear without an escort and Regie told him so, but the high-ranking officer would not let him pass. It was the ‘greatest honour’ of Regie’s young life when the great man labelled him an ‘impudent young blackguard’.

  Their new home, when they finally got there, was to be in the thickest part of the action as the battle intensified. The guns were rolled up under cover of a small wood at Veldhoek, near Ypres. Within two days GHQ had abandoned any attempts to try to regulate the number of shells being fired. Any hardship Regie had yet faced was about to be magnified considerably. The Germans were about to introduce a third of their armies into the cauldron of noise, chaos and shells in an attempt to make a decisive push towards Ypres, and beyond that, the Channel.

  Regie was aware of the rumours of an impending attack, but enthusiastic. The sight of the prisoners had given him hope and convinced him that the Germans were ‘obviously’ putting their last reserves into the field. He even felt sorry for them. ‘These poor German lambs led to the slaughter to gratify the ambitions of a few swollen headed vampires.’ He felt even sorrier for his compatriots in the British infantry. He had been dragged out of bed after a full day’s work and sent into the line with some Coldstream Guards to spot potential targets for his guns. Regie was ‘tremendously impressed’ at how they managed to function in the face of the combined threats of snipers, machine guns, shrapnel and Black Maria. A mere month ago he had expressed his distaste for ‘foot-sloggers’. Now he thought that the infantry were ‘really marvellous’.

  British troops were not occupying trenches of the elaborate nature that would follow later in the war. These were ditches, scraped out of the mud with whatever tool they could find. Sometimes they were only 3ft in depth and so narrow that men had to hunch side by side and crouch for hours on end. They were often in exposed positions. Neither did they form a continuous line but rather erratic sections, often divided by hundreds of yards. Once the troops were in them, there wasn’t a chance of receiving food or ammunition supplies, or so much as lifting a head into the open until darkness fell again. One OE was bored of it already. Wilfrid Smith had assumed command of the 2nd Grenadier Guards and found it all very ominous. ‘I can’t see how these battles are to end – it becomes a question of stalemate … no doubt we will kill heaps of Germans but there are always heaps more.’ Just as darkness was their friend in terms of being able to move backwards and forwards from the line, so it was their enemy. The Germans could theoretically get into the holes in the line and overrun one set of troops without their neighbours knowing a thing about it.

  Regie’s new friends in the 1st Coldstream were a far cry from the battalion that had attacked the Chemin des Dames in September. Much depleted, their brigade was now under the command of another OE, 49-year-old Brigadier-General Charles Fitzclarence VC. He had been trying to get to the front since the war began but was originally forbidden to leave the brigade of Kitchener’s new army that he had been allocated. A vastly experienced, brave officer, he had been awarded the Victoria Cross in South Africa. Now finally in Belgium, he had posted the Coldstream on the north side of the Menin Road which ran south-east and
in a straight line away from Ypres. Strung out over 900 yards it was an awful position; stuck at a crossroads on a salient with a 200-yard gap covered in thick woodland before the line met the Scots Guards on their left. With less than half its normal strength, the Coldstream formed a ragged set of outposts rather than a solid line of defence.

  At 5.30 a.m. on 29 October the Germans approached the Coldstream’s lines like wraiths and burst from the fog. The British were expecting an attack, but further south. Masked by the mist, enemy troops got within 50 yards of the British trenches before they were spotted and the Guards opened fire. In their weakened state and in their weakened position it was over almost immediately. Two machine guns jammed and the Germans washed over them like a wave, flooding through gaps in the line. Of eleven officers present in the trenches, four vanished into German hands and seven, all of them Old Etonians, were killed in one strike. Amongst them were Gordon Hargreaves Brown, who had tried to patch up Gerry Freeman-Thomas on the Aisne, their machine-gun officer and Charles Williams-Wynn, 18 years old, who had been at the front for less than forty-eight hours. The battalion was so depleted that eventually Fitzclarence would withdraw it from the line so that it would not be wiped out entirely.

