They moved from the Wood next day to Etricourt down the long road through Fins, and at Etricourt entrained for Beaumetz-les-Loges on the Arras–Doullens road which they reached late at night, cold and empty, and were not billeted at Berneville, two or three kilometres to the north-east, till midnight. They had lost, in November and December, two officers killed; Lieutenant N. F. Durant on the 30th November, who had joined on the 1st of that month, and 2nd Lieutenant T. A. Carey, killed on the 5th December, joined on the 24th October. (The average expectation of an officer’s life in those days on the Somme was still about six weeks, though some were so lucky they survived for months.) Four officers had been wounded in the same period: Lieutenants G. K. Thompson, Lieutenant (Acting Captain) Joyce; G. E. F. Van der Noot, and 2nd Lieutenant P. M. Riley, all on the 30th November. The following officers joined in November and December: Lieutenants Zigomala, B. F. Crewdson, D. J. B. FitzGerald and J. N. Ward; and 2nd Lieutenants H. A. A. Collett, A. W. G. Jamrack and C. A. J. Nicholson.
At Beaumetz-les-Loges they lay till the end of the year, cleaning up, refitting, drilling, and not forgetting their football — the 2nd Scots Guards beat them in the third round of the Divisional Football Competition at Arras — or their company Christmas dinners. These were the fourth that the Battalion had eaten within sound of the weary guns, but if any one had told them that their next would be celebrated in stately steam-heated barracks at Cologne, hospital would have been his portion. They could not have been called happy or hopeful at that time; for they knew, as all our armies did, that the year’s gain had been small, and the work ahead of them, now that the German divisions, released from Russia were pouring westward, would be heavy. But for the moment they were free of the Somme and its interminable duckboards that led men to death or hard work; its shell-holes floored with icy snowwater, the grave-like chill of its chalk trenches, and the life-sapping damps of the uplands on which they had lain out from nights till mornings.
Here is a memory of those days presented by the teller as a jest. “Aye! Gouzeaucourt and Gonnelieu! I’m not like to forget ‘em. I was back from leave, ye’ll understand; no more anxious to die than the rest of us. An’ there was some new men, too — new young lads just come over. My kit was all new, too, me bein’ back from leave. Our C.S.M. dhrew me attention to it one of those merry nights we was poachin’ about in No Man’s Land. ‘‘Tis a pity,’ says he, ‘ye did not bring the band from Caterham also,’ says he. ‘‘Twould have amused Jerry.’ My new kit was shqueakin’ an’ clicking the way they could have heard it a mile. Aye, Gouzeaucourt an’ the trenches outside Gonnelieu! Jerry was usin’ trench-mortars at his pleasure on us those nights. They was crackin’ on our heads, ye’ll understand. An’ I was in a bay with two men. Wan was a new young man, an’ the trench-mortars was new to him. Cowld? It was all of that! An’ Jerry crackin’ this dam’ trench mortar-stuff of his on our heads at will. It put the wind up me! Did I tell you the other man in the bay was dead! He was. That finished me new young man. He kep’ trying to make himself smaller an’ smaller against the trench-mortars. In the end of it, he laced his arrums round his ankles — he did — an’ rocked to an’ fro, whishperin’ to the Saints. Shell-shock? Oh, yes, ‘twas all that. Presintly I heard Mr. — — comin’ the rounds, walking outside the trench. Ye see more where ye’re outside a trench, but ‘tis no place I’m fond of without orders. ‘An’ are ye all cozy down there, Sergeant?’ says he. Yes, ‘cosy’ was his word! Knowin’ him well, ‘Why wud we not be cosy, Sorr?’ says I, an’ at that he dhrops into the bay to have a look. We was cosy enough, all three of us — the dead man dead an’ stiffenin’ in the frost, an’ this fine new young lad of ours embracin’ his own ankles an’ rockin’ back an’ forth, an’ me so sorry my leave was up. Oh! we was the cosiest party in the whole dam’ front line that night; and for to make it all the cosier, my new young man, as soon as he set eyes on Mr. — — , he flung his arrums around his neck, an’ he let out a yell, an’ he hugged him like a gurrl. I had to separate ‘em! I’ve laughed at it since, an’ so did Mr. — — an’, begad, I remember laughin’ at it at the time. Ay, ‘cosy,’ Mr. — — said. That was the word! So I laughed. Otherwise there was not much laughin’, ye’ll understand, at Gouzeaucourt an’ them ‘cosy’ trenches before Gonnelieu.”
* * *
Arras To The Armistice
THE LULL lasted till the 2nd of January when they marched via Warlus to Arras and were billeted in the prison there. Battalion Headquarters were in a luxurious house in the Rue d’Amiens, with a whole roof and all windows repaired with canvas. It was hard frosty weather, binding everything tight — of the kind that must be paid for when thaw comes.
