FOOTNOTES:
[37] The official title of the campaign is "The Battles of Ypres, 1917"; that of the action of August 16th, in which the 36th Division took part, "The Battle of Langemarck."
[38] The attack, after very heavy losses, was stopped by the orders of the French Government. History will decide whether the stopping was right or wrong. General Mangin, who commanded an Army in it, has given his reasons for the belief that the attack should have continued.
[40] History of the 9th (Scottish) Division. By John Ewing.
[CHAPTER VII]
Ypres to Cambrai: September to November 1917
Having once more left its Artillery and Pioneers in line, under the orders of another division, the 36th Division, after four days' rest about Winnizeele, moved south by train. The troops detrained at Bapaume and Miraumont, ruins now, upon the church steeples of which some of them had looked from the Mesnil Ridge a little over a year before. With the Division moved the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Fusiliers. This regular battalion had joined the Division in the Salient before the Battle of Langemarck, but had not taken part in that dolorous affair. Its arrival was highly significant. It was a sign of the shortage of recruits from home. The 36th Division had not been made up to strength between Messines and Langemarck, and was now deplorably below it.
The country into which the troops stepped from their trains was of a like they had not yet seen in all their active service. Behind them lay the "shelled" area; that in which they now stood was the "devastated" area. The former was featureless to an indescribable degree. Marks of battle there were few, save for the stumps of trees. All the countryside, its débris and its shell-holes, was covered with a mass of very coarse grass. There were not even ruins, for buildings had been blown flat and their rubble carted away to help maintain the excellent main roads with which the area was now traversed. It was hard to discover the sites even of villages. Most people who used the Albert-Bapaume Road will remember a wooden cross whereon was written: "This is the site of Le Sars Church." For that statement it was necessary to take the writer's word. There was no other evidence.
The devastated area, on the other hand, had not been fought upon. It represented the ground evacuated by the enemy in his retreat to the Hindenburg Line. It had, however, been cleared of civilians and scientifically demolished to make it as difficult and comfortless as possible for our troops. All houses had been blown up by explosives, bridges destroyed, fruit-trees cut down or gashed to death. Yet it was far from being as dreadful or as ugly as the battle-field. The ground was unbroken and covered with good grass or crop run to seed. There were still woods and copses. It was depressing, yet far less so than the Salient. It resembled primeval prairie, and the hutments springing up here and there might have been the encampments of bold pioneers.
Between the 28th and 30th of August the Division relieved the 9th (Scottish) Division in the line. The right boundary was marked by a communication trench, "Queen Lane," on the Beaucamp-Ribécourt Road, a thousand yards north of the former village; the left was on the Demicourt-Graincourt Road. The frontage was very considerable, upwards of six thousand yards in a straight line. All three Brigades were in line, the 107th on the right, in what was known as the Trescault sector; the 108th in the centre, in the Havrincourt sector; and the 109th Brigade on the left, in the Hermies sector. The men of the Scottish Division made a very good impression upon their comrades of the 36th by working on their trenches till the moment of relief. As the troops of the 107th Brigade filed up the long communication trenches they saw the men of the 9th Division's South African Brigade carrying up the last sacks of chalk from the deep dug-outs under construction. It was a friendly gesture, typical of the good sportmanship of this fine Division.
It was an interesting and remarkable front that was taken over by the 36th Division. Its principal feature was the Canal du Nord, designed to link up the Canal de la Sensée with the Canal de la Somme at Peronne. The Canal du Nord had been about half completed at the outbreak of war. It ran due south to the northern skirts of Havrincourt Wood, the height from its bottom to the ground level varying from fifteen to a hundred feet, dry where it crossed the Bapaume-Cambrai Road, but with a few feet of water in it further south. North of Havrincourt Wood it turned west along the Grand Ravin, then south again, disappearing at Ruyalcourt, and reappearing a couple of miles further on north of Etricourt. Just at the destroyed railway bridge between Hermies and Havrincourt it formed a barrier between British and German.
The other important feature was the Hindenburg system of trenches, two great lines, from five hundred to two thousand yards apart, each consisting of front and support trenches. The system constituted in all probability the most formidable fortification constructed in the course of the war. The Germans had sited and dug it at their ease, to a great extent with gangs of Russian prisoners and forced civilian labour. The trenches were wide, deep, and well revetted. The mined dug-outs were all designed to a pattern; the stairways, supports, and all timber used in them having been turned out by the sawmills in replica by the thousand pieces. They represented the first successful application of mass production to the construction of dug-outs. The wire defences were of huge extent, generally in three or four deep belts, at least twenty feet apart. The system had already been pierced by our troops at Bullecourt, but on a tiny front and at vast cost. It appeared practically impregnable.
