The month closed with the Battalion nominally at Arras, and actually finding more than two thirds of its strength for working-parties in the filthy front line — a favour which it had not received itself while there. Its casualty list for January was extraordinarily low, being only two men killed and twenty-six wounded, one officer, Captain Gordon, wounded and one, 2nd Lieutenant D. A. B. Moodie in hospital. During the month, 2nd Lieutenants A. S. Stokes and L. H. L. Carver joined, and 2nd Lieutenant A. W. G. Jamrack rejoined from the Reinforcement Battalion.
On the 1st February orders came that the line was to be held by all three brigades of the Guards Division instead of two; for it must be remembered that each brigade was short one battalion. The rearrangement drew more heavily on the working-parties in the forward area where a new, foul trench — Hyderabad Support — was under way. They supplied from two to four hundred men as need was, and lived in Arras prison in luxury — wire beds and palliasses for every man! — till the 6th February, when they relieved the 2nd Coldstream in the front line. The support-trenches here were the best they had found, being deep, duckboarded, well revetted and with plenty of dug-outs and an enviable system of cook-houses delivering hot meals in the actual trenches. They sent working-parties to the insatiable engineers and the brigade at large; for fresh trenches were being sketched out, if not built, against the impending German attack.
The front line from the 10th to the 13th February was remarkably quiet but not easy. Their patrols found no enemy, nor any sign of them in No Man’s Land; a little wiring of nights was possible; and there were no casualties. But the trench-strength of the Battalion was weak — 16 officers and 398 ranks, and every one had to work double-tides to keep the ways open.
They were relieved on St. Valentine’s Day, two days after the 4th Guards Brigade, which took with them the 2nd Irish Guards, had been formed under Lord Ardee, and added to the Thirty-first Division.
Three days in Arras prison saw them back again in support just in time to get the full benefit of another day’s thaw. It was a quiet tour. One man was killed by a trench-mortar, one badly wounded by a rifle-grenade, seven by shell-splinters outside a dug-out, and five men gassed. The enemy confined himself to long-range trench-mortars and an “increase in aerial activity.” He was noticed to “object very strongly to our air-craft crossing his lines.” Never was enemy more anxious not to draw attention to his moves. And, far behind our line at Arras and elsewhere, men dug and entrenched and sketched works of defence to meet the German rush, while the front trenches sat still and looked across deserts, apparently empty of life, till a head moved in the open. It was a season without parallel in our armies’ experience — this mere waiting for a certain blow to be dealt at a certain time. No written history records the psychology of those spring days. The Diary is concerned with the Battalion’s own sorrow. Here is the story, as written: “During the month [February] the Household Battalion was disbanded and eighty men were allotted to the Battalion. This marks the beginning, and is the first official recognition of the fact that the Irish Guards cannot keep up the supply of Irish troops. A most regrettable epoch in the history of the regiment.” On the heels of this comes, comically enough, almost the sole personal expression of feeling in the entire Diary. They went, on the last day of February, into rest at Gordon Camp, christened after the 9th Gordons who made it. “It is without exception the most comfortable and best-laidout camp I have ever been in. Everything that one could possibly wish for is here — even an officer’s bathroom with porcelain bath and hot and cold water laid on.” It was an all-too-short interval in cold and dirty work; for on the 2nd March the Scarpe trenches reclaimed them — Fampoux, Colt Reserve, Pepper and Pudding — in snow, sleet, and unbroken monotony of working-parties.
On the 6th March the Diary notes that the 2nd Grenadiers, whom they relieved the next day, carried out a raid, successful in itself, and doubly so as drawing no retaliation on their own line. It resulted in two identifiable prisoners and a machine-gun. But battalions do not approve of their neighbours raiding when the enemy is “nervous.”
