With these stage-directions clear in their mind, they went into the line on the 16th May, after a quiet relief, and took over from the Coldstream the sector from Railway Wood, the barricades across the railway, the big dug-out which had been an old mine, under Railway Wood, and disposed their reserves near Hell Fire Corner and the Menin road. It was ground they knew and hated, but since they had last eaten dirt there, our own listening-post, which had been the point of departure for the Coldstream patrol, on whose reports the raid would be based, had been withdrawn one hundred and fifty yards down the railway line. Apparently no one had realised this, and the captain (Platt) of the Coldstream Company, who had this sector when the 2nd Irish Guards relieved, had been killed while out wiring a couple of nights before. Consequently, that patrol had reconnoitred inside our own front; had mistaken our own wire for the German, had followed it to one of our own disused posts, and had seen and heard a listening-post of the 2nd Grenadiers which they, quite logically, assumed to be German and reported as such. Everything fitted in like a jigsaw puzzle, but all was based on a line which had been shifted — as the Battalion perceived the moment they took over the sector. So there was no attack with clubs and brown veils by the 2nd Irish Guards on the 2nd Grenadiers’ listening-post then, or afterwards, and the moral of the story was “verify your data.” (“No living man could tell from one day to the next — let alone nights — which was our line and which was Jerry’s. ‘Twas broke an’ gapped and turned round every way, and each battalion had its own fancy-trenches dug for to make it worse for the next that took over. The miracle was — an’ how often have I seen it! — the miracle was that we did not club each other in the dark every night instead of — instead of when we did.”)
The Battalion went on, sadly, with its lawful enterprises of running wire and trench from the high ground under Railway Wood toward the shifted barricade on the railway itself; and digging saps to unstable mine-craters that had, some way or other, to be worked into their ever-shifting schemes of defence. All this under machine-gun fire on bright nights, when, as the cruel moon worked behind them, each head showing above ground-level was etched in black for the snipers’ benefit. On their right flank, between their own division and the Canadians, lay a gap of a quarter of a mile or so, which up till then had been imperfectly looked after by alternate hourly patrols. (“And in the intervals, any Germans who knew the way might have walked into Ypres in quest of souvenirs.”) It had to be wired and posted, and, at the same time, a huge, but for the moment dry, mine-crater directly in front of the right company’s shattered trench, needed linking up and connecting with another crater on the left. Many dead men lay in the line of that sap, where, at intervals, enemy rifle-grenades would lob in among the sickened workers. The moonlight made the Germans active as rats every night, and, since it was impossible to wire the far sides of the craters in peace, our people hit upon the idea of pushing “knife-rests”-ready wired trestles out in the desired direction with poles, after dark. Be it noted, “This is a way, too much neglected, of wiring dangerous places. Every description of ‘puzzy-wuzzy’ can be made by day by the eight company wirers, and pushed out. Then on the first dark night, a few metal pegs and a strand or two of wire passed through the whole thing, makes an entanglement that would entangle a train.” (The language and emotions of the fatigue-parties who sweated up the unhandy “knife-rests” are not told.) Half the Battalion were used to supply the wants of the other half; for rations and water could only creep to within a couple of hundred yards of Hell Fire Corner, where the parties had to meet them and pack them the rest of the way by hand. The work of staggering and crawling, loaded with sharp-angled petrol-tins of water along imperfect duck-boards, is perhaps a memory which will outlast all others for the present generation. “The fatigues kill — the fatigues kill us” — as the living and the dead knew well.
On the 18th May they were drenched with a five hours’ bombardment of 4.2’s and “woolly bears.” It blew in one of their trenches (West Lane) and killed two men and wounded an officer of the Trench Mortar Battery there. But the height of the storm fell, as usual, round Hell Fire Corner, never a frequented thoroughfare by daylight, and into an abandoned trench. “They could hardly have put down so much shell anywhere else in our line and have got so small a bag. Only one man in the company was wounded.” The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but a battalion that works strenuously on its parapets and traffic-trenches gets its reward, even in the Salient in ‘16. Battalion Headquarters, always fair target for a jest, is derided as taking “a severe fright from a shell that pitched twenty yards away, but it was an obvious error in bowling, and was not repeated.” Our guns fired throughout the next day, presumably in retaliation, but, like all troops in trenches, the Battalion had no interest in demonstrations that did not directly affect their food and precious water-tins. They were relieved on the 21st of May by the 6th Oxford and Bucks of the Twentieth Division, and went off to camp near Proven for ten days’ Corps Reserve, when “almost the entire Battalion was on fatigue, either building military railways or cleaning up reserve-lines of trenches.”