From the village of Mœuvres the front system of the Hindenburg Line[41] followed the western bank of the Canal du Nord for four thousand yards, then crossed it, sweeping in a bold curve round the village of Havrincourt and south of that of Ribécourt. It did not, however, represent by any means the line held by the German outposts, which were in general a thousand yards in advance of it, and frequently in themselves stout and well-wired positions. Along the banks of the Canal du Nord there were at intervals spoil heaps, consisting of the chalk dug from its bed. Of these, two were of great importance to the Division. The northern spoil heap was on the front of the 109th Brigade, on the west bank of the Canal. Sixty feet in height, it was strongly wired and had machine-guns mounted on its flat top which swept our trenches. The southern spoil heap was smaller, at the sharp bend west of Havrincourt, where the Canal turned westward along the Grand Ravin. It was known as Yorkshire Bank. There was a British trench on the top of it, but on its eastern rim the Germans had established posts, rather unaccountably in view of the aggressive character of the troops of the 9th Division. They, too, seemed to feel that such a legacy to a relieving division was unworthy their fame. On the night of August the 30th, before General Nugent had taken over command of the front, a party of Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, advancing after the German part of the spoil heap had been shelled with gas, drove out the enemy piquets and established posts of their own. The 9th Division, therefore, was able to leave an honourable legacy here after all, but a peculiarly lively one. Next evening, after General Nugent had taken over the command and established his headquarters in Little Wood, outside the village of Ytres, the Germans hit back. After a bombardment of Yorkshire Bank, they drove in our posts and re-established their own. At 4-15 a.m. next morning they were re-ejected. Next night they came again, two parties bombing their way up simultaneously from either side. At 1 a.m. on the 2nd the 12th Rifles retook the posts, with bomb and Lewis gun. That evening at dusk an officer visiting the posts saw Germans looking over the edge of the bank. They were rushed immediately and driven out, leaving a wounded prisoner. Two nights later they tried yet again, with typical German persistence. A shower of bombs from the top of the spoil heap drove them off, and as they were retreating a shell from a Stokes mortar was seen to drop in the centre of a group. One other attempt was made, to meet with like decisive failure. It was not an important affair, though it caused the name of Yorkshire Bank to appear in the British communiqué three days running. The 36th Division had had the better of the exchanges, but did not unduly pride itself thereon, having a manifest advantage in position.
For the rest, the area was rolling, well watered, and fairly thickly wooded. In the big Havrincourt Wood, which had originally covered some four square miles, the Germans had cut down much timber and used it on the Hindenburg trenches, besides leaving a great many trees lying on the ground. It still contained enough, however, to afford excellent cover. The Hindenburg System was admirably sited, and afforded to the enemy good observation of the area held by us, particularly from the dark mass of Bourlon Wood, crowning the height of the hundred-metre contour north of the Bapaume-Cambrai Road. In such country as this, however, it was impossible for the Germans to deny to us all the good ground. From the Hermies Ridge, from trees in Havrincourt Wood, from the very front line on the Trescault spur, the British had admirable views of their positions. Very tantalizing they were to men who dwelt among ruins, for the villages on the German side were intact, save for the nearest, which had been slightly damaged by our shell-fire. Very distinct from one point, and little more than eight miles off, were the steeples and roofs of the beautiful city of Cambrai.
There was a striking contrast between the trenches in the Trescault and Havrincourt sectors, and those in the northern or Hermies sector. The former consisted of a whole series of lines, so many trenches that they had to be occupied and defended at intervals only, by a system of "localities," each manned in general by a platoon. These trenches had, in fact, been prepared in the spring for assembly with view to an offensive which did not eventuate. In the Hermies sector, on the contrary, there were practically no defences at all, save a shadowy front line and some trenches round the village. This northern sector had been held by the 27th Brigade of the 9th Division, commanded by the celebrated Brigadier-General F. A. Maxwell, V.C., who was killed in the Salient shortly after his Division had moved north. He, apparently, was not a believer in trenches, and relied on holding his position by counter-attack from the Hermies defences and from behind the high ridge along which ran the Hermies-Demicourt Road. The plan did not appeal to General Nugent or to General Ricardo, commanding the 109th Brigade, and a heavy programme of trench-digging and wiring in the Hermies sector was at once drawn up.
