The 7th Battalion, The Rifle Brigade, were to attack to the left of Delville Wood on the right flank of the 33rd Division, which had been given the ambitious task of capturing the remainder of the ground between Delville Wood and High Wood and securing High Wood itself.
Acting Lance-Corporal E. Gale, No. 3774, 1st (later 7th) Btn., The Rifle Brigade, 41st Brigade, 14th Division
It was the waiting to go over that was the worst, because we didn’t go over until almost three o’clock in the afternoon. There was a whole brigade waiting to go over on a battalion front, so we were crowded up like anything. During the morning, the Sergeant came round with the old rum jar and gave us a dessertspoonful of rum, just to put Dutch courage in us. It was strong, that Army rum, and I think he had two or three spoonfuls to our one – or more!
We really needed that rum, waiting to go over the top! Our own guns had put down this terrific barrage but, because we were a bit higher up than the Germans, in order to hit them they’d had to sight the guns so that they would just skim the top of our trenches and there we were, crouching in this terrible noise, and these terrible shells going over us just inches above. You can’t describe the feeling! You can’t describe the noise! A couple of our own chaps were killed. One fellow had the top of his head took off with one of our own shells. His brains were all over the place. But the artillery couldn’t help it. They had a terrible job to get the elevation right and just had to try and skim the top of our trenches and this poor chap Dixon got it. He was only five or six yards away from me. It didn’t do much for us to see that sort of thing before we went over!
Five minutes after we went over the top we were finished! The German machine-guns went through our lines just like a mow goes through a field of corn. I don’t think we got two hundred yards before we were so mucked up that we just had to lay out in No Man’s Land. I was in a shell-hole with the Sergeant – the one who’d been sampling the rum. We were absolutely pinned down but he kept jumping up and shouting, ‘Why don’t we advance? Why don’t we advance?’ He was absolutely hollering. How could you advance when there was three of you there and you couldn’t see anybody else? I shouted back at him, ‘Why don’t you keep down? You’ll be drawing the guns on us!’
D Company had gone across first and C Company were supposed to be following behind us. From this shell-hole we looked back and we could see C Company there lying on the ground spread out in extended order, just as they’d gone across. We couldn’t understand why they weren’t coming up to support us. There was just the three of us in the shell-hole – the Platoon Sergeant and Jack Hall, who was the Lance-Corporal, and myself. And the Sergeant said, ‘Why the hell don’t they come on and give us a hand? We can’t go in there on our own!’
This old Sergeant wasn’t half going on, nothing would keep him quiet. He was an enlisted man – he wasn’t a Regular. There was only two of us Regulars in The 7th Battalion, but the Sergeant had been in the Marines before the war, so he should have known better. Of course he had all this rum in him. Then the third time he jumped up they got him! A bullet went straight in his ear and blew half his face away. Me and Jack had to lay there with him. We lay there for hours and hours and hours with all this clatter going on around us and when it got dusk we started to crawl back.
It was a terrible crawl back and, hunched close to the ground, his ears ringing with the sound of the explosions as the Germans continued to bombard the British line, Ted Gale had not gone far before he realized why C Company had not come up to support them. They were still lying in extended order as he crawled past them – and almost all were dead.
Acting Lance-Corporal E. Gale, No. 3774, 1st (later 7th) Btn., The Rifle Brigade, 41st Brigade, 14th Division
Lieutenant Hall was alive, but only just. He said, ‘Can you help me! I’ve got a bad wound in my hip. I can’t move.’ I said to Jack, ‘Can you hold my rifle and I’ll pick him up?’
I picked him up and I carried him back to the trench – it was all of a hundred yards and it took a long, long time, because we had to be careful moving; the whole thing was still like an inferno although it was getting well dark. When we got into the trench, I laid him on the fire step. A few yards beyond him, laying out there, we’d come across a chap we called Corporal Gussie – a machine-gunner. He was badly shot in the stomach and I didn’t suppose there was much hope for him, but he was in a bad way. I couldn’t do anything, having the Lieutenant with me, but I said to the Corporal, ‘I’ll come back for you, Gussie.’ So, when I’d laid the Lieutenant down and someone else came to see to him, I said, ‘Right. I’m going out again.’ But the officer wouldn’t let me go. I felt very badly about it, because I’d promised Gussie I would go back, but the officer said, ‘No you’re not. You’ve had quite enough for one day.’ It was nine o’clock at night by then, so I suppose, in a way, he was right. But I tried to insist and, I remember, he said to me, ‘Anyone who’s left out there isn’t worth picking up now!’
He was right. There were twenty-three of us left alive out of my whole company. I don’t know how they missed us. It was a miracle! It was a miracle that any of us got back. I don’t believe I’d ever cried in my life, but, when I got back and found out what had happened, how many men we’d lost, I cried then. I was a Regular and they were all Volunteers, but we was all mucked in together. I cried then.
Their Battalion was the only one of the Brigade to have failed and they had only failed because the right of the 33rd Division had not succeeded in pushing forward. The Germans still held High Wood. The Tommies had inched forward in Delville, but it would be weeks yet before the wood was finally and permanently in British hands.