  Any help that Regie and his battery might have provided was nullified early that morning by seemingly ridiculous orders. The artillery had been instructed to fire on enemy batteries and told that the German infantry should ‘be allowed to come on’. On the south side of the crossroads the 1st Grenadier Guards, not long arrived from England, were oblivious as to what had been inflicted upon the Coldstream. That was until, in the gradually clearing fog, at about 7.30 a.m., rifle fire began pouring into their lines from behind. Straight away they realised that the enemy had come through the gap between the two battalions. After a brief attempt to hold their front-line trenches most of the Grenadiers fell back to their support lines. Major Stucley, an OE and second in command of the battalion, dashed off immediately to fetch the King’s Company, the only troops that they had in reserve. Having collected them he bravely led them across 200 yards of open ground back to the support lines, where he realised just how dire the situation was.

  The King’s Company had already taken heavy casualties in its advance. The two companies in the support trenches, one of them led by Captain Lord Richard Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington’s great-grandson, were under sustained machine-gun fire and the last remaining company, led by another OE, Captain Guy Rennie, were still stuck up in the original firing line. The rush of enemy troops was ‘like a crowd coming on the ground after a football match’. The problem was not hitting the advancing Germans. There were so many of them that ‘there was not the slightest difficulty’, but that there were so many that ‘the futility of killing a few out of such a crowd’ made the men panic. Stucley fell, dashing forward in a hail of bullets. Lord Wellesley followed, similarly trying to save the situation. Guy Rennie was so overrun that he and his men had no choice but to try and abandon their front-line trench. He was never heard of again.

  Since being driven back from Roulers, the Household Cavalry had been busy digging makeshift trenches with their bayonets. Large numbers of their horses had been killed by one lucky shell burst and valuable machine guns were systematically being put out of action. Whilst Regie was arguing with the general, the Blues and Royals were also being moved southwards, towards the village of Zandvoorde, south-east of Ypres. In such flat country, any piece of high ground was coveted greedily and Zandvoorde sat upon a mediocre ridge that nonetheless became the focus of German attention as they sought to gain an advantage.

  Even by the primitive standard up at the Menin Road, the trenches that the Household Cavalry occupied were ‘from first to last … a death trap’, dug in on forward slopes and leaving them in a particularly vulnerable position. Again, the lines were interrupted, with no lines of communication to reach the troops in reserve. It was a struggle to get enough food up to the lines and Worsley divided his supply of chocolate up and shared it between his men so that they might all have something to eat.

  As the Blues and Royals rotated in and out of the front line, he consistently remained. Some 50 per cent of the brigade’s machine guns were lost or damaged beyond use and he was simply indispensable. He had the propensity to try to make the best out of any situation, but on 26 October he admitted in a letter to his wife that he was struggling. The adjutant was sure that there was ‘nothing to prevent the Germans breaking through at any time’. The cavalry was holding a line far too long for its numbers and with nothing to respond to the enemy’s guns.

  On 29 October, as darkness set in, the Blues were relieved. Worsley had barely jumped out of the trenches when the brigade major, another OE named Cyril Potter, broke the news that he was required to stay behind yet again, this time to assist the 1st Life Guards. He had now been crouched in the front line for seven days and nights without respite, managing to take three hours’ ‘rest’, not sleep, each night. When he heard the news he characteristically grinned and remarked that it was ‘all in a days work’, but Potter was not convinced. ‘It must have been a bitter disappointment.’ As elements of the Blues turned out of the trenches, leaving him behind, the Royals arrived to join him, led by Lord Hugh Grosvenor; son of the Duke of Westminster and yet another Etonian. They settled down to a night in the open as the heavens opened and soaked them to the skin. In artillery terms it was ominous, silent.

