Marking Time
The Guards Division, after their ten days’ rest and clean-up at Sandpits Camp, Méaulte, supplied one brigade to take over a new sector of trench opposite St. Pierre Vaast Wood on the extreme east of things and left their 1st Brigade in reserve at Méaulte, Ville-sous-Corbie, and Méricourt l’Abbé. The latter camp was allotted to the Irish Guards who had to send one company for permanent fatigues to the railway station—all the valley here was one long siding for men and supplies—and another to the back of Bernafay Wood for Decauville construction, while the remainder were drilled and instructed in their specialties. This was the time in our armies’ development when nearly every third man was a “specialist” in some branch or another except, as company officers remarked under their breaths, the rifle and its bayonet. The men’s deferred Christmas dinners (it will be remembered they had been in the line on the day itself) were duly issued by half a battalion at a time in the big cinema-hall in camp, and, lest the transport officer should by any chance enjoy himself, their transport chose this time of rest to develop “contagious stomatitis,” a form of thrush in the mouth, and had to be isolated. Still, setting aside the cold, which does not much trouble well-fed men, the Battalion had some pleasant memories of its rest by the river. Leave was possible; smoking-parties made themselves in the big huts; the sergeants gave a dinner, which is a sure sign of well-being; there were cinemas for the men, and no one troubled himself too much for the noise of the guns ten miles up stream.
It is difficult to rediscover a battalion’s psychology at any given time, but so far as evidence goes they had not too black doubts as to the upshot of the campaign, though every platoon kept its loud-voiced pessimists who foretold that they would take root in the trenches for evermore and christened the R.O.D. locomotives “Roll on Duration!”
On the 1st February (1917) in “cold bright weather with snow on the ground,” the 1st Brigade were once again in Divisional Reserve near Carnoy, ready to relieve the 3rd Coldstream near Rancourt on the recently taken-over French sector, in trenches a little westerly of St. Pierre Vaast Wood which is under Sailly-Saillisel. In the wood itself lay a dreadful mine-crater of the old days, filled, as it seemed, with dead French Colonial troops—browned and blackened bodies, their white skulls still carrying jaunty red caps. Our wondering patrols used to look down into it sometimes of moonlight nights.
They moved out on the 2nd of February via Maricourt and Maurepas, left No. 2 Company under canvas in Maurepas Ravine, distributed the rest in shelters and dug-outs and resumed their watch. The frozen ground stopped much digging or “improvements,” and the enemy’s front line gave no trouble, but a few small shells were sent over, one of which hit 2nd Lieutenant J. Orr temporarily in command of No. 1 Company and wounded a couple of men. The rest of their turn—February 2 to 6—was quiet, for the new-fallen snow gave away the least movement on either side. While they crouched over their braziers and watched each other, the operations round Serre and at the nose of the Arras-Le Transloy salient, began again as the earth’s crust hardened. The Sixty-third Division hammered its way for a day and a night up the southern slopes of Serre, and our guns were threatening the line of enemy’s trenches from Grandcourt westward. This move unkeyed the arch of his local defences at this point, and next day he evacuated Grandcourt and such of his front as lay between Grandcourt and the Stuff redoubt.
By the 7th February our troops had carried forward to midway between Beaucourt and Miraumont, and on the 10th February the Thirty-second Division took in hand the business of shifting the enemy out of what remained to him in the Beaumont Valley. Their advance brought Serre village into direct danger from our artillery, and any further move on our part up the valley of the Ancre would make Serre untenable.
On the 17th February that move was made by three Divisions (Second, Eighteenth, and Sixty-third) before dawn, through heavy mist on the edge of a thaw, and in the face of a well-contrived barrage that caught the battalions forming up. But the positions and observation-points, already gained, helped our guns to help the infantry, broke up the enemy’s counter-attacks with satisfactory losses, and, in the next few days, gave us good command over the enemy’s artillery dispositions in the valley of the Upper Ancre and a fair look into his defences at Pys and Miraumont. Then the game stood thus: If Miraumont, which lay at our mercy, were taken, Serre would go; if Serre went, Puisieux-au-Mont and Gomiecourt, the pillar of the old German western defences, would be opened too; and it was no part of the German idea to cling to untenable positions, whose loss would have to be explained at home where people were asking why victory delayed so long. Not only was the whole of Arras-Le Transloy salient shaking by now; there was the prospect of indefinite wastage to no good end all along the rest of the Somme front, and though the weather, till then, had blunted the following weight of each following blow, many considerations pointed to a temporary withdrawal of a few miles in order to advance the more irresistibly at a more fitting time. Slowly, methodically then, with careful screens of veiled machine-guns behind them, and a series of scientifically chosen artillery positions, equally capable of supporting a counter-attack, or checking and destroying any too inconvenient body of pursuers, the enemy moved back into ground not yet churned and channelled by shell or traffic, over untouched roads which he had kept in perfect order, to this very end; and left us to follow through bottomless valleys of desolation.
