Neither side attempted to conceal their plans. The work of our airmen would have been enough to have warned the enemy what was intended, even had his own men overlooked the immense assembly of troops and guns in a breadth of country that had been remodelled for their needs, above ground and below. Our battalions in the Salient, where the unmolested German aeroplanes bombed them, knew well enough that, in the phrase of the moment, “everything had gone south,” and our listening-posts in the front line round Ypres could tell very fairly when a German “demonstration” was prompted by natural vice or orders to cover a noisy withdrawal of their guns in the same direction. It did not need placards in English, “Come on, we are ready for you!” which were hoisted in some of the German trenches on that Somme front to make men wiser than they had been for weeks past.
Side by side with this elaborate and particular knowledge, plus a multitude of camp-rumours, even more circumstantial, was the immense incuriousness that always exists in veteran armies. Fresh drafts would pour out from England filled with vain questions and the hope of that immediate “open warfare,” so widely advertised, to be told they would know all about it when their turn came, and that, meantime, deep trenches were not bad things after all. When they had looked for a little on the full face of war, they were content to copy their elders and ask no questions. They understood it was to be a wearing-out battle. Very many men had already been worn out and cast aside in the mere detail of preparation, in building the light and broad-gauge railways of supply and the roads beside them; in fetching up and installing timber, hutments, hangars, telephones, hospitals, pipe-lines for water, and the thousand other necessities of mechanical war. As it happened to individuals, so, they knew, would it be with the battalions, brigades and divisions of all the armies which General Rawlinson on the 1st of July moved up against that fortress of a whole countryside, called in history “The Somme.”
And while that storm gathered and broke, the Battalion went on with its horrible necessary work in the Salient till the hour should come for it and its Division to be cast into the furnace and used up with the rest.
On the 7th July they moved as a support to the broken and filthy banks of the Canal north of Ypres and sat in dug-outs connected by a tunnel and begirt with water and mud. Except for a mere nightly fatigue of a couple of hundred men, the Diary noted that “there was no training possible but there was little shelling.” The 2nd Grenadiers were in the line which the Battalion relieved (11th July) on a broken and marshy front, between Buffs Road and Forward Cottage with Battalion Headquarters near St. Jean and the 3rd Coldstream on their left. They were shelled during relief, when Lieutenant Christy, who, but a little while before, had just escaped a sniper’s bullet through the loophole, was killed.
That same morning four Germans wormed their way through the rank grass and broken ground and for a while almost captured an isolated post of six men of No. 1 Company. They tried, indeed, to march them off as prisoners, but the Irish edged away under cover of the next platoon’s fire, and all got back safely. The day closed with heavy bombardments from 5.9’s. An officer and three other ranks killed and seventeen wounded were counted as a light casualty-list “considering the bad cover.” No man could stand upright for an instant, and all repairs, parapets, and drainage work were done at night, stooping and crawling between spurts of machine-gun hose-work.
The 13th July was another “light” day with but seven men wounded. Second Lieutenant G. V. Williams joined from the base and Major C. F. Fleming went sick on the 14th. The sector being rather too active and noisy of nights just then, a patrol under Lieutenant J. N. Marshall went out to see what the enemy might intend in the way of digging a sap across “No Man’s Land.” The Lieutenant was wounded in the side as he left the trench, but insisted on doing his work and was out two hours; for which he paid by having to go into hospital a month later. Their casualties on the 15th, when they were relieved by the 2nd Grenadiers and went back to their dug-outs by the Canal, were five wounded, one of whom died. Out of this tense life were suddenly chosen an officer and twenty men to form part of the contingent representing our armies at the French review in Paris on the 14th July. They were chiefly veterans of 1914, and under Captain J. S. N. FitzGerald, then of the 2nd Battalion, repaired to a bright clean city where a man could hold up his head, walking in unchoked streets between roofed and glazed houses: and the day after the glittering affair was over they returned to their brick-heaps and burrows in the Flanders mire.