Meanwhile, in the Salient, the Artillery and 16th Rifles endured a bitter period. Indeed, it is to be doubted whether any Divisional Artillery, since the second Battle of Ypres in 1915, had been subjected to strain such as that which now fell to the lot of the 36th Division's gunners. They had gone into action on July the 14th, in support of the 55th Division. They remained in action after the 36th Division had departed, and on August the 21st supported an unsuccessful attack by the 61st Division on the same front. They were not relieved till the night of the 23rd. And these six weeks had represented battle conditions in their worst form, a huge expenditure of ammunition, heavy and continuous hostile counter-battery, shelling of wagon-lines, the scantiest of accommodation, mud and indescribable wretchedness. A great proportion of the personnel had disappeared, new officers were commanding sections and junior officers batteries, when they detrained at the end of August at Bapaume. The lot of the Pioneers was not quite so hard, but their period in the Salient was longer. Two companies worked on the ruins of the infantry barracks at Ypres, the remainder on screening the Menin Road, on a trench tramway to Railway Wood, on the construction of strong points on the Westhoek Ridge, and like tasks, till September the 30th, when the battalion was entrained at Vlamertinghe and sent to rejoin the Division.
The line now held by the Division was on the whole the pleasantest it had ever known. This does not imply that the troops were allowed to take life easily. On the contrary, the fighting arms displayed considerable aggression, with important results. The German methods of defence, with outposts far in front of the main Hindenburg System, not always very strongly defended, and sometimes held at night only, offered considerable opportunity for those little silent raids upon isolated piquets which the Canadians had perfected, and knew by the expressive term "winkling." The first affair was on a scale rather bigger than this implies, parties of about sixty being engaged on either side. The scene was Wigan Copse, north of Yorkshire Bank, and the result the retirement of the Germans, leaving a wounded prisoner in the hands of the 12th Rifles, who had an officer and four men slightly wounded. That was on October the 6th. Three days later, at dusk, the 10th Rifles cut the wire of a post on the edge of the eastern arm of Havrincourt Wood, known as Fémy Wood, waited for the garrison to arrive, captured its leader, a corporal, and killed the remaining ten. On the 23rd, a party of the 11th Rifles, covering work on our wire, made a neat capture of six men who approached it, closing in on them from either flank, and taking them without a shot fired. Another prisoner was captured by the 1st Royal Irish Fusiliers, now in the 107th Brigade, when one of its saps north of Trescault was unsuccessfully attacked by the enemy. Various other deserters and single wanderers were also taken from time to time. On the British side was one minor disaster. A patrol of one officer and nine other ranks of the 1st Irish Fusiliers, examining the results of trench mortar fire on the German wire, was ambushed by a party of about thirty Germans. After heavy fighting, in which they inflicted numerous casualties on the enemy, the Fusiliers were forced to withdraw, three wounded men being captured. But the most heroic of these little episodes was when a party of Germans approached a sap-head held by a section of four men of the 15th Rifles, calling out in English: "It's all right. We're coming to visit you." Deceived by the ruse, the Riflemen's first warning was a shower of bombs, which wounded one of them. At the same moment the Germans jumped into the sap. The three remaining Riflemen might well have been excused had they retreated down the sap. Instead, upon the instant, they charged the enemy with the bayonet. The Germans ran, but the plucky defenders laid hands upon one that they had wounded, and kept him. The prisoner stated that his party had consisted of an officer and eight men. And at dawn the body of that officer, dead from a bayonet wound, was found outside the sap-head. It was in truth a gallant exploit.
In two or three other cases our men were unsuccessful in entering posts, finding the enemy on the alert. One raid only on a big scale was carried out, on the trenches south of the Hermies-Havrincourt Road and east of the Canal. At 7-30 p.m. on November the 3rd, three parties of the 9th Irish Fusiliers, numbering in all, with stretcher-bearers and sappers, four officers and sixty-seven other ranks, moved out from Yorkshire Bank and passed through gaps in the German wire. They then sent up a red flare, which brought down a heavy barrage on all approaches. The raid would have been a complete success had not the right party come upon some wire repaired by the Germans since it had been reported destroyed by our artillery. Eventually they stormed the obstacle and cut down the defenders, but not without heavy loss to themselves. Our total casualties were one man killed, three missing, believed killed, and one officer and fourteen men wounded. The Germans were estimated to have had forty killed. Had the men, for the most part newly transferred troopers of the North Irish Horse, not been more eager to kill than to capture, a considerable number of prisoners might have been taken.
