Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated)

by Rudyard Kipling

  Drunkenness was confined, for the most part, to a known few characters, regular and almost privileged in their irregularities. The influence of the Priest and the work of the company officers went hand in hand here. Here is a tribute paid by a brother officer to Captain Gore-Langton, killed on the 10th October, which explains the secret. “The men liked him for his pluck and the plain way in which he dealt with, them, always doing his best for the worst, most idle, and stupidest men in our company. . . . One can’t really believe he’s gone. I always expect to see him swinging round a traverse.” The Battalion did not forget him, and while at Lapugnoy, sent a party to Vermelles to attend to his grave there.

  On the 31st October Lieut.-Colonel R. C. McCalmont arrived from commanding a battalion of the New Ulster Army Division and took over the command from Major Alexander who reverted to the 2nd Battalion, from which he had been borrowed.

  LAVENTIE

  On the 10th of the month the Guards Division were for duty again on the Laventie sector, which at every time of the year had a bad reputation for wet. The outcome of Loos had ended hope of a break-through, and a few thousand yards won there against a few thousand lost out Ypres way represented the balance of the account since November 1914. Therefore, once again, the line had to be held till more men, munitions and materials could be trained, manufactured and accumulated, while the price of making war on the spur of the moment was paid, day in and day out, with the bodies of young men subject to every form of death among the slits in the dirt along which they moved. It bored them extremely, but otherwise did not much affect their morale. They built some sort of decent life out of the monotonous hours; they came to know the very best and the very worst in themselves and in their comrades upon whom their lives and well-being depended; and they formed friendships that lasted, as fate willed, for months or even years. They lied persistently and with intent in their home letters concerning their discomforts and exposure, and lent themselves to the impression, cultivated by some sedulous newspapers, that the trenches were electrically-lighted abodes of comfort and jollity, varied with concerts and sports. It was all part of the trial which the national genius calls “the game.”

  The Battalion (Lieut.-Colonel R. C. McCalmont commanding) was at Pacaut, due north of Béthune, on the 11th, at Merville on the 14th, training young soldiers how to use smoke-helmets — for gas was a thing to be expected anywhere now — and enjoying every variety of weather, from sodden wet to sharp frost. The effects of the gas-helmet on the young soliders were quaintly described as “very useful on them. ‘Twas like throwin’ a cloth over a parrot-cage. It stopped all their chat.”

  On the 20th November they took over reserve-billets from the 1st Scots Guards near Bout Deville, and the next day, after inspection of both battalions by General Feilding, commanding the Division, and the late Mr. John Redmond, M.P., went into trenches with the happy fore-knowledge that they were likely to stay there till the 2nd of January and would be lucky if they got a few days out at Christmas. It was a stretch of unmitigated beastliness in the low ditch-riddled ground behind Neuve Chapelle and the Aubers Ridge, on the interminable La Bassée–Estaires road, with no available communication-trenches, in many places impassable from wet, all needing sandbags and all, “in a very neglected state, except for the work done by the 2nd Guards Brigade the week before the Battalion moved in.” (It is nowhere on record that the Guards Division, or for that matter, any other, was ever contented with trenches that it took over.) The enemy, however, were quiet, being at least as uncomfortable as our people. Even when our field-guns blew large gaps in their parapets a hundred yards away there was very little retaliation, and our casualties on relief — the men lay in scattered billets at Riez Bailleul three miles or so up the road — were relatively few.

  In one whole week not more than four or five men were killed and fifteen or sixteen wounded, two of them by our own shrapnel bursting short while our guns experimented on block-houses and steel cupolas, as these revealed themselves. Even when the Prince of Wales visited the line at the Major-General’s inspection of it, and left by the only possible road, “Sign Post Lane,” in broad daylight in the open, within a furlong of the enemy, casualties did not occur! There is no mention, either, of any of the aeroplane-visitations which sometimes followed his appearances. As a personal friend of one of the officers, he found reason to visit along that sector more often than is officially recorded.