At that moment our line, on the Somme side, ran from Lens just behind Oppy, through Rœux, five miles east of Arras, south to Bullecourt, south-easterly towards Boursies, round the Flesquières–Ribecourt Salient that Cambrai fight had won for us, curved back between Gonnelieu and Gouzeaucourt, and thence dropped, skirting St. Quentin and the valley of the Oise, to the junction with the French at Barisis, south of that river. This length, of close on seventy miles, was held, from Barisis to Gouzeaucourt, by Byng’s Third Army, and from Gouzeaucourt to Gavrelle, by Gough’s Fifth Army. North of this, the First Army took on. The working and reserve strength of the Third and Fifth Armies at the opening of 1918 was twenty-nine infantry and three cavalry divisions. So far as our arms were concerned, everything on the French and Belgian fronts was at a standstill. The Somme had cost very heavily throughout the year, and there was, or was said to be, a scarcity of men. The situation appears to have been met by reducing the number of battalions in the brigades from four to three apiece. This released the odd battalions to make what, on paper, and in the journals, looked like additional brigades, but threw extra work, which nowhere appeared as news, on the whole of the army administration in the field. Sir Douglas Haig’s despatches refer guardedly to the reorganization, which he hints “to some extent affected” the fighting efficiency of the units concerned. The sentiments of commanders more directly concerned were, perhaps, less publishable; for it rarely improves an old army in the field to lace it at the last moment, before a general attack, with new brigades composed of battalions suddenly disassociated from the units with whom they have been working. But thus was created the Fourth Guards Brigade, by lopping off the 4th Grenadiers, the 2nd Irish Guards, and the 3rd Coldstream from their respective brigades, and attaching them to the Thirty-first Division. Further, it was necessary for the British armies to take over another stretch of nearly thirty miles from the French on the right — approximately from Barisis to Vendhuille on the Oise — and this brought the British front up to one hundred and twenty-five miles total length.
Our enemy lay less under such burdens. His released divisions, aeroplanes, and guns were decently entraining from the Russian front, and arriving on the Somme in good order, a fact of which our Staff, and in a very short time all our armies, were perfectly aware. (“We could feel Jerry pilin’ up and pilin’ up against us in those days, ye’ll understand.”) So, as may have been pointed out, every one stood by to prepare for the worst. The Guards Division, now of nine battalions, instead of twelve, was assigned to the defences before Arras, the hinge on which the coming trouble might be expected to turn. Their trench and post system ran north and south across the Scarpe with its lagoon and marshes, by Rœux — all old and much used ground, but which had the advantage of being served both by canal and a light rail from Arras.
The Battalion, which had trained and bombed in the town till the 8th January, relieved the 3rd Grenadiers in the reserve trenches of the right sub-sector of this defence, on the 9th January, in heavy snow. Lancer Avenue, which commanded a fine view of our own lines and the enemy’s, and posts K, L, and M just off it (all south of the river), took half the strength. The remainder garrisoned Crump and Cordite Reserve trenches on the north, and supplied an isolated and unpleasant post (F) between the river and the lagoon which could only be reached with comfort a
fter dark, when an officer, twenty men, a Lewis-gun, and a couple of signallers watched there in case an enterprising enemy should be minded to raid along the tow-path.
Next day it thawed and the old horrors of Ypres Salient were their portion. The snow vanished, leaving terrible mud. The day passed quietly. Nos. 1 and 3 Companies had to find “a carrying-party for front companies in the evening.” The story behind the entry tells itself. The enemy did not add himself to their burdens. A patrol, under 2nd Lieutenant H. A. Collett, went out the next night (January 11) five hundred yards into No Man’s Land — from F post — saw and heard nothing. F post was always a ghostly sort of place, where bullets whistled by without explanation between the furred tree-trunks along the tow-path; and the marshy ground behind it was filled with shell-holes, rusty wire and the black dead of forgotten fights. The ruins of Rœux across the river, suddenly leaping to shape in the flare of Very lights, looked down on it like the skeleton of a fortress on a stage, and single unexpected shells spattered mud across the cold waters.
On the 13th January they relieved the 2nd Grenadiers at the front in a fresh assortment of decayed posts — Scabbard Alley, Scabbard Support, Welford Reserve and the like, whose names even to this day make men who served there shiver. As thaw and rain worked on them, the trenches “all fell in great lumps.”