Far away on the left flank, across the Albert–Bapaume road, the Australians had punched their way a little nearer to Mouquet Farm; some lines of trenches beyond the Leipzig Redoubt had been captured and, far away to the right, the troops had crept a little way up the valley to the right of Guillemont and the French had increased their hold on the village of Maurepas on the opposite slopes.
The small gains had been won at the cost of high casualties, but the Staff were satisfied. It was at least something.
Extract from the diary of Sir Douglas Haig
Saturday, 19 August: The operation carried out yesterday was most successful. It was on a front of over eleven miles. We now hold the ridge south-east of and overlooking Thiepval. Nearly five hundred prisoners were taken here while the battalion which carried out the attack only lost forty men! During their advance our men kept close to the artillery barrage.
The artillery, and the Staff who ruled the destiny of infantry and gunners alike, had been thinking on their feet and there had been time, since the catastrophe of the First of July, for shrewd reappraisal of the effectiveness of rigidly timed barrages with ‘lifts’ so inexorably predetermined. A new technique was now being tried – the ‘creeping barrage’ which would literally travel like a curtain in front of the infantry as it advanced, so that, when the barrage moved on from the German front line, the infantry would be there, on its heels, ready to engage the enemy, rather than advancing in full view two hundred yards away or more. Perhaps the most satisfactory thing about the limited successes of 18th August was that the technique of the creeping barrage had worked.
But the hard nuts were still holding out. The hardest of all was Guillemont and it was obvious that it would take a full-scale battle and much preparation to capture it. It was equally obvious that, before the Allies could push forward, Guillemont must be captured. There was just the faintest indication that the citadel of the German line was beginning to crumble – but it could be compared to the merest trickle of brick dust on the outer curtain wall. There was a long way to go.
Meantime the survivors of the troops who had been engaging the enemy must be relieved, rested and revived for their next endeavour. So the great chess game of moving troops and transport across the grassless waste of the battlefield, now swept intermittently by rain and winds and thunderstorms, must start all over again. Th
e exhausted troops stumbled thankfully out of the line and, with some trepidation, fresh divisions slogged up through the desolation to take their place.
Alex Paterson was a born soldier, although, unlike Ted Gale, he had not been a Regular before the war. Nevertheless, he had reached the rank of Sergeant in the 11th (Service) Battalion, The Rifle Brigade and furthermore had turned out to be a ‘natural’. Officers and men alike depended on Paterson. He had common-sense. He had a steady nerve which inspired confidence. He was a man’s man.
Sergeant A. K. Paterson, DCM, MM, No. 52574, A Coy., 11th (S) Btn., The Rifle Brigade
I took to it like a duck to water, which was remarkable because when I joined up I’d never even heard of The Rifle Brigade. I went up to London, to Waterloo Station, and walked across to Scotland Yard and there was a great big Recruiting Sergeant there. I told him I wanted to join the Royal Engineers. He said, ‘Well, you can’t join the Royal Engineers. They’re all full up. But I can give you a jolly good regiment to join.’ I said, ‘What regiment?’ He said, ‘The Rifle Brigade.’ I told him quite straight that I’d never heard of it. I thought it was the Fire Brigade! It might as well have been the Fire Brigade for all I knew about it.
It was 8 September 1914, and I was still well under military age – I had to lie to get in – but a year later I was Platoon Sergeant and I took my platoon to France.
In the course of his year’s service in France, Sergeant Paterson had become adept at trench warfare. He had become a veteran leader of patrols and, for many months in the line in front of Laventie, he had practically lived in No Man’s Land. In his view, it was a good deal to be preferred to sitting in a dugout waiting to be shelled. He made it his personal responsibility to cut the zig-zag gaps in the wire in front of the trenches through which the patrols could pass undetected at night. He made it his business to see that every man in his platoon was familiar with the alien land on the other side of the wire. After dark he would take them silently ‘over the top’ to lie beyond the wire and perhaps to creep a little way ahead, so that they became accustomed to being at large, vulnerable, unprotected by the high sandbagged parapets, with nothing between them and the enemy just two hundred yards away. He taught them to be ready to freeze when a flare went up; ready, when it died down, to scramble back noiselessly through the wire, knowing that such experiences would make his men less apprehensive about leaving the shelter of the trenches when a fatigue party was needed to strengthen the defences or to repair entanglements broken by shellfire.
Daylight patrols called for even greater nerve and skill, but only by daylight could the enemy’s positions be properly reconnoitred, his strongpoints observed, his dispositions sketched. Day after day, in the hot September month of 1915, Paterson led his patrols out through the long grass towards the German line. The line was newly dug and information was badly needed.