AFTER HOOGE
On the 1st June they moved out of that front altogether, to billets at the back of Wormhoudt fourteen miles away, and thence on the next day, June 2, to Bollezeele westward, while the enemy were making their successful attack on the Canadians at Hooge. (“Have ye noticed there is always trouble as soon as you come out of the line; or, maybe, being idle you pay the more attention to it. Annyway, the minute we was out of it, of course Jerry begins to play up and so Hooge happened, and that meant more fatigue for the Micks.”) Meantime, they were in “G.H.Q. Reserve” for a fortnight, busy on a rehearsal-line of English and German trenches which the R.E. had laid down for them to develop. Our G.H.Q. were thinking of the approaching campaign on the Somme. The enemy were intent on disarranging our plans just as our guns were moving southward. Hooge was their spoke in our wheel. It came not far short of success; for it pinned a quantity of shellable troops to weak ground, directly cost the lives of several thousands of them and added a fresh sore to the Salient’s many weaknesses in that it opened a fortnight’s fierce fighting, with consequent waste, as well as diversion, of supplies. While that battle, barren as the ground it won and lost, surged back and forth, the Battalion at Bollezeele gained a glory it really appreciated by beating the 3rd Grenadiers in the ring, six fights out of nine, at all, weights. Specially they defeated Ian Hague (late heavy-weight champion of England) whom Corporal Smith of the Battalion settled “on points.” There would be time and, perhaps, warning to attend to Death when He called. Till then, young and active life was uppermost, and had to be catered for. Indeed, their brigadier remarked of the social side of that boxing entertainment that “it reminded him of Ascot.”
But at the back of everything, and pouring in hourly by official or unofficial word, was the news of the changing fortunes of Hooge. Would that postpone or advance the date of the “spring meeting,” not in the least like Ascot, that they had discussed so long? Whichever way war might go, the Guards would not be left idle.
On the evening of the 13th June the order came “telling us that we would move up next day to Hooge and take over a section of the line from a Canadian brigade.” They went off in motor lorries, and by the evening of the 15th the Battalion was once more in the packed Infantry Barracks of Ypres where the Canadian officers made Battalion Headquarters their guests till things could be sorted out. Our counterattack of the 13th June had more or less come to rest, leaving the wrecked plinths of the houses of Hooge, and but very little more, in the enemy’s hands, and both sides were living on the last edge of their nerves. Proof of this came on the night of the 16th, when the Battalion in barracks was waiting its turn. An SOS. went up in the dark from somewhere north of the Menin road, that stony-hearted step-mother of calamity; some guns responded and, all in one instant, both sides’ artillery fell to it full-tongued, while “to make everything complete a gas
-signal was given by one of our battalions. A terrific bombardment ensued. Later in the night, the performance was repeated, less the gas-alarm.”
The explanation was as simple as human nature. Both sides had taken bad knocks in the past fortnight. Both artilleries, largely increased, were standing by ready for trouble, and what else could one expect — save a detonation? But local rumour ran that the whole Gehenna had been started by one stray ration-party which, all communication-trenches being blown in, was toiling to the front line in the open and showed against the sky-line — quite enough, at that tension, to convince the enemy that it was the head of a fresh infantry attack. The rest came of itself: but the gas-alarm was the invention of the Devil himself. It upset the dignity of all the staffs concerned, for the Brigadier himself, the H.Q. Staff of the Coldstream as well as the C.O. and company officers of the 2nd Irish Guards who were visiting preparatory to taking over the sector, found themselves in one tiny room beneath a brick-kiln, all putting on their helmets at once, and, thereafter, all trying to explain their views of the crisis through them. Some have since compared that symposium to a mass-meeting of unemployed divers; others to a troupe of performing seals.
They relieved the 1st Coldstream, very quietly, on the night of the 18th June in an all but obliterated section of what had been the Canadians’ second line and was now our first, running from the Culvert, on the Menin road, west of Hooge, through Zouave Wood, and into the north end of Sanctuary Wood. Four to eight hundred yards lay between them and the enemy, who were settling down in the old Canadian front line across the little swampy valley. The left of the Irish Guards’ sector was, even after the Coldstream had worked on it for three days, without dug-outs, and blown in in places, but it offered a little cover. Their right line, for nearly half a mile, was absolutely unrecognizable save in a few isolated spots. The shredded ground was full of buried iron and timber which made digging very difficult, and, in spite of a lot of cleaning up by their predecessors, dead Canadians lay in every corner. It ran through what had once been a wood, and was now a dreary collection of charred and splintered stakes, “to the tops of which, blown there by shells, hung tatters of khaki uniform and equipment.” There was no trace of any communication-trenches, so companies had to stay where they were as long as the light lasted. Battalion H.Q. lived in the brick-kiln aforementioned, just west of the Zillebeke road, and company commanders walked about in the dark from one inhabited stretch to the next, trusting in Providence. So, too, did the enemy, whom Captain Alexander found, to the number of six, ambling promiscuously in the direction of Ypres. They challenged, he fired, and they blundered off — probably a lost wiring-party. In truth, neither front line knew exactly where the other lay in that chaos; and, both being intent upon digging themselves in ere the guns should begin again, were glad enough to keep still. Our observation-parties watched the Germans as they crept over the ridge at dusk and dropped into the old Canadian line, where their policies could be guessed at from the nature of the noises they made at work; but no one worried them.