Among other offensive methods employed must be recorded a new horror of war, the Livens projector, which the troops of the 36th Division now saw for the first time. It was simply a large steel drum filled with lethal gas, under compression, fired from a short tube. Its range was upwards of two thousand yards. Six hundred of these mortars were dug in at the bend of the Canal, and on the night of the 14th of September fired into Havrincourt. It was definitely established by the evidence of prisoners captured the following month that the losses in the village were very heavy. The battalion which held it had to be relieved that night. In two dug-outs alone twenty men were killed by the gas.
The artillery also was active. The ammunition allotment was high. It was, indeed, the huge increase in the supply of 18-pounder ammunition that had made really "quiet bits" almost unknown upon the British front. For when the British had ammunition they fired it off. The French, on the other hand, on a quiet front, preferred to live quiet lives. The IV. Corps ordered that two-thirds of the allotment should be expended at night, in harassing fire upon roads. As most of our batteries had little flash-cover, such shooting betrayed gun positions. Recourse was therefore had to single guns for night-firing, pushed forward at dusk and withdrawn before dawn. Some of these forward guns had an unpleasant reception. One was destroyed by accurate enemy fire. The Germans, for their part, paid greater attention to our batteries than to our trenches. Their favourite method, which the 36th Division had experienced in Flanders, was a deliberate "shooting-up" of a single battery, beginning with aeroplane observation, and continued by the aid of high shrapnel bursts, which could be "spotted," for five or six hours at the rate of about a round a minute. These bombardments did some damage and caused some loss to the gunners, but the latter had more than once the satisfaction of drawing fire upon dummy or abandoned positions, while those in use went scatheless.
Mention has already been made of the arrival of the 1st Irish Fusiliers from the 4th Division. This battalion was, on August the 27th, posted to the 107th Brigade. To make place for it two other battalions of that Brigade, the 8th and 9th Rifles, were amalgamated, becoming the 8th/9th Royal Irish Rifles. It was a sad occasion, above all for such officers and other ranks of these original battalions as still survived with them. It meant the end, or well-nigh the end, of a cherished tradition. The next arrivals were over three hundred all ranks of the North Irish Horse, a regiment of which had been dismounted. This large draft was posted to the 9th Irish Fusiliers, thereafter officially known as the 9th (North Irish Horse) Battalion Royal Irish Fusiliers. Then came the 7th Irish Rifles from the 16th Division, and a regular battalion, the 2nd Royal Irish Rifles, from the 25th Division. The 7th Battalion, of a total strength of less than four hundred all ranks, was broken up, and its personnel transferred to the 2nd. The latter was then posted to the 108th Brigade, while to make place for it the 11th and 13th Rifles were amalgamated, becoming the 11th/13th Royal Irish Rifles. In each case surplus personnel was drafted to the remaining battalions of the 107th and 108th Brigades, which were now over strength. The 109th Brigade, which received considerable reinforcements during the month of September, was little below it.
The work of the 36th Division in this area almost equalled that of Flanders. The "localities" in the front line trenches soon resembled model fortifications, such as might have been made for the instruction of an engineering school. Curving round the village of Hermies, the Pioneers dug perhaps the best trench ever made in entirety by the Division, which was christened in their honour "Lurgan Switch." The best deep dug-outs the Division had ever known, with thirty feet of cover, were dug in the chalk under the instruction of the Field Companies, now no mean experts in such work. Here, too, what were known from their shape as "champagne" dug-outs were constructed, on a pattern invented by that artist in trench warfare, the enemy. In these the team of a single machine-gun could shelter from the heaviest bombardment, and bring its gun into action in the time it took two men to run up a ladder. Behind the lines work was equally hard. In such country as this, with not a solitary house standing, the troops had no other accommodation than that which they constructed for themselves. This was the land of the "Nissen" hut, too well known even to people who never saw the Front to merit description here. They sprang up everywhere, these ugly but useful buildings, with their arched roofs of corrugated iron. Excellent Divisional Headquarters were built in Ytres, to replace those in Little Wood. Fine new Brigade Headquarters appeared in Neuville and Bertincourt, to which the two northern Brigades moved back from unsafe and uncomfortable headquarters further forward. Bertincourt represented perhaps the best example of scientific work upon a ruined village. It was parcelled out between the various units, each being allotted its own section, on which no other might encroach. General Ricardo offered prizes for the best designed and best kept billets. Under the stress of this competition Bertincourt had become, when the 109th Brigade reluctantly quitted it, a model village.