  At the beginning of the month the 1st Guards Brigade was relieved by the 3rd of its Division, and the Battalion handed its line over to the 4th Grenadiers, not without some housewifely pride at improvements it had effected. But, since pride ever precedes a fall, the sharp frost of the past week dissolved in heavy rain, and the neat new-made breastworks with their aligned sandbags collapsed. If the 4th Grenadiers keep veracious diaries, it is probable that that night of thaw and delayed reliefs is strongly recorded in them.

  La Gorgue, under Estaires, upon the sluggish Lys in sodden wet weather (December 3-8) gave them a breathing space for a general wash-up and those “steady drills” necessary to mankind. The new stretch that they took over from their own 2nd Battalion was about two miles north of their previous one and southeast of Laventie, running parallel to the Rue Tilleloy, that endless road, flanked, like all others hereabouts, with farm-houses, which joins Armentières to Neuve Chapelle. The ground was, of course, sop, the parapets were perforable breastworks, but reliefs could arrive unobserved within five hundred yards of the front, and the enemy’s line lay in most places nearly a quarter of a mile from ours. More important still, there was reasonable accommodation for Battalion Headquarters in a farm-house (one of the many “Red Houses” of the war) which, by some accident, had been untouched so far, though it stood less than a mile from the front line. Where Headquarters are comfortable, Headquarters are happy, and by so much the more placable. Only very young soldiers grudge them protection and warmth.

  For a few days it was a peaceful stretch of the great line that buttressed on Switzerland and the sea. Christmas was coming, and, even had the weather allowed it, neither side was looking too earnestly for trouble.

  A company of Welsh Fusiliers with their C.O. and Adjutant came up for eight days’ instruction; and were distributed through the Battalion. The system in the front line at that moment was one of gangs of three, a digger, an armed man, and a bomber, relieving each other by shifts; and to each of these trios one Welshman was allotted.

  The Welsh were small, keen and inquisitive. The large Irish praised their Saints aloud for sending them new boys to talk to through the long watches. It is related of one Welshman that, among a thousand questions, he demanded if his tutor had ever gone over the top. The Irishman admitted that he had. “And how often does one go over?” the Welshman continued. “I’ll show you. Come with me,” replied the other Celt, and, moving to a gap in the parapet, lifted the Welshman in his arms that he might the better see what remained, hung up in German wire, of a private of some ancient fight — withered wreckage, perhaps, of Neuve Chapelle. “He went over wanst,” said the Irishman. The working-party resumed their labours and, men say, that that new boy put no more questions “for the full of the half an hour — an’ that’s as long as a week to a Welshman.”

  All four companies were held in the first line except for three posts — Picantin, Dead End, and Hougoumont — a few hundred yards behind that were manned with a platoon apiece, but on the 12th December rumours of a mine made it wise to evacuate a part of the right flank till one of our 9.2’s should have searched for the suspected mine-shaft. Its investigations roused the enemy to mild retaliation, which ended next day in one of our men being wounded by our own 9.2, and three by the enemy’s shrapnel — the first casualties in four days.

  The wet kept the peace along the line, but it did not altogether damp the energies of our patrols. For a reason, not explained officially, Lieutenant S. E. F. Christy was moved to go out with a patrol and to hurl into the German lines a printed message (was it the earliest
workings of propaganda?) demanding that the Germans “should surrender.” There is no indication whether the summons was to the German army at large or merely to as many of them as lay before the Battalion; but, the invitation being disregarded, Lieutenants Christy and Law made themselves offensive in patrol-work to the best of their means. On one excursion the latter officer discovered (December 15) a water-logged concrete-built loop-hole dug-out occupied by Germans. Being a hardened souvenir-hunter, he is reported to have removed the official German nameboard of the establishment ere he went back for reinforcements with a view of capturing it complete. On his return he found it abandoned. The water had driven the enemy to a drier post, and the cutting-out expedition had to be postponed. Too long in the line without incident wears on every one’s temper, but luck was against them and an attempt on the 20th December by a “selected party” under some R.E.’s and Lieutenants Law and Christy was ruined by the moonlight and the fact that the enemy had returned to their concrete hutch and were more than on the alert. By the light of later knowledge the Battalion was inclined to believe that the dug-out had been left as bait and that there were too many spies in our lines before Laventie.