On the 20th June an unlucky shell pitched into No. 1 Company, killing three, wounding two, and shocking five men; otherwise there was quiet, and their brigadier came round the support-trenches that day and complimented all hands on their honesty as craftsmen. As he said, it would have been easy for them to have slacked off on their last night in a position to which they were not returning, whereas they had worked like beavers, and so the battalion which relieved them (the Royal Canadian Regiment resting at Steenvoorde since Hooge where it had lost three hundred men) found good cover and fair wire all along the sector. The Canadians were late, for their motor buses went adrift somewhere down the road, and the Battalion only “just caught the last train” out of Ypres and reached camp near Vlamertinghe at dawn on the 21st June.
It had been a strange interlude of ash-pits and charnel-houses, sandwiched between open-air preparations, for that always postponed “spring meeting.” No troops are the better for lying out, unrelieved by active reprisals, among shrivelled dead; and even the men, who love not parades, were pleased at a few days of steady barrack-square drill, when a human being walks and comports himself as though he were a man, and not a worm in the mire or a slave bound to bitter burdens and obscene tasks. At Vlamertinghe they found, and were glad to see him, Captain FitzGerald, recovered after three weeks’ sickness in England, and joyfully back before his time; and Lieutenant R. McNeill, who had acted as Adjutant, returned to the command of No. 2 Company in the absence of Captain Bird, gone sick. They were busied at Battalion H.Q. with the preparation of another raid to be carried out on the night of the 2nd July “as part of the demonstration intended to occupy the attention of the Germans in this locality while more important events were happening elsewhere.” Lieutenant F. Pym, a bold, daring, and collected officer, was chosen to command the little action, and each company sent up eight volunteers and one sergeant, from whom thirty men and one sergeant were finally picked and set to rehearsing every detail.
On the 28th June they moved up to within four miles of the front and lay at Elverdinghe — two companies and Battalion H.Q. in the Château itself, where they were singularly comfortable, and two in the canal bank, in brick and sand-bag dug-outs. It was true that all furniture and pictures had gone from the Château with the window-glass, and that swallows nested in the cornices of the high, stale-smelling rooms, but the building itself, probably because some trees around blocked direct observation, was little changed, and still counted as one of the best places in the line for Brigade reserves. Their trenches, however, across the battered canal presented less charm. The front line was “dry on the whole,” but shallow; the support quite good, but the communication-trenches (it was the Battalion’s first experience of Skipton Road) were variously wet, blown in, swamped, or frankly flooded with three feet of water. Broken trenches mean broken companies and more work for company commanders, but some of the platoons had to be scattered about in “grouse butts” and little trenches of their own, a disposition which tempts men to lie snug, and not to hear orders at the first call.
THE RAID OF THE 2ND JULY
All through the 1st of July our guns bombarded their chosen front with the object of cutting, not too ostentatiously, the wire where our raid was going to take place, and of preparing the way on the right for an attack by the 3rd Guards Brigade on a small German salient that had to be reduced. The enemy answered with a new type of trench-mortar shell, nine inches in diameter, fired from a rifled mortar of high trajectory at a thousand yards’ range. The shock and smash of it were worse than a 5.9, and did much damage to Nile Trench, but caused no casualties. The 2nd July was the day for the raid itself, and just as Battalion Headquarters were discussing the very last details, an urgent message from Brigade Headquarters came in to them — ”Please hasten your report on pork and bean rations.”
The notion was that our 18-pounders and 4.5 hows. with a couple of trench-mortars, would open heavily at twenty minutes to ten. Ten minutes later, the Stokes mortars were to join in. At ten the guns would lift and make a barrage while the Stokes mortars attended to the flanks of the attack. It was a clear evening, so light, indeed, that at the last minute the men were told to keep their jackets on lest their shirts should betray them. (It was then, men said later, that the raid should have been postponed.) Everything was quite quiet, and hardly a shot was being fired anywhere, when the party lined up under Lieutenant F. Pym. Our bombardment opened punctually, but drew no answer from the enemy for ten minutes. Then they put down a barrage behind our front line, which was the origin of all the trouble to come. At the last minute, one single unrelated private, appearing from nowhere in particular, was seen to push his way down the trench, climbing over the raiders where they crouched waiting for the life-or-death word. Said an officer, who assumed that at the least he must bear vital messages: “Who are you?” “R.F.A. trench-mortar man, sir,” was the reply. Then, “Where the devil are you going?” — ”Going to get my tea, sir.” He passed on
, mess-tin in hand, noticing nothing that was outside of his own immediate show; for of such, mercifully, were the armies of England.