So, in line and behind it, the troops were as comfortable as conditions on any part of the British front allowed. They would have been as happy as was possible under any conditions of active service had it not been for the desolation about them, which bred a feeling of loneliness. The British soldier had grown used to being billeted in villages, or lodged in encampments within reach of them. He missed vaguely the sights of village life, the gallant old men and the women setting about their endless toil, the clatter of the farm, the children who watched him falling in for parade, and came in the afternoon to listen to the band. More definite was the loss of the shops, the eggs to be bought from the villagers, the warmth and comfort of the estaminet, where he drank his beer, solaced himself with bacon or fried potatoes if he had gone short of a meal, joked with the daughter of the host, or played "House" with his friends on benches about the fire. Officers of the Provost Staff have stated that in their experience there was almost always less crime and unrest among troops in inhabited regions than among those living upon the Teuton-made veldt. There was among the men of the Ulster Division little crime at any time, but undoubtedly they also were in some degree a prey to the inevitable nostalgia born of desolation. They would have come far more completely beneath its influence but for the efforts that were made to afford them distraction and increase their comfort. "Peace hath her victories," and a comparatively peaceful life afforded as much opportunity as battle for the Quarter-master General's Staff—"Q"—to prove its ingenuity and resource. In this sector the work of the 36th Division "Q" was certainly triumphant in this respect; first of all under the direction of Colonel Comyn, for eighteen months A.A. and Q.M.G., and then, on his transfer to the War Office, under his successor, Colonel S. H. Green, who had worked under him as D.A.Q.M.G. It organized in the first place daily trips to Amiens. Three lorries, one to take twelve officers, the remaining two each twenty other ranks, left Ytres at an early hour each morning for Achiet-le-Grand. Thence the party went by train to Amiens, being met again by the lorries at Achiet in the evening. The trips allowed of six hours or more being spent in the city. Beer was provided in great quantities to replace the supplies of the lost estaminets. In September the Division was buying from brewers of Amiens no less than two railway truck-loads of forty-five barrels a day. A soda-water factory was established on the Canal bank at Manancourt. Soda-water, labelled "Boyne Water," a fancy which appealed to the troops, was sold at a penny a bottle, and various other aerated concoctions at twopence. The Divisional Canteens, always of the greatest benefit to the troops, became then of incalculable importance. Added to their usual "lines"—tobacco, biscuits, chocolate, tinned foods, books, candles—were now sold in great quantities fruit and vegetables, eggs, bread and cake, and, when procurable, fresh fish and even oysters; while special orders for anything required in Amiens by officers or men were taken, the goods being procured by the following evening, and sold to the buyer at cost price. The Division had long had a cinema, a concert party—"The Merry Mauves"—and an excellent band. These passed up and down the front, all units taking turns in the pleasures of their performances. Football and boxing competitions reappeared. There was one very exciting race meeting and horse show, with numerous classes for transport turn-outs. For animals at least the area was a paradise, there being unlimited grazing and great fields of clover. Some agriculture was attempted, over a hundred acres being ploughed and sown. A few headquarters purchased cows, and many units pigs and chickens.
To those who cared to ponder such things, the wonders of the great, creaking, rather clumsy machine, in which it took a thousand men to form the tiniest cog, never ceased to appeal. The British organization for war was assuredly by now amazingly thorough. Was there required some new-fangled and complicated Lewis-gun-mounting for trench warfare; a message and a tracing to some workshop behind brought a hundred in a week. Copies innumerable of an enlarged aeroplane photograph wanted in a hurry for a raid could be printed off at Albert in twenty-four hours. The little press of the IV. Corps, the Intelligence Branch of which officers of the 36th Division will remember with gratitude, seemed to pour forth up-to-date maps. If there was the slightest hitch about rations, it was the topic of conversation for a week. The post-office was an unceasing marvel. In Flanders, Divisional Headquarters had had their newspapers the day they were published, and the rest of the troops next morning. The letters for men in the saps reached them in two or at most three days. A letter to Hermies would probably take longer now.