Sergeant A. K. Paterson, DCM, MM, No. 52574, A Coy., 11th (S) Btn., The Rifle Brigade
The grass was just like hay, so anything that was dark or anything that was too light or was coloured would show up. We had to wear as little equipment as possible – no belts or buckles or anything that was likely to glitter in the sunshine. We had to really think about camouflage. We had to brown our hands and faces and, with my black hair, I had to wear a khaki handkerchief over my head with knots at the corners to keep it on and, because the weather was so hot and we knew that our faces would be wet with perspiration – and even that could glisten in the sunlight – we covered our faces with grass seed. We crawled on our tummies and we didn’t keep to a straight line because, if we’d done that, we might have furrowed the grass as we went through and that would certainly be seen by troops using periscopes on the other side. So we had to move to the left and then to the right on our bellies and, as we got near the line, we had to keep very close so that we could whisper to each other and discuss things that we saw. We even had brown paper instead of white to write our notes on – just a four-inch square which we put in our pockets and then, if there was a bit of a shell-hole, we would get into it and very cautiously make a sketch or two of any sniper posts in the parapet, or any places where it seemed as if they’d got some activity in saps. Sometimes people were captured. We lost an officer and another Sergeant who were a bit too bold. They actually got into one of these German saps. They thought it was empty, but there were Jerries there, or at least they got there pretty soon! Only six officers out of eight got back that day and we didn’t know what had happened. There was a certain amount of firing, but firing was going on all the time, all over the place, and you couldn’t distinguish one particular lot of fire from the other.
In the best part of a year’s foraying in No Man’s Land, Alex Paterson had gained a great deal of valuable experience, a Military Medal, and a certain aplomb which was about to be distinctly useful in the trenches in front of Guillemont, for the troops were there to work, to dig, to push the line well out into hostile territory, to push out saps and communication trenches and to so improve the position that when the big attack came they would jump off with every advantage.
Paterson was in his element. Night work suited him. No Man’s Land suited him. In spite of harassing fire from the Germans the work went well. Paterson took considerable satisfaction in what had been achieved and was more satisfied than ever when the Brigadier-General came up in person to inspect the results.
Sergeant A. K. Paterson, DCM, MM, No. 52574, A Coy., 11th (S) Btn., The Rifle Brigade
General Shute was the finest offensive officer I’ve ever come across and he was a man who wanted to be in the line and to know exactly what was going on. The Colonel came with him, and the Adjutant, and they handed him over to me and said, ‘Sergeant, will you take the General and do what the General says.’ And the General said he wanted to see on the other side of the wire and take a close look at the German line. Well, we had tunnels under our parapets running up through the wire and beyond. So I said, ‘Right, you follow me.’ He was on his own. I lifted up the sack on one side of the tunnel, I got in and said, ‘Now, you come in.’ So he came through. Two yards further on was another sack hanging down in the hole in front because, if you left it open all the way through, the Germans would spot the light shining through the other side. I lifted up the curtain at the front end of the tunnel and got through and held it up while he came through. He was a good six feet tall – a big man, taller than me. He went to his right and lay there and had a good look. I said, ‘Keep down, sir. You’ll have to go right down on your tummy and don’t go any distance because there’s no cover. I’m going to the right and I’d like you to follow me there, because you can see more.’
I talked to him like my uncle, and he knew perfectly well what I wanted him to do. I crawled along to a safe place and the Brigadier followed me, and I said, ‘This is as far as I’m going. You can see all you want to see from here. Now, what do you want to know?’ We stayed there for a good five minutes and I pointed things out and he asked me questions. When he’d seen all he wanted to, I said, ‘We’ll go backwards now. Don’t turn round, because you’ll be making a target three or four times the length. You go backwards
on your toes and your knees, into the same curtain and I’ll follow you backwards. Don’t turn round and put your boots to them!’ So we went back, just like that, and, when we’d crawled through the tunnel into the trench, he stood there and he chatted to me and he thanked me and he shook my hand in front of the Colonel and the Adjutant and everybody. They stood there just like stuffed dummies! But the General spoke to me man to man. He was a marvellous chap.
General Shute was no milksop, no remote, godlike figure so detached from his men that he saw them as pawns or statistics. They had done a good job. They had prepared the advanced positions with care. They were tired with long labour and had suffered much from shelling and sniping. Because of the bad weather which had caused the battle to be postponed twice they had been far too long in the line, and General Shute was absolutely determined that they sho
uld have a rest before it started. There was very little time, for the assault was now scheduled for 3 September and August was almost at an end. But Shute insisted. On 31 August his Brigade filed out of the trenches and moved back, for two days’ holiday, to camp in the Carnoy Valley.
They knew that it would be for a mere breathing space, that in forty-eight hours they would be back – but it was a relief to be out of the line, away from the discomfort of dripping clothing that was soaked again as soon as it began to dry out, away from the gruelling labour of digging trenches that the rainstorms turned into muddy streams even as they dug. Away from the dripping gloom, away from the stench, away from the eternal sound of the guns and the shells that whined through the leaden skies. Yesterday evening, just before dusk, the awful weather had crashed to a climax so furious that it had silenced even the guns. Two observation balloons were struck spectacularly by lightning and exploded. The torrential downpour soaked every man to the skin and turned trenches that had been rivers of water into seas of mud. Duckboards which had provided dry standing of a sort or, at the very least, a foothold, sank a foot or more into the glutinous depths. That night, between sunset and dawn, thirty-seven lorries of supplies and ammunition stuck on the Carnoy-Montauban road alone, and next night, as the boys trudged back towards their unexpected rest, rope-gangs of the ASC were still trying to haul the last of them out.
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