  On the 21st December the Battalion came out for Christmas and billeted at Laventie, as their next turn would be in the old sector that they had handed over to the 4th Grenadiers three weeks ago. The same Battalion relieved them on this day, and, as before, were an hour late in turning up — a thing inexcusable except on one’s own part.

  Their Adjutant’s preoccupations with officers sick and wounded; N.C.O.’s promoted to commissions in line battalions, and the catching and training of their substitutes; and with all the housekeeping work of a battalion in the field, had not prevented him from making strict and accurate inquiries at Headquarters as to “what exactly is being sent out for Christmas Day. Is it plum-pudding only or sausages alone? Last year we had both, but I should like to know for certain.”

  All things considered (and there was no shelling), Christmas dinner at La Gorgue 1915 was a success, and “the C.O. and other officers went round the dinners as at home” in merciful ignorance that those of them who survived would attend three more such festivals.

  Major-General Lord Cavan, commanding the Guards Division, who had been appointed to command the newly formed Fourteenth Corps,3 addressed the officers after dinner and half-promised them the Christmas present they most desired. He spoke well of the Battalion, as one who had seen and shared their work had right to do, saying that “there might be as good, but there were none better,” and added that “there was just a hope that the Guards Division might eventually go to his corps.” They cheered.

  The quiet that fell about Christmastide held till the birth of the New Year, which the inscrutable Hun mind celebrated punctually on the hour (German time) with twenty minutes’ heavy machine-gun and rifle fire in the darkness. One killed and one wounded were all their casualties.

  Here is the roll of the Officers and Staff of the Battalion as the year ended in mud, among rotten parapets and water-logged trenches, with nothing to show for all that had gone before save time gained and ground held to allow of preparation for the real struggle, on the edge of which these thousand soldiers and all their world stood ignorant but unshaken

  HEADQUARTERS

  Lieut.-Colonel R. C. A. McCalmont

  Commanding Officer.

  Major Lord Desmond FitzGerald

  Adjutant.

  Lieut. T. E. G. Nugent

  a./Adjutant.

  Hon. Lieut. H. Hickie

  Quartermaster.

  Capt. P. H. Antrobus

  Transport.

  Lieut. C. Pease

  Brigade Company.

  Lieut. L. C. Whitefoord

  “

  Lieut. J. Grayling-Major

  Depot.

  Capt. Rev. A. H. A. Knapp, O.P.

  Chaplain.

  Capt. P. R. Woodhouse, R.A.M.C.

  Medical Officer.

  No. 108 Sgt. Major Kirk

  Sgt. Major.

  No. 176 Q.M.S. J. M. Payne

  Q.M.S.

  No. 918 Drill-Sgt. T. Cahill

  Senior Drill Sgt.

  No. 2666 Drill-Sgt. G. Weeks

  Junior Drill Sgt.

  No. 1134 O.R.Cr. Sgt. P. Matthews

  Orderly-Room Sgt. at Base.

  No. 3933 Sgt. Dr. W. Cherry

  Sgt. Drummer.

  No. 1119 Sgt. R. Nugent

  a./Pioneer Sgt.

  No. 837 Armr. Q.M.S. S. Bradley

  Armr. Q.M.S.

  No. 3874 Sgt. M. Greaney

  Transport Sgt.

  No. 4166 Sgt. J. Fawcett

  Signalling Sgt.

  No. 2900 Sgt. P. J. Curtis

  Orderly-Room Clerk.

  No. 1. Company.

  Capt. R. G. C. Yerburgh.

  (3726 C.Q.M.S. P. M’Goldrick.)

  Lieut. D. J. B. FitzGerald.

  2562 C.S.M. P. A. Carroll.

  3303 a./C.Q.M.S. J. Glynn.

  No. 2 Company.

  Capt. V. C. J. Blake.

  3949 C.S.M. D. Voyles.

  Lieut. C. E. R. Hanbury.

  999 C.Q.M.S. H. Payne.

  No. 3 Company.

  Capt. T. M. D. Bailie.