THE MARCH PUSH
Their next front-line turn — 6th to 10th March — was utterly uneventful, and on the 12th they, being then in Stirling Camp, were ordered to “stand to” for the expected German offensive. It proved to be no more than a light shelling. So the still fine days, in line or in support, ran out till the dawn of the 21st March when the great shells suddenly descended on Arras, and rumours, worse than any shelling, followed their tracks. Says the Diary: “The German offensive has begun.”
The evacuation of the town, during the next two days, was a nightmare of flying masonry, clouds of dust, the roar of falling brick-work, contradictory orders, and mobs of drifting civilians, their belongings pushed before or hauled after them; and no power to order them where to go. Arras, always in the front line, had been safe so long, it was inconceivable that there should be real danger now. Might they not camp out and return to-morrow? But the enemy were reported almost in sight, and ready to open on the town with their field-guns. They had broken through, men said, under cover of the heavy morning fog — broken through everywhere along the line of all our old gains from Lens to St. Quentin, and their whole strength was behind the blow. No one could understand it, though all men argued; and while the refugees fled forth, expostulating, blaming, but seldom weeping, that sunny day, eight hundred shells fell purposefully on the dishevelled town. By evening word came that our Somme line had not only broken but gone out — infantry, artillery and uncounted stores — between Chérisy and Demicourt in the north. South of that, the old Cambrai Salient, which had not been hardly tried, was standing but would have to withdraw or be cut off, because, from Gouzeaucourt to La Fère, ten miles and more south of St. Quentin, the German tide had swept in from one to three miles deep, and was racing forward. It is not difficult to imagine what manner of reports the mere truth gave birth to, while the Battalion waited on in the Communal College where it was billeted, and was not encouraged to wander about the rocking, sliding streets.
By the evening of the 22nd March men began to understand it was no mere break-through but a collapse such as had never befallen British arms in the history of her people. Officers were sent out in the morning to reconnoitre the support-line of a third system of defence between Wancourt and Hénin-sur-Cojeul. But Hénin-sur-Cojeul was already under the hand of the enemy, who had gained three more miles in a few hours and, left and right, were widening the breach.
The morning of the 22nd March had been foggy again till noon and, under that cover, the Germans had again broken in on our surprised or withdrawing divisions. Report said that whole battalions and even brigades had been cut off by the flood; their wireless working faithfully so long as it stood, and the sound of their small-arm fire continuing for a while after their last words had ceased. Late that evening orders came for the Battalion to move at midnight from Arras to Boisleux-St. Marc, some six miles due south of the town on a line more or less prepared against eventualities, and, with their brigade, to give what help they could to the divisions who might be falling back on that front. This was all that could be made out of the mass of contradictory orders that afflicted them, and the growing crop of rumours and alarms that upset men almost more than any countermanded orders.
The Battalion set to work on the 23rd March to dig a support-line in rear of what was called the Army Line which ran in front of Boisleux-St. Marc while the evacuation of Arras was being completed and “all details and drummers marched to the Reinforcement Battalion at Agnez-les-Duisans,” on the Scarpe well to the west of Arras. (“In those days we was throubled the way a man is disthressed in dhreams. All manner of things happening, ye’ll understand, and him the only one able to do nothing. But I wisht I’d been a musicaner.”)
The Diary for the 24th March merely says, “remained in same positions,” and refers to “repeated rumours.” They sent their first-line transport back out of harm’s way, and went on digging. Yet the 24th was
a day no rumour could have painted much blacker than it was. From directly in front of the Guards Division at Boisleux, the line of the German gains in the past forty-eight hours dropped straight south to the Somme at Cléry, and thence skirted its western bank to Ham, where it broke across to the wide marshes of the Oise below La Fère. Two thirds of the hardbought ground of the Somme campaign, the scores of villages whose names smelt of blood, were lost, and the harvesting of the remainder was a matter barely of hours.