On the Battalion’s next turn (July 18-22), suspecting that the enemy might be newly relieved, our patrols worked hard night after night to catch prisoners for identification purposes. 2346 Lance-Corporal Hennigan, a regimental “character” and a man of strong powers of leadership, with 5743 Private O’Brien, of whom, too, many tales are told, were marked as “very prominent in the work.” But the Germans took great care not to leave men or corpses about, and they got nothing for their toil.
On the 23rd July orders came that their expected term of rest was to be cancelled as the Division would go “elsewhere,” which all knew meant towards the Somme. There were five days yet ere the Battalion drew clear of the Salient, each day with its almost unnoticed casualty that in the long run makes the bulk of the bills of war, and brings home the fact that the life-blood of the Battalion is dripping away. The support platoons were reckoned lucky to have only one man killed on the 23rd after bombardment by a six-inch high-explosive gun. Captain Pollok, who took over command of No. 1 Company on the same day, was wounded two days later, just after relief, by a machine-gun bullet; and their last “normal” day in the trenches gave one sergeant killed and three other ranks wounded.
They were relieved on the 27th July, after dark as usual, by the 1st Royal Warwicks, “recently come from the south, having been in the fighting there.” The Warwicks knew “The Somme.” They looked on the clean, creosoted, deep-bayed, high-parapeted trenches they were to hold and announced that they would feel “cushy” in such a line. “Cushy!” said the Brigade. “Wait till you’ve had to live in ‘em!” “But,” said the Warwicks, “you see, we’ve been fighting.” The large Guardsmen looked at the little worn Linesmen and swallowed it in silence. The 4th Division, to which the Warwicks belonged, had been part of that terrible northern attack along the line from Serre to Fricourt, which had spent itself in vain against the German defence a month before, and had been ground and milled day by day since. But all that the Diary notices is that that last relief was “carried out smoothly and quietly” in what to the Warwicks, after such experience, must have been grateful peace.
After their three weeks in dug-outs, the Battalion rested and washed south of merry Poperinghe which had been heavily shelled and for some days completely evacuated.
Between March 18 and July 18, excluding four weeks in rest, they had lost four officers and thirty other ranks killed; five officers and a hundred and fifty-three other ranks wounded — a total of one hundred and ninety-two, in the mere routine of the slow days.
There was a saying of the war, “no one notices weather in the front line”; and it is curious that, so soon as the Battalion was above ground, walking under naked skies with light and air all round it, men dwelt on weather as almost a new discovery. They found it hot when the Division entrained at Proven for St. Pol. Forty-two trains took the Division and forty-seven lorries bore the Battalion itself from St. Pol to Bouque-Maison on the Doullens road. There, Headquarters were in an orchard beneath unbarked trees with leaves on the branches and a background of gun-voices from the Somme, to remind the men who laughed and talked in that shadow and sun what waited for them after this short return to real life.
They moved on the 4th August to Vauchelles-les-Authies, the matchboard huts of which, on the trampled ground, have been likened to a “demobbed poultry show.” It lay just off the well-worn Doullens–Albert road, now flooded with a steady current of troops and material. They waited there for ten days. During that time 2nd Lieutenant Cook (4th Connaught Rangers),
Lieutenant T. Butler-Stoney from the Entrenching Battalion, and Lieutenant N. Butler from Hospital joined them.
The Regimental Band arrived from England for a three months’ tour. The officer who accompanied it wore a wound-stripe — the very first which the Battalion collectively had ever seen — and men wondered whether wound-stripes would become common, and how many one might accumulate. It was removed from the officer by laughing friends, as a matter something too suggestive in present company, and the band played in the still warm evenings, while the dust of feet going Sommeward rose and stretched unbroken along the Doullens — Albert pavé. Here the very tree-boles, before they began to be stripped and splintered by shellfire, were worn and rubbed beneath the touch of men’s shoulders and gnawed by the halted horses.