  (2112 C.S.M. H. M’Veigh.)

  Capt. A. F. L. Gordon.

  3972 C.Q.M.S. R. Grady.

  Lieut. S. E. F. Christy.

  2922 a./C.S.M. J. Donolly.

  Lieut. K. E. Dormer.

  No. 4 Company.

  Capt. P. S. Long-Inns.

  2nd Lieut. M. B. Levy.

  Lieut. Hon. H. B. O’Brien (Bombing Officer).

  3632 C.S.M. M. Moran.

  (2122 C.Q.M.S. T. Murphy.)

  Lieut. R. J. P. Rodakowski.

  798 a./C.Q.M.S. J. Scanlon.

  * * *

  The Salient To The Somme

  BRIGADIER-GENERAL G. FEILDING, D.S.O., as we know, succeeded Lord Cavan in the command of the Guards Division, and the enemy woke up to a little more regular shelling and sniping for a few days till (January 4) the 1st Guards Brigade was unexpectedly relieved by a fresh brigade (the 114th), and the Battalion moved to billets in St. Floris which, as usual, were “in a very filthy condition.” There they stayed, under strong training at bombing and Lewis gunnery, till the 12th. Thence to Merville till the 23rd, when Lieutenant Hon. H. B. O’Brien, a specialist in these matters, as may have been noticed before, was appointed Brigade Bombing Officer. The bomb was to be the dominant factor of the day’s work for the next year or so, and the number of students made the country round billets unwholesome and varied. There is a true tale of a bombing school on a foggy morning who, hurling with zeal over a bank into the mist, found themselves presently being cursed from a safe distance by a repairing party who had been sent out to discover why one whole system of big-gun telephone-wires was dumb. They complained that the school had “cut it into vermicelli.”

  The instruction bore fruit; for, so soon as they were back in the trenches at Ebenezer farm, which they had quitted on the 4th, bombing seems to have been forced wherever practicable. A weak, or it might be more accurate to say, a sore point had developed on the front in a crater thrown up by one of our own mines, which it was necessary to sap out to and protect by intermittent bombing. This brought retaliation and a few casualties nightly. A trench-mortar battery was imported to deal with the nuisance and, as might be expected, drew the enemy’s artillery.

  On the 28th January a single stray bullet in the dark found and killed Captain V. C. J. Blake, No. 2 Company, while he was laying out some work in wire for his company, and a bombing attack round the mine-crater ended in three other ranks killed and one wounded.

  On February 1 our mine-shaft in the same locality flooded without warning and drowned a couple of men in a listening-post. Our pumps could make no impression on the water; it was difficult to put up any head-cover for the men in the forward sap, and the enemy’s wire was being strengthened nightly and needed clearing a
way. This was routine-work undertaken by our artillery who blew gaps in it in three places, which the Battalion covered with machine-gun fire. It kept the enemy reasonably quiet, and H.R.H. Prince Albert, who was out on a tour from England, breakfasted with Battalion Headquarters the same morning (February 5). Once again the enemy’s information must have been inaccurate or delayed since there is no mention of any shelling or aeroplane work on Headquarters.

  They came out of the line on the 7th and billeted near Merville. Reckoned by their standards it had been an uneventful stretch of duty, and those officers who could be spared had gone on short leave; for there was a rumour that leave would be stopped after the 20th of the month. The French and their English allies knew well that the great German attack on Verdun was ripening (it opened in the third week of February) and the world had no doubt of the issues that depended upon that gate to the heart of France holding fast. The whole long line stiffened to take the weight of any sudden side-issue or main catastrophe that the chance of war might bring about. But a battalion among hundreds of battalions knows as little what its own movements mean as a single truck in a goods yard knows of the import and export trade of Great Britain. The young officers snatched their few hours’ leave at home, loyally told their people that all was going well, returned — ”to a most interesting lecture on the Battle of Neuve Chapelle,” delivered at La Gorgue by a Divisional Staff Officer, and to an inspection of the 1st Guards Brigade by Lord Kitchener on a vile wet day when they were all soaked to the skin (February 10), and “to the usual routine in very poor weather.”