  At 7.a.m. on 30 October the Germans opened a terrific cascade of high explosive and shrapnel shells on the Household Cavalry’s pitifully exposed trenches. The infantry attack was just as swift and just as brutal as the one that the Guards had faced further north. By 9.a.m. they had been bombarded out of their trenches and as they were forced back into an older set behind, to the right of Worsley the line simply collapsed. Messages were sent out to Grosvenor to get him to retire but if they ever reached him he was unable to act upon them. Two whole squadrons simply vanished whilst the tiny number of troopers or NCOs that were not killed outright were hauled off to prisoner-of-war camps.

  In just four hours the Germans had secured Zandvoorde and the entire ridge, leaving the Blues and Royals to retire slowly down the hill towards Klein Zillebeke. They sat waiting, hoping that stragglers would file in after them, but not a single man did. Lord Grosvenor and seventy of his men never returned. Alec Vandeleur of the 2nd Life Guards, another OE and a great friend of Worsley’s, also disappeared with sixty more and another six Etonian officers who added to the school’s rapidly growing list of casualties.

  In the aftermath of the attack, Oberleutnant Frieherr von Prankh was wandering through the British lines. Lying in a shell hole on his route were a number of fallen soldiers. Inspecting the bodies he rifled through the pockets of the officer he found among them. The effects that he found identified Lord Worsley. He and his entire machine-gun section had been wiped out in the attack. Von Prankh thought that an English lord should have a grave, so he had his men dig one by the side of the road south of Zandvoorde. The German himself was killed within a matter of weeks.

  These desperate attacks, with their astonishing casualty rates, were to prove to be just a prelude. The BEF and its French counterparts would reach the height of desperation on 31 October 1914 and events would reach crisis point at the village of Gheluvelt, just west of the crossroads where the Guards had been hit so hard on the Menin Road. The only thing standing between the British Empire and ruin were ‘haggard and unshaven men, unwashed, plastered with mud, many in little more than rags’.

  The British artillery began firing early. Rather than taking potshots at enemy batteries, Regie was ranged on a wood, inside which enemy troops were massing for an attack. At 8.a.m. a massive German bombardment began to pave the way for an fierce attack on both sides of the Menin Road. An hour later they rolled more batteries into action. The Menin Road was packed with British troops attempting to retire. Artillerymen squirmed their way westwards having abandoned their guns – others were attempting to drag theirs
through the crowds. The noise of the bombardment was phenomenal. Wounded men, wagons, confused troops and the guns jockeyed for space to retreat. The British were swamped but shot back so fiercely that the advancing Germans were convinced that they faced large numbers of machine guns. By midday though, they had seized Gheluvelt, which was ablaze, also infiltrating the grounds of the nearby chateau. To make matters worse, shortly afterwards a chance shell hit a building where several staff officers had congregated, throwing command into disarray. The British line had been breached and the road to Ypres, and beyond it the English Channel, lay open.

  As devastating as the situation at Gheluvelt was, the Germans would throw the heaviest weight of their attack that day on the British line on the Messines Ridge to the south. The line there was held by cavalry, including the 9th Lancers. The point had arrived when the cavalry had ceased to be mounted troops who occasionally got off their horses to fire their rifles to become dismounted men ‘occasionally using their horses to move from one part of the battle to another’. A passionate cavalryman, Francis Grenfell did not like it at all. ‘We have become mounted infantry … with very little of the mounted about it.’ The burden of doing two jobs at once was a heavy one. ‘If you see a man carry a lance, sword, rifle, spade and pick he looks just like a hedgehog.’

  The Ninth had only arrived back in Messines on the evening of 30 October. Large numbers had gone off to a remount depot and they were depleted. Out of a full strength squadron of 130, Francis had forty men. He was back in command, having returned to the front in mid October and was clearly not himself. He was yet to accept his twin Rivy’s death on the Aisne. He savoured the moments when the men still confused them and called him by his brother’s name. The Harvey brothers, aside from a case of toothache that had earned Lennie a few days in Paris, had come through unscathed thus far. That night the regiment remained awake, listening to the the Germans shuffling about in front of them.