Next day saw Béhagnies, Grévillers, Irles of the wired bastions, Miraumont, Pys, Courcelette, Contalmaison, Thiepval and its myriad dead, and Pozières of the Australians — the very hearts of the deadliest of the first fightings — overrun; and the question rose in men’s minds whether the drive would end, as was intended, in the splitting apart of the French and British armies. For what was happening north of the Somme was play to the situation south of it. There the enemy’s swarms of aeroplanes harried the Amiens hospitals, driving the civilians into the broadside of the country behind, where the moonlight nights betrayed them to fresh hosts in the air.
By the 26th March the tongue of the advancing tide had licked past Noyon and Roye and, next day, had encircled Montdidier. Meantime, our old Somme base on the Ancre, whence the great fights were fed and supplied from the hundred camps and dumps round Méaulte, and the railway-sidings between Albert and Amiens, had passed into the enemy’s hands. To all human appearance, the whole of our bitter year’s effort was abolished, as though it had never been. The enemy had prepared, brought together, and struck at the time that best suited himself, with seventy-three divisions against thirty-seven British divisions, and the outcome was appalling defeat of our arms.
It would thus seem that no amount of inspiring statesmanship at home, or anxious readjustment of divisions at the front, will make troops where troops are not. Therefore the battalions and batteries in the full blast of the onset perished or were taken prisoners; and of the stores captured or destroyed, lest they should benefit the enemy, we may look to receive no account. Not the least depressing of the sights that adorned the landscapes were the dumps lit by our own hands, flaring to heaven when, as turned out afterwards, there was really no need. Divisions were being raced up to reinforce the fluid front as fast as might be, but no one knew for certain when or where they would arrive, and Camp Commandants acted on their own judgments. The battalions in the line swayed to conflicting storms of orders.
“STANDING-TO”
On the 25th, being still at Boisleux-St. Marc, the 1st Irish Guards were detailed to relieve “several different units,” but more specially the 1st Coldstream just east of Hamelincourt then practically in possession of the enemy. (One found out where the enemy were by seeing them come over the brows of unexpected slopes in small groups that thinned out and settled down to machine-gunning under cover of equally unexpected field-guns.) They spent the whole day being “hit and held” in this fashion, and, close on midnight, got definite instructions not to wait for any relief but to go off to the sugar-factory near Boyelles, which they did, and bestowed themselves in huts in the neighbourhood, and there were hotly shelled during the night. The German attack was well home on that sector now, and the German infantry might be looked for at any moment. They removed from those unhealthy huts to an old trench next morning, where their first set of orders was to relieve the 1st Scots Guards. (Order, provisional, definite and cancelled all in two hours and a half!) Later came orders — equally definite, equally washed out later — to relieve the 2nd Coldstream in another sector, and finally just before midnight they relieved the 1st Scots Guards after all. That battalion had been in the army line between St. Léger and Hénin, but the enemy’s advance had forced it back in the direction of Boisleux-St. Marc near the Arras–Albert railway-line. The Battalion found it a little before dawn, and lay out with all four companies in the front line, as did the other battalions. By this time, though it would be not easy to trace their various arrivals in the confusion, the Guards Brigades had got into line between Boisleux-St. Marc and Ayette, on a front of roughly three and a half miles, while battalions of exhausted and withdrawing divisions, hard pressed by the enemy, passed through them each with its burden of bad news. It was not an inspiriting sight, nor was the actual position of the Guards Brigades one to be envied. High ground commanded them throughout, and a number of huts and half-ruined buildings gave good cover to the gathering machine-guns. The German advance on that quarter resembled, as one imaginative soul put it, an encompassment of were-wolves. They slouched forward, while men rubbed tired eyes, in twos and threes, at no point offering any definite target either for small-arm or artillery, and yet, in some wizard fashion, always thickening and spreading, while our guns from the rear raged and tore uselessly at their almost invisible lines. Incidentally, too, our own gun-fire in some sectors, and notably behind the Fourth Guards Brigade, did our men no service. But the most elaborate of preparations have an end, and must culminate in the charge home.