But, there was no doubt about the matter, the organization was expensive in man-power, and man-power at that moment was a problem that engaged G.H.Q. almost as much as did the enemy. The writer of this book can well remember being sent, in Flanders, when the Division was very weak, to investigate the number of men a certain battalion had in the trenches. The "paper strength" of that battalion was just six hundred men. It had in the line, exclusive of its headquarters, one hundred and seven men. He went through the state with the adjutant. That revealed, indeed, a remarkably strong battalion headquarters, and an undue number at the transport lines, but no other leakages which the adjutant had power to stop. There was a number of men at Divisional Headquarters, clerks, draughtsmen, orderlies, a cook, five attached to the Signal Company; and about three times as many at Brigade Headquarters. The rest followed varied avocations. Five were on traffic control, a number attached to a Tunnelling Company. There were clerks to town majors, camp wardens, guardians of coal, straw, and ration dumps; cooks and servants at the Rest Camp. There were about forty on leave, and twenty sick not evacuated.
There were also twenty at various schools. Schools were a vital necessity; but who at this period can doubt that they were ludicrously overdone? Every formation had its schools—G.H.Q., the Army, the Corps, the Division, the Brigade. There were infantry schools, artillery schools, and trench-mortar schools; machine-gun schools, Lewis-gun schools, bombing schools, gas schools; schools which taught horse-mastership, shoe-making, brick-laying, carpentry, sanitation, butchery, cooking. For a weak Division, schools became a nightmare. Divisional commanders had to protest that they had either to man their trenches inadequately, or refuse vacancies allotted. And vacancies refused raised a vast to-do, because they threatened the existence of the school, and the school naturally appealed to the formation of which it was the protégé. Up to the Division headquarters this did not so largely matter. The Division may have been inconsiderate at times, but it did know precisely how its line was held, how strong its posts, how far separated. But above the Division the situation was not always so quickly grasped. The Corps was an impersonal affair, encamped, sometimes for years, upon the same front, changing its Divisions week by week. And when a Corps headquarters, as happened before Cambrai, resting out of the line, sent out appeals for students to attend its schools, so that they might not be idle, the most long-suffering were inclined to protest and to feel that, after all, for the idle, there was a certain work which might have been accomplished somewhat further forward. The jests of most humorists are based upon exaggeration, but there is just a kernel of truth in them, or they are not good jests. Of such nature is the dictum of M. André Maurois,[42] the French interpreter who loves the British so well and pokes such clever fun at them—that a school "is a plot of ground traversed by imitation trenches, where officers who have never been near the line teach war-worn veterans their business."
The swarm of writers which, under the influence of the reaction from war, has so bitterly criticised the higher staff officers for the waste of man-power, has been hopelessly astray in its estimation of the reason. It was not inefficiency or carelessness. It was rather the Englishman's passion for organization, for orderliness and smoothness. That passion for perfecting the machine put too many cogs and fly-wheels upon it, made it over-complicated, clumsy. Ever eager to expand their business, these directors put into it too much of the one form of capital which they could not afford—man-power.
In October began preparations for a great new offensive, a surprise offensive, which was to depend entirely upon the use of tanks. The scheme and the plans for the Battle of Cambrai must be left for discussion till the next chapter. Here will be detailed only some of the preliminary moves. The part of the 36th Division in the first day's attack was to be confined to the capture of the German trenches bounded by the Bapaume-Cambrai Road and the Canal du Nord. This was the task of one Brigade only, and the other two were to be withdrawn from the Trescault and Havrincourt sectors, each being replaced by a Division. These Divisions, the 51st (Highland) and the 62nd (West Riding), were to be kept in rear as long as possible. It fell, therefore, to the 36th to do much of the work of preparation in their areas; the repairing of forward roads, the excavating of new dug-outs, the construction of bridges over trenches. The C.R.E.'s of these Divisions, with their Pioneer battalions and some Engineers, moved forward early in November to work under the general control of the C.R.E., 36th Division. Havrincourt Wood was crammed with little wooden hutments, which its trees and scrub rendered invisible to the enemy. One of the most important tasks was the metalling of the roads, and the dumping of metal beside them in parts where it was impossible to lay it, in order that work might commence with the assault. The surface of the roads was good, but only because the Division had been holding a front so wide, which made the traffic upon them relatively light. It was quite obvious that a single day of traffic such as an offensive entails would cut them to pieces. It was front-line roadmaking upon which the C.R.E., Colonel Campbell, was required to exercise his ingenuity. Work upon tracks in Havrincourt Wood was easy; silence was all that was necessary. But work upon what was to be the most important communication of the IV. Corps in the offensive, the road from Metz to Ribécourt, was of great difficulty. In Trescault, half-way between these villages and almost in our front line, there were, to begin with, two enormous craters blown by the enemy before his retirement. These had to be filled in by night, and it took chalk by the ton to do it. Road-metal also was stacked by night almost up to the front line, and covered with camouflage before dawn. Wooden bridges were prepared for all the trenches crossing the roads which would be required, and most of these for British trenches set in position. The problem of gun positions on the northern part of the front was difficult. Cover there was none reasonably far forward, save among the ruins of Hermies and Demicourt. Among these the positions were prepared, and by night seven hundred rounds per 18-pounder borne up to them.