The frost broke on the third week of February, and the last state of the ground was worse even than it had been throughout the rainy autumn. Trenches caved in bodily; dumps sank where they were being piled; the dirt and the buttresses of overhead shelters flaked and fell away in lumps; duckboards went under by furlongs at a time; tanks were immobilised five feet deep and the very bellies of the field-guns gouged into the mud. Only our airmen could see anything beyond or outside the present extreme discomfort, but the mists that came punctually with the thaws helped to baffle even their eyes.
On the 24th February the enemy had evacuated his positions in front of Pys, Miraumont, and Serre; next day his first system of defence, from Gueudecourt to west of Serre, running through half-a-dozen fortified villages, was in our hands.
At the end of the month, Puisieux-au-Mont, with Gomiecourt and its defences, were occupied by us. The Germans had pulled themselves cleanly out of the worst of the salient.
By March they were back on their fortified Le Transloy-Loupart line, except that they still held the village of Irles above Miraumont, which was linked up to the Le Transloy-Loupart line by a peninsula of wired trenches. Irles was carried by the Second and Eighteenth Divisions on the 10th March.
As soon as our guns were able to concentrate on the Le Transloy-Loupart line itself, which they did the day after, the enemy, leisurely as always, released it, and fell back on and through his next line a mile or two behind—Rocquigny-Ablainzevelle—steadied his rear-guards, and continued his progress towards the Hindenburg defences, withdrawing along the whole front from south of Arras to Roye. By the 17th of March word was given for a general advance of our troops in co-operation with the French.
To go back a month. Rumours of what was to be expected had cheered the camps for some time past; and just as the fall of single rocks precedes the collapse of an undermined quarry-face, so the German line had crumpled in certain spots long before their system readjusted itself throughout. Front-trenches, far removed from actual points of pressure, observed that life with them was quieter than even the state of the weather justified, and began to make investigations.
When the Battalion went up, as usual, on the 15th February to relieve the 2nd Grenadiers in the trenches a little north of Rancourt and opposite St. Pierre Vaast Wood, their casualties for the four days were but three killed and five wounded. “Practically no sniping and very occasional shelling.” They treated it lightly enough, for it was here that the sentry told the conscientious officer who had heard a shell drop near the trench: “Ah, it fell quite convenient here”—a jerk of his thumb over his shoulder, and as an afterthought—“’Twas a dud, though.” The ground was still hard, and, to the men’s joy, they could not dig.
Captain R. J. P. Rodakowski arrived from the base on the 18th of the month. The thaw caught them in camp at Maurepas, just as the enemy’s withdrawal got under way, and their turn in trenches from the 23rd to 26th February was marked by barrages let down on them of evenings, presumably to discourage curiosity. So they were ordered at short notice to send out a couple of officer’s patrols from their left and right companies to reconnoitre generally, and see if the enemy were falling back. The first patrol, under 2nd Lieutenant Shears, an N.C.O., three bombers, and three “bayonet-men,” spent a couple of hours among the wire, were bombed but returned unhurt. The second, also of seven men, under Lieutenant Browne, were seen by the enemy, headed back to our lines, but made a fresh outfall, which carried them to the wire where, “finding a weak spot, they cut their way through it” and won within a few yards of the enemy’s parapet when they were bombed. They used up their own supplies and came back with a good report, and four men and Lieutenant Browne wounded. On their information a raid was arranged for the next day to take over a couple of hundred yards of the enemy’s trench, but it was cancelled pending developments elsewhere. They lost two killed and thirteen men and one officer wounded in this tour, and went back to routine and “specialist” training in a camp near Billon on the last day of February.
Their domestic items for the next fortnight, which, like the rest of March, was cold and stormy, run as follows: 2nd Lieutenant A. L. Bain went to the Fourteenth Corps School for a fortnight at Méaulte, which, in that weather, was no special treat; and Lieutenant E. H. Shears to Headquarters Lewis Gun School at Le Touquet, a much superior place. Lieut.-Colonel R. C. A. McCalmont left on the 3rd March to take over command of the 3rd Infantry Brigade just south of the Somme, and had a tremendous send-off from the Battalion. He was succeeded in the command by Major the Hon. H. R. Alexander, D.S.O., M.C., and Major G. E. S. Young came over from the 2nd Battalion as second in command—as it proved for all too brief a time. The specialist training continued, and “open warfare” was practised by companies. There was an irreverent camp-jest just then that whenever the enemy abandoned one quarter of a mile of trench, the five nearest British army corps forsook every other game to practise “open warfare.” The Battalion learned also attacks on triple lines of trenches, the creeping barrage being personified by their drums and those of the 2nd Coldstream. In this sort of work, men say, there is a tendency to lean a little too heavily on such a barrage, which had to be checked by taking the offender’s name. (“So, ye’ll understand, ye catch it, both ways; for if ye purshue the live barrage ye’ll likely to be killed; an’ if you purshue a dhrummy barrage too close, your name’s in the book. That’s War!”)