“Why troops who had held them all the summer had done nothing to revet them and prepare for the winter, I cannot think,” one indignant sufferer wrote. “But that is always the fault of the British army. It will not look ahead.” He prophesied better than he knew. Then he went to visit his posts, where the men were already half buried in mud. The enemy assisted our repairing parties with trench-mortars at intervals, till orders went forth that, though our mortars were nowise to stir up trouble, when once it began they would retaliate for just five minutes longer than the enemy. By the misfortune of a faulty shell, one of our Stokes guns burst on the 14th, killing or wounding eight men. However, it was noted that the enemy transferred his attentions for the next few days to a battalion of East Lancashires on our right.
On the 15th all wiring and defence-work ceased — ”employed solely on trying to keep trenches passable.” In spite of which the mud gained. Men’s boots were pulled off their feet, and it is on joyous record that when Captain Gordon, the adjutant, tried to get up Johnson Avenue, their only communication-trench, he stuck up to his waist in mud and water and, lest he should be engulfed, had to wriggle out of his gum-boots, which came up to his thighs, and continue in his socks. The gum-boots, empty, sank out of sight like a wreck on the Goodwins. They reconnoitred new tracks for the reliefs, across duckboards running in full view of the enemy, who, luckily, had their own conditions to fight, and let a couple of our patrols invade No Man’s Land unmolested, prowl round two machine-gun posts and even enter a German front line, “being too busy talking and hammering to notice us.” The sodden sand-bags of the revetments bulged outwards and met across the trenches. The men worked day and night, and blessed every battalion’s remotest ancestry that had ever used, and neglected, that accursed line.
On the 17th January they were relieved by the 2nd Grenadiers, which merely meant their reverting to Crump Trench, Cordite Reserve, Ceylon Avenue, etc., where, all being equally impassable, every movement had to be effected in the open.
Our artillery chose the 18th to be very active from their positions round Battalion Headquarters near the railway cutting behind, whereby there was some enemy retaliation that the mired front line could have spared. (“Every one is looking like the worst form of tramp — standing, walking, sleeping and eating mud.”)
On the 19th they got it worse, and when No. 1 Company paraded in the dawn dark (they were in dug-outs below the rail embankment) to go to work, a shell which dropped at the entrance killed one (but he was the cook), wounded two of their number, and destroyed the whole cooking-outfit. Captain A. F. L. Gordon, M.C., was also slightly wounded on that date, but not enough to send him to hospital. He was riding into Arras with Captain Woodhouse, the M.O. — also a man of charmed lives — and just behind the railway embankment came in for a complete barrage of heavy stuff, intended for Battalion Headquarters. Neither he, nor any one else, ever understood why they were not blown to pieces. The doctor’s horse wounded was the only other casualty.
On the 22nd January the relieved 2nd Grenadiers, having handed over news of the discovery of a German listening-post which seemed to be used only by night, a scheme was arranged to occupy it while it was empty, and astonish the enemy on their return. But the enemy never came, though 2nd Lieutenant Stacpoole and a party of seven, with blackened faces and smoked bayonets, lay out for them all night. It was the same with a German working-party, fifty strong, located by our patrols on the 22nd, sought on the 23rd, and found missing. The enemy were anxious not to give any chances just then, for identifications; and, ‘though they raided generously in other directions, left the Guards’ sector by the Scarpe unvisited. They delivered mortar bombardments when reliefs were due, and were attended to by our artillery at dusk with a desultory but at the same time steady shelling, just enough to keep the five principal offenders’ crews in their dug-outs. It worked admirably, and the enemy mortars, as registered on the maps, were quiet for a whole evening. After one such treatment (the night of the 25th January) they drenched the Decauville railway, just when the Battalion had railed back to Arras on relief by the 1st Grenadiers, with an hour’s intense barrage of gas-shells, and a sprinkling of 5.9’s and 4.2’s. Battalion Headquarters were waiting to follow: and all the men had been sent down the line because rail-head was no healthy place to linger at. A company of the 2nd Grenadiers, newly relieved, came up and also waited for the little train in the still moonlight night, and drank hot tea while a spare engine was being coupled up. Every one thought (inevitable prelude to calamity!) that, after sixteen days in the trenches, his troubles were over. Then a gas-shell skimmed over the line which at this point had a cutting on one side and an embankment on the other. All hands fled to the embankment side and hugged it for precisely one hour while the air screamed to the curious whiplash-like noise of the gas-shells splintering, and filled with the fumes of them. The engine bolted down the line before it should be blown up, and when, on the stroke of ten, shelling ceased, Battalion Headquarters, Father Browne and the Doctor, Captain Woodhouse, and the Grenadiers’ Company stumbled as best they could along the sleepers towards Arras. Every one missed every one else in the confusion, while the Irish orderlies raged through the crowd like angry nurses, in search of their officers. But at last all hands were accounted for, blind, coughing, and, thanks to the nose-clips of the masks, mostly with sore noses. They got into Arras at midnight, and a good many of the Grenadiers had to be sent down for gas injuries.
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 900