Meantime the enemy barrage increased on Nile Trench, and the front trenches began to gap badly. There was still light enough to give a good view of the German parapets when our raiders went over the top, and several machine-guns opened on them from the enemy second line. This was a bad kick-off, for, with our leading raiders out in the open, it would have been murder to have held the rest back. They all went on into the barrage and the machine-gun fire, and from that point the account of what actually, or supposedly, happened must, as usual, be collected from survivors. The whole attack seems to have reached the German wire which was “well cut in places.” Here our men were checked by machine-gun fire (they probably ran up to the muzzles of them) and some bombing. They stopped and began to bomb back. Pym rushed forward through the leading men, jumped into the trench, landed in an empty German bay, shouting to them to follow, turned left with a few men, reached the door of a machine-gun dug-out with its gun in full blast, broke in, found two men at work, knocked one of them off the gun and, with the help of Private Walshe, made him prisoner. Our bombers, meantime, had spread left and right, as laid down, to hold each end of the captured section, but had further to block a communicationtrench which entered it about the middle, where the enemy was trying to force his way in. It is difficult to say whether there was not an attack on both flanks as well. At any rate, a general bomb-scuffle followed, in which our men held up the enemy and tried to collect prisoners. The captured section of trench only contained one dead and five living. One of these “proved unmanageable and had to be killed.” Four were hurried back under escort for samples, but two of these were killed by their own shell-fire on the road. The R.E. officer looked round, as his duty was, to find things to demolish, but the trench was clean and empty. He was hit twice, but managed to get back. Three gas-experts had also been attached to the expedition. Two of them were wounded on the outward run. The third searched the trench but found no trace of gas engines. Some papers and documents were snatched up from the dug-outs, but he who took charge of them did not live to hand over. The barrage grew heavier; the machine-gun fire from the enemy second line never ceased; and the raiders could see the home-parapet going up in lumps. It was an exquisitely balanced choice of evils when, at about ten past ten, Lieutenant Pym blew his horn for the withdrawal. A minute or two later, men began to trickle over our parapet through the barrage, and here the bulk of the casualties occurred. Our guns ceased fire at twenty past ten, but the enemy battered savagely at our front line with heavies and trench-mortars till eleven. The result was that “the front line, never very good, became chaotic, and the wounded had to be collected in undamaged bays.” It was hopeless to attempt to call the roll there, so what raiders could stand, with the two surviving prisoners, were sent up to Brigade Headquarters while the wounded were got across the open to Lancashire Farm and the trolley-line there. Pym was nowhere to be found, and though some men said, and honestly believed, that they had seen him re-enter our lines, he was not of the breed which would have done this till he had seen the last of his command out of the German trenches. He may have got as far as the German wire on his way back and there, or in that neighbourhood, have been killed; but he was never in our trench again after he left it. Others, too, of that luckless party bore themselves not without credit. For example, a signaller, name not recorded, who laid his telephone wire up to the trench across No Man’s Land and had it cut by a shell while he was seeking for Lieutenant Pym. On his return he came across a man shot in the legs, and bore him, under heavy shell and machine-gun fire, to our wire which was not constructed for helpless wounded to get through. The signaller dropped into the trench, calling on Sergeant O’Hagan, a busy man that night, for stretcher-bearers, but these had all been hit. The Sergeant suggested that he should telephone to Battalion Headquarters and draw some from there. The telephonist — perhaps because a doctor rarely uses his own drugs — preferred to put the case directly to a couple of men in No. 2 Company, at the same time indicating the position of the wounded man, and those three handed him down into the very moderate safety that our front line then offered. And again, when Sergeant Austen, the sergeant of the raid, was hit and fell in German wire, one of the raiders stayed with him awhile, and finally dragged him to our line, with the usual demand for bearers. This time they were all busy, but he found Lieutenant F. Greer and that officer’s servant, whom he had led forth, and “in spite of heavy machine-gun fire,” they brought in the Sergeant. Unluckily, just at the end of the German bombardment, Lieutenant Synge was very badly hit while in the front line. The raid had been a fair, flat, but heroic failure, due, as most men said, to its being loosed in broad daylight at a fully prepared enemy. Outside the two prisoners, nothing, not even a scrap of paper, was gained except the knowledge that the Battalion could handle such affairs as these in their day’s work, put it all equably behind them, and draw fresh lessons for fresh to-morrows. (“We lost one dam’ good officer, and more good men than was worth a thousand Jerries, but, mark you, we might have lost just that same number any morning in the front line, as we have lost them again and again, under the expenditure of half a dozen, maybe one, shell the devil happened to be riding that time. And them that it took would never have had even the exercise, let alone the glory, of all them great doings of ours. So, ye see, everything in war is good luck or bad.”)
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 917