The King came on the 9th August to visit the Division. Special arrangements were impossible, so bombing-assault practice went on, while the officers of the Battalion were presented to him “in the orchard where the messes were pitched.” He made no orations, uttered no threats against his enemies, nor guaranteed the personal assistance of any tribal God. His regiments merely turned out and cheered the inconspicuous car as long as they could see it. But there is a story that a Frenchman, an old Royalist, in whose wood some officers had rigged a temporary hut of which he highly disapproved, withdrew every claim and complaint on the promise that the chair in which the King of England had sat should be handed over to him, duly certificated. Which was done.
On the 11th the Brigade moved over the open country via Louvencourt and Bertrancourt to the woods south of Mailly-Maillet, a six-mile march in hot and dusty weather, and the Brigade (2nd Grenadiers, 3rd Coldstream, 2nd Coldstream in reserve and 1st Irish Guards in support) took over trenches east of Englebelmer and “well within the shell area.” Thiepval and the Schwaben redoubt across the Ancre were only a thousand yards away and unsubdued; and, for a while, it looked as though that weary corner of death was to be the Guards’ objective. But, next day, orders came to move out of the line again, back to high and breezy Louvencourt in warm rain, taking over billets from the 2nd Sherwood Foresters and, by immense good luck, coming across a heaven-sent Expeditionary Force Canteen, a thing not often found in front-line billets. Upon this, pay was at once arranged for, and every one shopped at large. The incident stayed in their minds long after the details of mere battles were forgotten, and “that canteen at Louvencourt” is a landmark of old memories.
By this date the battle of the Somme was six weeks old, and our troops had eaten several — in some places as much as five or six-thousand yards deep into the area. Two main attacks had been delivered — that of the 1st July, which had lasted till the 14th, and that of the 14th, which went on till the end of the month. From Serre to Ovillers-la-Boiselle the Germans’ front stood fast; from Ovillers-la-Boiselle to the junction with the French armies at Hardecourt, the first tremendous system of their defence had been taken literally a few score yards at a time, trench by trench, village by village, quarry by quarry, and copse by copse, lost, won, and held again from three to eight or nine times. A surge forward on some part of the line might succeed in making good a few hundred yards of gain without too heavy loss. An isolated attack, necessary to clear a flank or to struggle towards some point of larger command, withered under enormous far concentrations of enemy guns, even as the woods withered to snapped, charred stickage. At every step and turn, hosts of machine-guns at ground-level swept and shaved the forlorn landscapes; and when the utmost had been done for the day, the displaced Germans seemed always to occupy the crest of some yet higher down. Villages and woods vanished in the taking; were stamped into, or blown out of the ground, leaving only their imperishable names. So, in the course of inconceivable weeks fell Mametz and the ranked woods behind it, Contalmaison, Montauban, and Caterpillar Wood, Bernafay, Trônes Wood, Longueval, and the fringe of Delville (even then a charnel-house among shattered stumps), both Bazentins, and Pozières of the Australians. The few decencies and accommodations of the old settled trench-life were gone; men lived as best they could in the open among eternal shell-holes and mounds of heaped rubbish that were liable at any moment to be dispersed afresh; under constant menace of gas, blinded with the smoke-screens of local attacks, and beaten down from every point of the compass either by enemy fire, suddenly gathered and loosed, or that of their own heavies searching, from miles off, some newly cleared hollow or skyline of the uplands where our troops lay indistinguishable from the skinned earth.
Battalions, brigades, and divisions went into the fight, were worn down in more or in less time, precisely as the chances of the ground either screened or exposed them for a while to the fire-blasts. Sometimes it was only a matter of hours before what had been a brigade ceased to exist — had soaked horribly into the ground. The wastage was brought down and back across the shell-holes as well as might be, losses were made good, and with a half, two thirds, or three quarters, new drafts, the original Battalion climbed back to its task. While some development behind the next fold of land was in progress or brought to a standstill, they would be concerned only with the life-and-death geography of the few hundred yards immediately about them, or those few score yards over which profitable advances could be made. A day, even an hour, later, the use and value of their own hollow or ridge might be altogether abolished. What had been a hardly won foothold would become the very pivot of a central attack, or subside into a sheltered haven of refuge, as the next dominating ridge or lap of the large-boned French landscape was cleared. Equally suddenly, even while the men thanked God for their respite, German batteries or a suddenly pushed-forth chain of German machine-guns would pound or spray their shelter into exposed torment once more.