An intense barrage on the morning of the 27th March heralded the crisis, but luckily went wide of all the Battalion except No. 2 Company on the left. The attack followed, and down the trenched line from Ayette and Boisleux-St. Marc, the Brigade answered with unbroken musketry and Lewis-guns. It was an almost satisfactory slaughter, dealt out by tired, but resolute, men with their backs to the wall. Except for occasional rushes of the enemy, cut down ere they reached the wire, there was nothing spectacular in that day’s work. The Battalion shot and kept on shooting as it had been trained to do in the instruction-camps and on the comfortable ranges that seemed now so inconceivably far away. The enemy, having direct observation over the whole of our line, shot well and close. We suffered, but they suffered more. They ranged along the front from north to south as waves range down the face of a breakwater, but found nothing to carry away or even dislodge. Night closed in with a last rush at the wire on the Battalion’s front that left a wreckage of German dead and wounded, and two machine-guns horribly hung up in the strands. Our losses in officers were 2nd Lieutenant Stokes severely wounded in the morning, and in the afternoon, Lieutenant Nash killed, and Captain Derek FitzGerald wounded and sent down. Lieut.-Colonel R. V. Pollok and Lieutenants Bence-Jones and Bagenal were also slightly wounded but remained at duty. When an officer dropped and could not get up again without help he was assumed to be unfit for work — but not before.
(“Ye’ll understand, ‘twas no question, those days, what ye could or could not do. Ye did it.”)
And so ended the 27th of March with the German front from Lens to Albert held up, and destined, though men then scarce dared believe, not to advance to another effective surge. The French and British armies were perilously near forced asunder now and, the needs of the case compelling what might have been done long ago, General Foch in the little city of Doullens was, on the 26th March, given supreme command of all the hard-pressed hosts. The news went out at once into the front line where men received it as part and parcel of the immense situation. Nothing could have astonished them then, or, unless it directly concerned food or rest, have made them think.
The Battalion was placed where it was to endure, and was thankful that the 28th was a “fairly quiet day” but for heavy shelling on their right, and trench-mortars and shells on themselves. No. 2 Company, who had been unlucky with the big barrage the day before, suffered once again.
Next day (29th March), which was another “quiet” occasion, Lieutenant Zigomala was wounded and forty “of the most tired men” were relieved by an equal number from the Reinforcement Battalion, which relief became systematized, as it eased the strain a little to clear out visibly finished men day by day. All were worn down but “remained cheerful.” Those who have full right to speak affirm that, in absolutely impossible situations, the Irish could be trusted to “play up” beyond even a cockney battalion. The matter will always be in dispute, but none know better than the men who saw the Push through how superbly the mud-caked, wire-drawn platoons bore themselves.
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On the 30th March the attack rolled up again from the south where it had met no particular encouragement, and barraged the Battalion’s sector with heavies for a couple of hours; causing forty-two casualties among the men and wounding Lieutenants Stacpoole and Bagenal. It then fell upon the 2nd Grenadiers and 1st Coldstream immediately to the Battalion’s left and right, and was driven off with loss. There were other attacks, but with less venom in them, before the Hun could be induced to withdraw. Half the Battalion spent the night digging a line of posts in support which they occupied by dawn.
On the last of March “nothing of importance occurred.” Everything, indeed, had occurred already. The old Somme salient which, English fashion, had become an institution, was completely reversed on the ominous newspaper maps. The Germans stood a-tiptoe looking into Amiens, and practically the entire spare strength of the British armies in France had been used and used up to bring them to that stand. The French were equally worn down. The American armies were not yet in place, and what reinforcing divisions were ready in England somewhat lacked training.
The Battalion, a straw among these waves, had in the month lost, besides officers, twenty-three other ranks killed and one hundred and seven wounded and one missing. It is even reported that there had been many days on which, owing to press of work, they had not shaved. (“That, ye’ll understand, is being dirty, an’ a crime. Believe me, now, there was times when we was all criminals, even Mr. — — an’ it disthressed him more than bloody war.”)
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 901