During the first sixteen days of November, the 36th Division had also to provide parties of from two to six hundred men daily for unloading trains at Ytres station, for the Heavy Artillery ammunition dump at Bus, and for the Field Artillery dump in Vallulart Wood. Trains frequently did not arrive within six hours of the advertised time, and the men had to sit about and wait for them, frequently half through the night—as ill a preparation for troops on the eve of an offensive as could well be imagined. Amid much confusion and unnecessary hardship, one officer earned the gratitude of the infantrymen by his foresight and consideration, the Staff Captain of the IV. Corps Heavy Artillery. He required parties up to seventy-five men, and always at short notice. He kept three of his lorries always standing by at his headquarters, telephoned when he wanted men, and fetched them from Ytres, Neuville, Ruyalcourt, or Bertincourt, as detailed by the General Staff of the Division. Better still, he generally gave them tea before sending them home, to supplement their haversack rations.
The weather favoured the British arrangements amazingly. It was fine, but morning after morning dawned with a thick ground mist which hung about all day. Foden lorries carrying stone and light steam rollers to lay it were enabled, beneath this shelter, to work at a proximity to the Germans that had otherwise been out of the question. Night after night the tanks, upon which all hinged, moved up into Havrincourt Wood. Here again the mist was a godsend, for the track of a tank across country is plain enough on an aeroplane photograph, and not hard to distinguish with a glass. Contrary to the general belief of those who have not heard them on the move, the tank is not very noisy. It was the artillery tractors, dragging up the big howitzers, which frightened everyone by their clatter.
The relief of the 107th and 108th Brigades took place on the nights of the 17th and 18th of November. To deceive the enemy as to the great concentration in front of him, a screen of the troops of these Brigades remained to hold the outpost line. These men knew only that a raid on a large scale was intended. In the early hours of the 18th, the Germans, evidently somewhat suspicious, raided a sap held by the 1st Irish Fusiliers behind a heavy "box" barrage, and took six prisoners. From the evidence of German prisoners taken subsequently, it appeared that the most the enemy gathered from the examination of his captives was that an attempt to capture Havrincourt might be expected. This aroused in the German command no great uneasiness. On the 16th, the 14th Rifles had taken over the whole front of the 109th Brigade to permit the other battalions to train for their task, This training was carried out by General Ricardo over trenches laid out to scale with the plough, upon a front of four thousand yards.
Accommodation was so limited that much marching and counter-marching was necessary to provide billets for the 51st and 62nd Divisions moving up. In its course the 108th Brigade moved back as far as Barastre, upwards of eight miles from the front line. By the night of the 19th, however, the eve of the attack, the infantry was concentrated well forward. The whole of the 109th Brigade was in assembly positions, the 108th Brigade in Vélu Wood, and the 107th Brigade in the area Ytres-Lechelle. The 16th Rifles were in Havrincourt Wood.
These details have been here given in order that the next chapter may proceed with the scheme of the Battle of Cambrai, without interruption to explain the moves which preceded it. It is in itself one of the most interesting actions in which the 36th Division took part during its combatant career, and, at the same time, measuring final result by the standard of early achievement, one of the most disappointing. The material results that it produced were small, but it opened a new era in the history of war. No adequate conception of the victories of 1918, first of the Germans, then of the Allies, can be reached without a close study of its lessons.