As one philosopher of that unearthly epoch put it some time afterwards: “We was like fleas in a blanket, ye’ll understand, seein’ no more than the next nearest wrinkle. But Jerry and our Generals, ye’ll understand, they kept us hoppin’.”
“Our Generals,” who, it may be presumed, knew all the wrinkles of the blanket, shifted the Brigade on the 16th August opposite Serre on the far left of the line, which was not destined to be pierced till the next year. It was a fleeting transfer to another Army Corps; their own, the Fourteenth, under Lord Cavan, having joined the Fourth Army. They took over from the Somerset L.I. (61st Brigade) a set of trenches which, after their experiences in the Salient, struck them as dry, deep and good, but odd and unhomely. They had been French, were from six to nine feet deep, paved in places with stone, which our men had never seen in trenches before, and revetted with strange French stickwork. The dugouts, too, were not of their standard patterns. The front line was badly battered, but reliefs could be effected in broad daylight without casualties. The activities and comforting presence of our aeroplanes impressed them also as a great contrast to Ypres, where, naturally, our troops for the moment held only a watching-brief and every machine that could be spared had gone to the Somme. The dead of the opening battles lay thick about the place. The Irish buried two hundred of a division that had passed that way, five weeks or so before, and salved, with amazement at its plenty, the wreckage of their equipment. “There’s the world and all out there, Sorr,” said a man returning from his work. “The very world an’ all! Machine-guns and” — his voice dropping in sheer awe — ”rum-jars!” They were unmolested, save by a few minenwerfers. Un dertaker’s work does not hearten any troops, and they were glad to get back to hutments in the untouched woods behind Authie, near their old “poultry-show.” During these days 2nd Lieutenants J. N. Ward and T. Gibson joined from home, the latter going to the first line transport and Captain L. R. Hargreaves took over No. 2 Company on joining from home on the 20th.
On the 23rd August they moved with the Brigade across to Beauval on the Doullens–Amiens road (where camps and hutments almost touched each other), and on the 25th embarked at Canaples in a horror called a “tactical train,” which was stuffed with two thousand of their brigade. After slow and spasmodic efforts it bore them quite fifty kilomet
res in seven hours to Mericourt l’Abbe, whence they marched to Méaulte in a green hollow under the downs, and found themselves once more in their own Fourteenth Corps under Lord Cavan. More immediately to the point, and a thing long remembered, their billets were damp, dirty, and full of fleas; the weather that was destined to ruin the campaign broke in torrents of rain, and the continuous traffic of stuff had knocked the very bowels out of all the hard-worked roads. This was the first time they realised what the grey clinging Somme mud meant.
They trained in that wet at bombing, at assaulting from trenches, at visual signalling to aeroplanes, and at marking out trenches by night with white tapes, as scores of thousands had done before them, while the roar of the guns rose and dropped without explanation, like the tumult of unseen crowds; and rumours and contradictory orders for standing fast or leaving on the instant kept them in tension for ten days. But, most wonderful of all to the men from The Salient, where silence and guarded movement were automatic, was the loud life of this open-air world of troops around them — men and guns spread over the breadth of counties — horses in the open by thousands ranked in endless horselines — processions of roaring lorries and deep-rumbling heavy guns; and, only a few miles away — the war in full blast. It was possible to catch a ride in a lorry and go up and see “The War,” as the saying ran. Yonder, but a very little way, stretched horizons, downs, and tablelands as far as imagination could range. All the firmament groaned to the artillery hidden and striving within them; and statelily, and regularly and unceasingly, the vast spaces of open were plumed with vertical columns of changeful shell-smoke. Men perceived that everything they had known, till then, had been a field-day. Here was The War!
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 890